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Beauty is a characteristic of a person,
place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of
pleasure, meaning or satisfaction . Beauty is studied as part of
aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. As a
cultural creation, beauty has been extremely commercialized. An
"ideal beauty" is a person who is admired, or possesses features
widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture.
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Outline logical structure
Its logical structure is essentially as follows:
There are compelling reasons for considering beauty
to exist in a way that transcends its material manifestations
According to materialism, nothing exists in a way that transcends
its material manifestations.
According to classical theism, beauty is a quality of God and
therefore exists in a way that transcends its material
manifestations
Therefore, to the extent that premise (1) is accepted, theism is
more plausible than materialism
Points 2, 3 and 4 are relatively un-controversial, and the argument
is formally valid, so discussion focuses on the premise(1). .
Suggested reasons for accepting the premise
The principal arguments for the premise are:
We have a strong intuition, especially when in the presence of great
art or extreme natural or human beauty, that the beauty is real
and transcends its material manifestations.
Although such intuitions are not always correct, they are strong
enough prima facie evidence that very compelling arguments to the
contrary would be needed to cancel them out.
Creative artists generally experience their efforts to create great
art/literature/music in terms that assume the objective existence of
beauty, albeit mediated by their subjective experience.
Although one can make plausible evolutionary explanations for
finding beauty in potential sexual partners and in healthy animals
that might be food or predators, the experience of beauty is
much wider than these categories and includes visions of things for
which there can be no direct evolutionary advantage
(like clouds seen from aeroplanes, or images from telescopes).
Scientists, especially physicists, have found that mathematical
beauty is a very useful guide to a valid theory.
It is very difficult to speak of beauty in a coherent way without
assuming its objective existence, albeit mediated by highly
subjective and cultural factors.
Suggested reasons for disputing the premise
Our intuitions may be mistaken.
Creative artists may be mistaken or culturally conditioned.
Given that important brain circuits have evolved for detecting
beauty in potential sexual partners, food or prey, they may be
"misfiring" to detect beauty in other places. The evolution of
the brain may create this impression as a byproduct of its main
function.
Ordinary language is not always a reliable guide to objective
reality.
Beauty does not actually exist in the observed object or scene.
Instead the sense of beauty exists within the observer, as does the
sense of "transcendent" beauty.
Philosophical Criticism of the Argument
Critics have labeled the variant of Argument based on
the level of beauty (as per Swinburne above) as a seeing the world
in an overly optimistic fashion, incapable of seeing the
ugliness as well as the beauty. Joseph McCabe, a freethought writer
of the early 20th century, questioned the argument in The
Existence of God, when he asked whether God also created parasitic
microbes. Bertrand Russell questioned it in a similar fashion,
stating that he was "unable to see any great beauty or harmony in
the tapeworm." H. L. Mencken stated that humans have created
things of greater beauty when he wrote, "I also pass over the
relatively crude contrivances of this Creator in the aesthetic
field, wherein He has been far surpassed by man, as, for example,
for adroitness of design, for complexity or for beauty, the
sounds of an orchestra." More recently, Richard Dawkins dismissed
the Argument as "vacuous", claiming that "[i]f there is a
logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence
of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents."
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