Music/Beauty

For The King — FTK

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Music/Beauty

February 12, 2021

For The KingFTK

Does music point to God? Even more broadly, does beauty point to God?

https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/reflections/read/reflections/2019/11/19/god-as-the-best-explanation-of-beauty

https://mountcarmelapologetics.com/argument-from-beauty/

https://bahaiteachings.org/does-god-exist-the-argument-from-beauty/

https://apologetics.fandom.com/wiki/Argument_from_beauty ------> more technical treatment of the argument (my cup of tea!)

https://christian-apologist.com/2017/10/18/several-aesthetic-arguments-in-support-of-god/

Zephaniah 3:17 : "The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing."

That was me on the uku btw at the end :D

Meaningful Monologue #1

forthekingpodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

(music) Hey everybody, this is Rocky with the For The King podcast. (cough) Sorry, I wanted to do a new series titled "Meaningful Monologues" where it's something a little bit more digestible, shorter, five to ten minutes, where I talk about a topic that interests me and kind of gives you guys a glimpse into my mind and things that I find compelling for the existence of God or things about God, things about society that seem contradictory or hard to understand the way many people would talk about how to understand the topic. So, for instance, today I wanted to talk about music.

So, I love music. I use Spotify all the time. Listen to music when I get in the car.

It's either a podcast or I'm listening to music. And what gave me this idea is I was just driving the other day listening to whatever. And, you know, I was just contemplating how just music is so beautiful in and of itself.

And, you know, the secular naturalist that believes in evolution would say there are mating calls or like danger calls that animals do in the animal kingdom to alert others that they either like want to mate or that there's danger coming so you need to leave. You know, there are - there's a whole category of birds called songbirds where they just literally create beautiful music and we get to listen to them in the mornings a lot here in the Midwest. And, you know, those do serve a purpose for survivability.

Songbirds do that to alert each other that they might find each other and then, you know, reproduce and carry on their genes, that sort of thing. That would be the account for why we find sounds in nature. So, for humans, sounds are a little bit more complicated because it is the way we communicate.

But then also there's this different category of sounds called music that humans enjoy and it's just a huge part of our society. So, if you really think about what music is, all it is is just sound waves in the air in such an organization, in such a fashion that your ears incline to it and you like it. And everybody has their own musical preferences but at the end of the day, there's every single society has, you know, interacted with music.

There's always - that's always part of the culture. No matter where you go is they have a certain type of music that they enjoy and instruments that are unique to that culture. And it's not really a thing for survivability.

If there was never any music composed throughout the history of mankind, I imagine we would still be - we wouldn't die. If that makes sense. If I never listen to music every day, even though I really enjoy it, just for the sake of its beauty and the lyrics and all that, I imagine I wouldn't die and I wouldn't be able to - it wouldn't keep me from being able to survive.

And that being said, I just - I think there's a transcendental component to music that is unlike other sounds that we find in nature. And for those of you that are Christian, you guys should understand from the Bible, we're commanded to sing and to praise God. So we know that music is created by God.

In Zephaniah chapter 3 it says that God will exalt over you with loud singing. So even God is depicted as singing in joy over his people. I'll put that verse in the show notes.

But I think that's really interesting and I've always thought music was kind of - it's just totally different than most other things in this world and it's such a huge driver of culture and ideas and the way we think. My Lord Will and soon to be father-in-law talks about how everything's been put to music. It's a good teaching tool.

It's something humans can really grasp onto and enjoy just for the sake of enjoying it. So yeah, that leads me to talk about the argument for God based on aesthetics. So the reason we like music is because it's beautiful and there's an aesthetic to it that we enjoy.

So I'm going to put some stuff in the show notes but I find this a very compelling argument for the existence of God and it's actually not used very much in like western Protestant American apologetics and I think it's a good argument. So I'm just going to read a few formulations of it just so you guys have an idea of it. There are compelling reasons for considering beauty to exist in a way that transcends its material manifestations, namely the sound waves, right? There's a way in which music is more than just sound waves to us.

According to materialism, nothing exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations. It's just atoms. It's just sound waves vibrating at a certain thing and nothing more, nothing less.

According to classical theism, beauty is a quality of God and therefore exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations. God is beautiful. He is beautiful to us.

He created beauty. So beauty being a quality of God, that must mean it's derived from Him and there is a God. So premise number four, therefore to the extent that premise number one, which is that there's compelling reasons to think that beauty is transcending the material manifestation is accepted.

Theism is more plausible than materialism to account for beauty. Here's another formulation of it. Everything physically beautiful could conceivably be even more beautiful.

Therefore, all physical beauty falls short of perfection. Therefore, perfect beauty exists only in its external form. So beauty is a attribute of things in the world, but whatever you're looking at that you're like, oh, that's beautiful.

It can always be a little bit more beautiful if it was just this different way or bigger or better or whatever. So therefore, perfect beauty exists only in its external, sorry, eternal form, not external. My bad.

Therefore, the timeless idea of beauty comes from a non-material realm, independent and superior to the imperfect world of the senses. Therefore, perfect beauty describes God. Here's probably the simplest formulation of it for you guys to... I went from a really hard way to understand it to this is going to be probably the easiest.

