OU812INVU–

I will deal with this matter of beauty more fully when I come to the Argument from Fitness (which is where it properly falls). But just a few brief comments here:

(1) The “billions of galaxies” and what they contain is part of the beauty, not an exception to it.

(2) I doubt very much that a male rat finds a female rat to be “staggeringly beautiful.” But try that using that as a follow-up comment next time you tell your wife or girlfriend that she is even beautiful (let alone, staggeringly), or go further still and say that a fly probably finds a piece of dung staggeringly beautiful; and see how well she thinks that “fits’ with what you’re truly trying to express to her.

That said, the argument from beauty, somewhat like the argument from morality, is one a person is always free to reject by explaining the experience as an evolutionary “trick” to get us to survive and reproduce. My argument would simply be that such a perspective doesn’t match with the existential nature of the experience itself.

Keith–

I respond to your first two paragraphs in my subsequent entries and the comments you’ll find underneath those (I’m working backwards on these threads…). To your last paragraph:

(1) You write, “He baldly asserts everyone simply knows morality, despite obviously different moral views throughout time and across cultures.” You’re confusing fundamental moral principles with moral behavior and ethics.

If you remember, this point came up b/c Dr. Carrier argued that God, if he exists, should have provided human beings with a revelation teaching “the same simple gospel message of kindness, honesty, and reasonableness” (Dr. Carrier’s words).

My reply was that all human beings already know these are virtues and thus don’t need a revelation to tell them that. What humans do with this knowledge is another thing entirely. Of course most don’t even live consistently with these basic virtues; nor do they apply them as they should. So maybe you want to make the argument that God, if he exists, owes people a much more detailed handbook of ethics. Feel free to propose that, of course, but it wasn’t Dr. Carrier’s argument, and with an 1,100-word limit I can only reply to what Dr. Carrier actually argues.

(2) You write, “He claims beauty is somehow more than just an aesthetic response, despite the fact that each human’s view of beauty seems to be obviously impacted by their culture and basic biological needs.”

That culture and biology have some impact on our aesthetics is an obvious fact, and irrelevant to my argument. To carry your counter-point (if I understand where you’re going with it) you would need to argue that different cultures, nations and races share very little aesthetics in common, and therefore that there’s probably no such thing as “beauty.”

But this is manifestly false. There is tremendous cross-cultural agreement on what is beautiful, and even where there are differences, it’s typically a matter of which (of say, two paintings or architectural styles or women) is MORE beautiful, not whether one is beautiful and one is ugly.

and I think all sorts of aesthetic responses, as well as the sense of “fun”, gives a useful boost with learning, and guiding actions. If experiencing data and experimenting is positively stimulating, we’re more likely to do it. Even boredom drives us to do something new.

So it might even be useful to equip a general artificial intelligence with these kinds of drives.

Plus, aesthetic responses do “help a species survive and reproduce.”

The natural history of peacock plumage is a famously well-studied example.

Response: I think that depends on the nature of the debate. But generally that is the case when you’re discussing issues (pros or cons of something), more so than a fact about the existence of something. For example if you and I were debating the development of new toll roads or the legalization of marijuana casino gambling then certainly there are arguments or evidence to be made on either side of the argument.

But when it comes to the mere existence of something there is either real evidence for or against or merely the appearance of real evidence.

If all facts of the world were suddenly made known to us we would learn that all of the evidence were actually on one side of the argument (with respect to the existence of God).

On the one hand, it’s easy to point out that the world is also full of “ugliness” too; death, decay, evil, flowers that smell like rotting flesh; on the other, there are views of these things that could see them as “beautiful” (one man’s junk is another man’s treasure after all). The world is not uniformly beautiful, and beauty itself is subject to the beholder. Thus insofar as it can be used to demonstrate the existence of an aesthetically motivated superbeing, it still lands as evidence against such a being existing.

Even so, we’re still projecting our view of beauty onto God; perhaps God enjoys watching people die from ebola; perhaps that is God’s aesthetic preference! Even so, I can no longer appeal to aesthetics as evidence for God, as it becomes apparent that my own view of such things does not corroborate the actual being.

Your claim that evolution tends only towards those things that are “helping a species survive and reproduce” is the insipid claim, I’m afraid; it is simply an inaccurate view of evolution, so I would recommend you strive to understand this better before engaging in this line of argument.

“Everyone knows, and has always known, that they are virtues…” this is just plain false, and it surprises me that a historian would make that claim.

But it is by no means necessary that our planet should be as staggeringly beautiful as it is, and the fact that it is so constitutes at least some evidence for God, since if God exists, we would expect him to create a staggeringly beautiful world.

As much as we might like to think that our wee little planet is at the center of our Universe, the fact is that there are a hundred billion galaxies and 100 Billion alien planets fill our own Milky Way Galaxy.

When you look at it that way should we be at all surprised by mere chance at least one of them (and possibly more) might fit the description of what we see as “staggeringly beautiful”?

And much like the guy holding the weekly winning Power Ball ticket you might be inclined to wonder “Why me?, Why did I win?”. But truth be told eventually somebody had to win, and that somebody might have a hard time grasping that he (or his numbers) were no more special than anyone else’s.
It was all in the odds.

Also with respect to calling something “staggeringly beautiful” I think you need to keep that in perspective.

If you were born a male rat you might very well find a field female rat or a trash dumpster to be “staggeringly beautiful”. So ultimately we can’t say that something is beautiful or tastes good as a fact (even if there is consensus on that opinion), we can only offer up that we find something to be beautiful or tastes good (as a fact). So then it simply becomes how/why any living thing finds another particular thing to be beautiful (or repulsive). While certainly responses like “It must be magic” or “It must be God” are answers that easily get you off the hook of trying to figure out how/why something actually works I think that history has proven that it is never the right answer.

In fact it is a non-question, for I doubt whether there is a single sane person in the world who believes gremlins cause plane crashes, whereas most of the world, and many great minds, believe or have believed in God.

Response: I don’t see how that is relevant to the argument. There was a time when pretty much everyone believed that the world was flat. But we now know that everyone was wrong about that. In hindsight what use would that fact (what most everyone believes it) have served without the evidence to back it up?

You want Dr. Carrier to acknowledge the evidence for the existence of God. Specifically what evidence?

If you’re the one insisting that such evidence does exists then It seems to me that the onus should be on you to offer up such evidence.

How dare Dr. Carrier not come up with or at least acknowledge real evidence for the existence of God. And how dare both of you for not coming up with or at least acknowledging some real evidence for the existence of Bigfoot.

Are natural evils divine retribution? This doesn’t track with any empirical review of such events. There is no connection between the victims that coincides with a single view of the Christian God . There is no justice (unless you abandon any reasonable view of justice and simply declare all God’s actions to be just by definition). It’s random, unless again you make an ad-hoc assertion that it simply isn’t, even though no one can demonstrate the cause.

Dr. Marshall’s greatest downfall is in fact a rejection of reality, insofar as we can view it. He baldly asserts everyone simply knows morality, despite obviously different moral views throughout time and across cultures (including the very times and cultures that made up his holy text). He claims beauty is somehow more than just an aesthetic response, despite the fact that each human’s view of beauty seems to be obviously impacted by their culture and basic biological needs. This is a repeat of the Kalam. Dr. Marshall starts with personal interpretations of science/history that must be true for his view to be substantiated, and then complains when the science/history don’t match his interpretations.