This week’s question is a new one for me: What is beauty? A follow-up question some of you may ask is, “What does that have to do with Christianity?” More than we might think! Beauty is a powerful evidence of intelligent design, an aspect of reality that inspires both fear and wonder.
God shows us what he’s like through what he created. As Paul puts it, “There are things about God that people can’t see — his eternal power and all that makes him God. But since the beginning of the world, those things have been easy for people to understand. They are made clear in what God has made, so people have no excuse for the evil they do” (Rom 1.20).
Inquisitive minds have marveled at the beauty/symmetry of nature for millennia. A pattern is obvious in so many seemingly-unrelated things! The “Golden Ratio” under various names has been important to our study of reality for thousands of years. It can be seen in the number of leaves on a stem, in the pattern of a nautilus shell, and even the proportions of our faces.1 Not all of us are remotely mathematically minded (at least I’m not), but I don’t need to understand the properties of Φ to appreciate its role in nature’s beauty! I have eyeballs and some level of consciousness, so it’s self-evident.
The question wasn’t, “Why is beauty important to a believer?” Some consider this topic irrelevant or unimportant or even repulsive, but beauty plays such a powerful role in showcasing God’s unlimited power and love!
So what is beauty? In nature, it is symmetry and something that inspires awe. Snowcapped mountains and roaring seas each have their own beauty (see I Cor 15.40-41 for other examples). Awe is fear with beauty, the goosebumps we might get when we see something truly incredible or terrifying.2 God made nature and people beautiful as an expression of himself! From almost the very beginning, humanity’s enemies hijacked beauty to interact with it in ways God never intended. There’s nothing new under the sun — beauty is just one of a few things God created for good that have potential for abuse.
In the abstract, beauty is (at least in part) whatever we might call “good” or “beneficial”. When someone helps another person we call that “beautiful”. When a person’s actions and disposition align with what is good, we call that “beautiful”. It is difficult to describe, but God has written a moral code in each person’s heart. Some listen to it, many do not. But we don’t have to delineate this code to know when something is beautiful! Anything done by that ethic is beautiful.
So God created humans in his own image. He created them to be like himself. He created them male and female. God blessed them and said, “Have many children. Fill the earth and take control of it. … God looked at everything he had made. And he saw that everything was very good” (Gen 1.27-28, 31).
1 Examples of the golden ratio you can find in nature. (n.d.) Sacramento State University. https://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mirzaagham/math1/SQ5.pdf
2 See also Mcphetres, J. & Zickfield, J. (09.2022). The physiological study of emotional piloerection: A systematic review and guide for future research. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 179 (pp. 6-20). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.06.010
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