Explaining Beauty Away

I have spent a lot of time in the past 10 years writing about the hardships in life.  My scars are hardly unique, but I have sought to embrace the experiences and the implications of  life’s broken beauty with as much honesty as I can muster.

But there is more to “broken beauty” than the broken.  There is also beauty. As C.S Lewis pointed out, one cannot understand crooked without understanding straight.  In the same way, one cannot think with clarity about the ugliness of life without an understanding of its beauty.

In the presence of sometimes staggering pain and ugliness, one must either explain it or explain it away.  Worldviews have dismissed it as illusory (some Eastern religions), refused to even define it (Atheism), or sought to understand the reason and the solution (Christianity).

     
The presence of grandeur and goodness provides no less of a challenge.  One must either explain things like beauty, awe and wonder, or explain them away.

     
The New Atheist movement believes that Christianity fails in its attempt to explain our existence: “Something of the wonder of this world is lost when we explain away phenomena with supernatural, untestable, unfalsifiable, conjecture.”  

     
The Christian theologian wonders, in turn, how atheists find wonder or appreciate beauty in a world without God -  a world that atheists believe is without meaning, purpose, or design.

    A good worldview needs to explain the world, not explain the world away.

If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, I will let the following pictures and quotes make the bulk of my argument - Christianity explains beauty; atheism explains it away.  

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“Peacocks are carrying around this beautiful…useless [tail][ but they are still strong enough for really important stuff…evolution is just producing these weird things… have to admit that important parts of life are not efficient or engineered to work out. If you wound back evolution, you wouldn’t end up with the same things we have now. This isn’t the world we had to get—it is just some weird possibilities that happened to catch on.”  – David Rothenberg

“I am deeply impressed the the existence of value in the world....our physical world is shot through with value, with beauty...the wonderful order of the world and the fruitfulness of cosmic history are reflections of the mind and purpose of the Creator." John Polkinghorne

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I believe the book of nature .. suggests a God of purpose and a God of design. And I think my belief makes me no less a scientist.”  Owen Gingerich

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“Wilson suggested that natural selection might have instilled in us a “biophilia,” or reverence for nature, that benefits both us and those creatures with which we enjoy mutually beneficial relationships. But why do we respond to so many things—butterflies, starfish, rainbows, sunsets—from which we extract no tangible, utilitarian benefit?” - John Horgan

"[A]n acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed." Physicist James P. Joule

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“It was when I was happiest that I longed most. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all the beauty came from.” C.S. Lewis

"Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one..."  Cosmologist Edward R. Harrison