We have finished addressing the questions put to us by internationals at AIF. Today’s blog resumes the discussion from February, but fortunately, the last several blogs have picked up the theme we left off with. To review: We were discussing what it means to be created in the image of God, and we have talked about things like our ability to detect moral right and wrong, our sense of a spiritual reality, and our desire for purpose. So to continue …
We have a proverb in English:
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
The idea is that different people see beauty in different things. You’ve certainly experienced this. Your friend likes modern art, but you think it is a jumble. One man likes the look of a suit, while another prefers the look of blue jeans. Despite your experience with differing tastes, however, I want to push back a little against the proverb.
On one level, the proverb works, but on another level, it is problematic, for the more I think about beauty, the more I have to confess that it isn’t random. If beauty had no connection to anything outside a person, then we ought to expect much more disagreement about it than we do. Now we do find disagreement about many things, but we also find many phenomena that virtually everyone says are beautiful. I have heard people argue about the attractiveness of a painting or a building or a lady, but we must admit that not all paintings, buildings and ladies engender the same amount of disagreement. Some are more generally acknowledged to be lovely, some more generally acknowledged to be ugly, and some have the populace split. Almost everyone would have to confess that Banff, Alberta is far prettier than Gary, Indiana, including (likely) the mayor of Gary, Indiana. I have yet to hear someone say that the stars are ugly, and people all around the globe believe the Grand Canyon to be fabulous, and almost every human who has ever lived will tell you that a sunset is splendid. Why? If beauty is entirely in the eyes of the beholder, why are the beholders sometimes so overwhelmingly in agreement? It seems as if two things are true. First, not all things have the same intrinsic beauty. Second, we humans are wired to appreciate beauty, and, in some cases, the wiring brings consensus, as if beauty were more like an objective reality than anything else.
So. To summarize. Humans have the ability to sense beauty, and beauty seems to be real. I do not wish to argue whether it is our wiring or the sunset that defines beauty; for regardless of which one you give preeminence to, the other must still be present or we enjoy no beauty. It’s like any other sensor. A light sensor requires internal wiring and light in order to sense light. A movement sensor requires internal wiring and movement in order to sense movement. A camera requires an internal apparatus and a real object in order to take a picture. So it is with beauty. The human race has the software for processing beauty, and it seems as if beauty really does exist.
This ability we humans have is part of the package that comes with being made in the image of God. We have a moral sense. We have a spiritual sense. We have an aesthetic sense. All of these senses are designed to process different types of information. We are more than a body, more than a brain. There’s something else inside us.
