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The
Lightstand Magazine
1986
• August • Reflections on the Way
by Bro.
Robin Lamplough
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I
remember as a student entering a course called "Introduction
to Philosophy". One of its sections dealt with the proofs
for the existence of God. As I recall, there were several
classic arguments, but none of them (unless my reading then
or my memory now have proved deficient) took into account
what I often think of as the aesthetic argument. Yet the presence
in man of an aesthetic sense, of an ability to appreciate
the beautiful as opposed to the merely useful, seems to me
very strongly to argue the existence of a creating and a caring
God.
THE WORLD AROUND US There are very good practical reasons,
as we learn particularly from the biologists, for the appearance
of the physical world around us. The grass and the leaves,
for example, are green because of the presence in them of
a substance known as chlorophyll. And, by a process called
photosynthesis, the light of the sun, reacting with this green
substance, produces the glucose which the plant needs to survive.
So each green plant is nothing less than a miniature glucose
factory. But there is no practical or utilitarian reason why
these production units should have an appearance which is
attractive to human sense. There is no practical reason, either,
why the predominant colour of the natural world should be
(as interior decorators have only recently discovered) the
most soothing and restful to the human eye.
CONTINUING LIFE-CYCLE The same principle is to be observed
in plant reproduction. The continuing life-cycle of many plants
depends on the ways in which their flowers and fruits attract
the attention of birds and bees and other creatures.
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Biologists agree that colour plays an important role in this attraction.
But, again, there is no practical reason why we humans should find
these plants beautiful. The colours of a set of traffic lights,
after all, are functional, but their aesthetic appeal is, to say
the least, limited. Yet the variety of the floral world and its
different colours brings new joy to human hearts every day.
Very much the same may be said of birds. Ornithologists reliably
inform us that the singing of a bird is a build-in pattern of behaviour
which has the effect of marking his territory. And this song, too,
with the brightness of his plumage, ensures that in the breeding
season
he will find a mate. Why then should I, who have no territorial
ambitions in avian sphere and still less desire to find a feathered
partner, find the appearance of birds and the sounds they make a
source of great pleasure? Surely the answer must be because they
have been created by an all-wise and beneficent Being who Himself
takes pleasure in the work of His own hands. Otherwise, could Eden
have been "very good", as Genesis tells us it was?
BUT WHY? But was all this beauty created just to bring joy to human
hearts (as much modern theology would lead us to believe, as if
human joy were the acme of achievement) or was there a higher purpose?
Was it not that man, appreciating the delights of the natural world,
might ask: "Who has done all this?" and be led by that
question to seek and to know the God of heaven, whom to know is
life eternal? The capacity in all men to appreciate aesthetic qualities
is yet another means by which our loving Heavenly Father has sought
to bring men to Himself.
R.L.
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