Many features of the natural world are beautiful. Beauty cannot be fully or sufficiently explained naturalistically. Therefore, beauty has a supernatural explanation.

So those are some ways you can think about the argument for beauty. Here's a few quotes from some Christian philosophers that deal with it that I think was pretty good. "If everything, including humanity, is the result of random and personal forces, which encouraged only survival," so this is a macroevolution, "then it seems highly unlikely that the process would yield organisms," humans, "which recognize values like these," artistic beauty, "which aren't survival conducive." So again, going back to earlier what I was saying, it doesn't seem like our interaction with music is merely for survival.

There's something more, there's something transcendental about it. If macroevolution is true, it's just unguided naturalistic forces creating complexity out of non-complexity, then it doesn't really make sense that we would find... Specifically, music is what I'm talking about here, beautiful. He adds to that point, "but values like these," artistic beauty, "what we would expect if humans and the human environment were created by a personal, loving, and beauty value in God.

God's existence is a much better explanation for the existence of non-utilitarian value than any explanation without God." Here's just some cool little pithy, these are shorter pithy statements from... What's his name? Christian philosopher Paul Coben, "Impressive natural beauty is in no way linked to survival, so why I think this overwhelming beauty should exist given naturalism? Why isn't everything functional, monotonously textured, and a battleship gray color? Why is there anything that's eccentric? Why isn't everything given naturalism? If it's just supposed to be the most simple yet gets the job done structure from evolution, why wouldn't it be more bland to us, but somehow we've developed a sense of it's not that bland?" And then he appeals to the human aesthetic element by saying, "And why should human creatures exist who can admire and appreciate the world's lovingness and majesty? And why do scientists prefer elegant or beautiful theories often without observational support?" So that's actually a really interesting thing. Some scientists, when they are developing a theory, they'll just guess if they're kind of at a... If they're kind of stuck somewhere, they'll guess, "Oh, this would be... If this worked, this theory would be beautiful, it'd be almost too good to be true." And when they try these things, especially in mathematics, like, "Oh, I took differential equations last year, my senior year." And it's just odd how well these things work out. I mean, these theorems and proofs get really complicated, but then at the end of the day, you get some really nice, easy to understand number.

And it's just... Honestly, there's a beauty to mathematics and it's very odd that it's not super complicated. Even things at a macro level, you can describe how planets are gonna orbit around each other through a gravitational constant equation that is like... You know, it only entertains four or five variables and you can describe something like that. And it's just very impressive.

So hopefully you guys found this interesting. I'll put some stuff in the show notes about the argument from Beauty. I think you guys are... There's short articles, so I think you guys can access it pretty easily and learn a little bit about it.

At the end of the day, music is something special. It's a way that we worship God, that we give Him glory. He made music to be beautiful.

It's a special thing. Sound waves aren't merely just sound waves. There's something about the human mind that interprets these sound waves and we find it beautiful and magnificent.

And it does cause us to think and act towards God, if that makes sense. So when you look at a sunset for the Christian... Whenever I'm hiking and I hike and I summit a mountain, like I did some 14ers in Colorado this past summer, like when you're at the top and you're a Christian, it's hard to not say, "Oh wow, this is even bigger than God and this is beautiful up here." And if anybody doesn't believe in God, obviously you can still have a sense of beauty. I'm definitely not saying that.

You can have a sense of beauty, but I would just challenge you to consider, where does that come from? Why are you even thinking this? Why do you find that beautiful? And if it could always be more beautiful, then why would you not then think that God is the creator of beauty? If you have a sense of beauty, then where is it coming from? Because there has to be a standard for why something's even beautiful in the first place. So I hope that blesses you guys and that's something cool to think about. God is beautiful.

He is the most beautiful thing. He created beauty and it's from Him and it's for our good. It's a grace to us.

So I hope you guys enjoyed that. This is going to be a new series, a meaningful monologue that I'm going to do maybe, maybe not every week, maybe twice a week, some weeks. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but it's just a little shorter 10 to 15 minute monologues where it's just me talking about an interesting topic.

So I hope you guys enjoyed that. Please send me an email at forthekingpodcast@gmail.com to interact with some of these ideas that I talk about. Just anything on the podcast, please send me an email.

Thanks for listening. All the support recently has been awesome. I released it last Sunday and there's been a lot of people listening to it.

So I really appreciate the support. I hope it's just encouraging and that you guys learn something about God and learn something about humanity and our culture and ways Christians can think about things. Now that really is my goal.

Also, peep the new intro and outro. Me and my buddies were filming a walkie Wednesday the other day and we did that. That little intro or outro, the for the King thing.

So that's just a bunch of grown men collaborating on just singing for the King. So I hope you guys enjoy that. And I thought it was kind of funny.

Hopefully it's not awful and just kind of destroy your guys's ears, but I thought it was pretty. Yeah, I think that's it. So thanks for listening, guys.

Sully Dale Gloria. This is the for the King podcast with your host Rocky.