On beauty

I got a chance to read the excerpt of "Religion without God" in the New York Review of Books and wanted to excerpt from the excerpt, but first I'm going to excerpt from a Phil Plait article that threw me, titled "Galaxies Are Weird and Weirdly Beautiful":

Galaxies, on the whole, are very pretty. I find that interesting, actually; we didn’t evolve to see galaxies with our naked eyes, and they exert no selective pressure on us to breed, so when we find them so attractive it must be coincidence. Their shape, color, and structure just so happen to fit our definition of beauty. Appreciating the art of the Universe is a collateral benefit of evolution.

Um, there's a whole lot in this world--much of it on this planet--that is beautiful with no evolutionary advantage to itself. Where does this leave appreciating the art of the earth?

Which brings us back to "Religion without God":

Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast universe but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.

There are famous and poetic expressions of the same set of attitudes. Albert Einstein said that though an atheist he was a deeply religious man:

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.¹

Let's skip ahead to Richard Dawkins' attempted take-down:

Richard Dawkins says that Einstein’s language is “destructively misleading” because clarity demands a sharp distinction between a belief that the universe is governed by fundamental physical laws, which Dawkins thought Einstein meant, and a belief that it is governed by something “supernatural,” which Dawkins thinks the word “religion” suggests.

But Einstein meant much more than that the universe is organized around fundamental physical laws; indeed his view I quoted is, in one important sense, an endorsement of the supernatural. The beauty and sublimity he said we could reach only as a feeble reflection are not part of nature; they are something beyond nature that cannot be grasped even by finally understanding the most fundamental of physical laws. It was Einstein’s faith that some transcendental and objective value permeates the universe, value that is neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction to natural phenomena. That is what led him to insist on his own religiosity. No other description, he thought, could better capture the character of his faith.

I think my favorite line is,

[Religious atheists] accept that nature is not just a matter of particles thrown together in a very long history but something of intrinsic wonder and beauty.

1Albert Einstein, in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, edited by Clifton Fadiman (Doubleday, 1990), p. 6.