hughbiquitous

I’ve wondered recently about beauty. Why are some things beautiful and other things aren’t? Why is it that a thing can be beautiful to one person, but hideous to another? Why is it that beauty often defies definition, yet we know exactly what it means? How come immaterial things can be beautiful?

One oft-cited immaterial bearer of beauty is mathematics. Physicists and mathematicians reportedly wept over the beauty of Einstein’s proofs. Paul Erdős, the late mathematician, has said, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

The sublime beauty of mathematics is lost on those of us who have not paid the high price of admission to join the elite fraternity that includes men like Isaac Newton, John Nash, and countless others you’ve never heard of. This makes me sad, because it doesn’t take long before mathematicians turn into theologians when they behold the elegance of the way numbers relate to one another.

Exhibit A: Euler’s Identity. It is simply this: e^iπ+1=0. Impressed? Are you slack-jawed at the astonishing beauty of this equation? Few people are, but blessed are those who “get it,” I say. A mathematics professor at MIT, an atheist, has said of Euler’s Identity, “There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence.” I wish I could appreciate that. I feel like I’m missing out.

Erdős, also an atheist, said, “God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.” Here’s what he means: look at this picture of the prime numbers, plotted graphically. The white dots are primes; the black dots are non-primes. Notice a pattern? Click the image to see all the primes from 1 to 1,299,827 plotted like this.

Why should prime numbers line up like this? When numbers—which are uncreated and necessary (in the sense of “it could not be otherwise”)—exhibit an aesthetic like this, I can understand why mathematicians turn into theologians. Galileo reportedly claimed that “mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe.”

I have a faint idea of why he might say such a thing. But I daresay a musician could say the same thing about his art; C. S. Lewis had Aslan sing Narnia into existence. Similar claims could be advanced by a programmer or a painter or any manner of craftsman, I suppose. Whatever form beauty takes for a person, it stirs within the soul a desire for the One who possesses beauty without limit.

(Before we leave Galileo, let me digress from mathematics into astronomy to present Spiral Galaxy IC342. As one astronomy blogger put it, “If that doesn’t impress you, close this window, shut down your computer, go find a nice hole in the ground and lie down. You have no pulse.” And Yuri Gagarin went up there and claimed he didn’t see God. Like Ellie Arroway said in Contact, “They should have sent a poet.”)

In the end, I think beauty is an apologetic for God’s existence, a signal of transcendence that leads us home. As Lewis reasoned, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We desire beauty and we never tire of it; we never have our fill. Our appetite for beauty is never satisfied in this world, so the most probable explanation is that the beauty we desire resides elsewhere.

Augustine knew where to find it: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

See also: God by the Numbers (Christianity Today)

You know how sometimes you find a particular subject come up in all kinds of different places with no apparent connection between them?

As cases of suffering and evil come to my attention on many fronts, William Lane Craig’s Q&A page at Reasonable Faith this week addresses the question, “Why Does God Permit Suffering to Continue?” The question specifically asked about Amos 4:6-11. Dr. Craig comments,

As for the passage from Amos, it reminds us powerfully, as C. S. Lewis put it, that Aslan is not a tame lion. People often say that God doesn’t send suffering into our lives but merely allows it. The passage you cite explodes that fairy tale! The ancient Israelites didn’t understand that the calamities that befell them were in fact a severe mercy sent by God for their own well-being, but their intransigence short-circuited the good purpose that God had in mind… non-Christians, used to a Santa Claus God, won’t understand this sort of tough love. But it’s not really difficult to grasp when you reflect that any finite amount of suffering is worth enduring in order to gain eternal joy and to avoid eternal ruin.

With all the attention J.P. Moreland’s ETS paper is directing at issues of natural theology and the proper sort of commitment to the Bible, I’m looking for some boundaries on these questions.

Ten years ago, Michael Horton wrote on Calvin’s take on the limits of natural theology and concludes that unbelievers are not bereft of reason or truth; God’s common grace should not be discounted in these matters. But it is only when the Holy Spirit "notarizes" revealed truth in the heart of unbelievers that there is power to save:

Calvin also insists that [knowledge of God implanted in the conscience] is legal rather than evangelical in character. This is crucial especially for Reformed believers today, when this distinction seems to be fading. Everyone knows God, but as Creator, Law-Giver, and Judge. "There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity [sensus Divinitatis]." Calvin argues that there is a great deal of common ground in creation for agreement on general principles of morality, justice, beauty, and even truth. One does not require special revelation in order to create a reasonably just society, a beautiful work of art, or even a common sense of morality based on the law written on the conscience (2.2.15). Surely, Christians and non-Christians could agree on many issues related to the common good. And, we can infer (given his positive evaluation of many of the advances of philosophy in secular matters) that Calvin would approve of appealing to philosophical arguments in apologetics…

Calvin finds the inscripturated Word to be the only rock in a whirlpool of subjective opinion. "Hence the Scriptures obtain full authority among believers only when men regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard" (1.7.1). The Word and the Spirit belong together, and thus Calvin moves to the role of the Spirit’s witness, "stronger than all proof." Credibility in doctrine depends on our full confidence in God’s Word. The prophets invoke God’s name for their writings with great care and purpose. Again, the central concern for Calvin is pastoral; he seeks to care for those whose consciences would vacillate and find no comfort. We must rise above human reasoning, judgments and conjectures and this can only be done when the Holy Spirit joins the Word as its "notary public." This is no capitulation to fideism in the face of poor arguments, an evasion of the critical questions…

We have some common ground with unbelievers. In nature, there is some revelation about God. But nature can only tell us that he is a Judge; it does not tell us of his fatherly kindness in the provision of Christ. Nature provides legal knowledge of God, but only Scripture reveals the Gospel, the evangelical knowledge of Christ.

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

— Joseph Baretti

… vs. …

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

— Romans 5:6-8

Blogger provocateur Dan Miller offers a question that was raised at church: “Why am I responsible for Adam’s sin?” I got talking about that question with Eric Farr, who pointed me to a fantastic course at biblicaltraining.org: Systematic Theology I.

Here are the courses offered there on MP3: (more…)