Beyond the Rainbow

What Our Sense of Beauty Tells Us about Reality

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” You’ve heard it all your life, and it’s easy to believe it’s true because our aesthetic preferences differ so broadly. I like Beethoven; you like jazz. I like mountains; you like seashores. I like Michelangelo; you like Monet. Our differing tastes make it easy to assume that beauty has no objective standard.

These differences are minor, however, compared with the vast sea of agreement about beauty. Everyone sees beauty in swans, butterflies, and roses, but you never hear anyone gush over scorpions, tarantulas, or warthogs. We love foam-capped ocean waves but not scum-coated swamps. This widespread agreement about beauty suggests that the eyes of beholders don’t tell the whole story.

The Naturalistic Explanation

Naturalists tend to explain beauty in terms of pragmatic function. What we call beauty, they see as features that emerged through natural processes. To them the brilliant color of a rose evolved not to produce beauty, but as nature’s signal to attract butterflies and bees for cross-pollination. They say nature was oblivious to beauty when evolving the physical features of a woman. Her form is purely utilitarian, displaying her capacity to bear and nurture children. The splendid stripes of a tiger evolved solely as camouflage. According to naturalists, beauty was never in nature’s blueprint. What we call beauty is the byproduct of nature’s blindly produced forms and functions.

Naturalistic explanations for beauty don’t work because they turn reality wrong side out. Naturalism reduces everything in nature to its mechanical function, but reality presents itself the other way around. Just as the meaning of an analog clock is not found in its gears and springs but on its face where it displays the time, the meaning of the universe is found not in the mechanics that keep it running but in the purpose for which it exists. Naturalistic philosophy is wrong side out because it mistakes the mechanics for the essence. Naturalists cannot admit to meaning and purpose in the universe because meaning and purpose would have to precede mechanics and involve an intelligent designer—which their worldview cannot allow.

Seeing the universe as a meaningless mechanism leaves no place for beauty. Naturalists cannot admit the grandeur of a snowcapped mountain, because grandeur is a concept that requires more meaning than mere mechanics can provide. All they can see are solidified minerals thrust upward by random geologic forces. They cannot allow any sense of art or meaning or delight in the extravagant forms, textures, and colors displayed in nature.

The Naturalistic Inconsistency

If you think it’s presumptuous of us to claim that no naturalist can see beauty in nature, you are right; it is. What we have described is how naturalists should see nature if they were to remain consistent with their philosophy. But despite holding a philosophy that logically excludes beauty, most naturalists respond to beauty much as theists do. They may explain the color spectrum within sunlight in strictly mechanistic terms, but they are as likely as theists to feel delight in sunsets and rainbows. Why? Because beauty is a reality so much stronger than naturalistic philosophy that it streams past the intellect and acts directly on the emotions.

But for naturalists strongly committed to both consistency and naturalism, the light of beauty cannot shine. If you think we’re overstating the case, read the pitiable lament of scientist George John Romanes (1848–1894), a believer in God until he abandoned his Christian faith to become a Darwinian. In his book Thoughts on Religion, he wrote, “I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness.” He went on to confess that when he pauses to reflect on this loss of beauty, “at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible.”

When Romanes turned to naturalism, his universe turned wrong side out. All he could see was the viscera of reality—the mechanical chugging, pulsating engine of nature fueling itself on itself, producing nothing meaningful, having no purpose, but running on aimlessly like a Rube Goldberg machine until it peters out. When Romanes excluded God from his world, all that could give meaning to its forms, textures, colors, and sounds evaporated. He was left in a darkened universe haunted by an illusion of beauty which his new philosophy forced him to reject.

Beauty cannot exist in a truly naturalistic world because beauty implies the existence of ideals—standards to which objects should conform. The more nearly an object approaches the ideal for its kind, the more beautiful it is. But in a naturalistic world with no absolutes, no ideals are possible. What is, merely is; there is no such thing as what ought to be. In a universe driven by the random winds of evolution, all forms and functions are accidental and perpetually changing. And without a fixed ideal to conform to, beauty has no meaning.

The Theist’s Explanation

How do theists explain the ecstatic human response to a majestic mountain? As C.  S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, naturalists assert that when we express such feelings, we are merely describing our subjective emotional state, rather than saying anything meaningful about the object that aroused the emotion. The emotion is absurd, however, unless the mountain possesses qualities that appropriately elicit the awe we feel. Naturalists will say it has no such qualities. They will turn the mountain wrong side out, expose its innards, and say it is merely the result of tectonic mechanics. But mechanics fail to explain the lofty feelings mountains tend to evoke—feelings inexplicable in a totally naturalistic universe. Obviously, something more than geology is involved.

The mountain may be a work of art. That is, a creator may have purposefully willed its form to evoke in us a specific effect. Is it possible the mountain was created as a visual metaphor for our longing to touch some quality beyond our limited experience? Like Plato’s shadows in a cave, mountains, sunsets, music, and art may be shadows of greater realities that exist in a supernatural realm above our own.

It is in those moments of romantic bliss—when we feel the grandeur of the mountain, the magical dance of leaves, music tingling with the essence of life, the ethereal light of a goddess glowing in a beloved face—that the veil is lifted, and we see reality for what it is. The naturalists’ analytic lens that discounts such experiences as romantic illusions misses reality by a tree-lined, flower-strewn, brook-rippling, bird-chirping country mile.

The Promise of Beauty

For all the longings beauty arouses, nothing in nature or art will fully answer. As C. S. Lewis noted in his essay “The Weight of Glory,” these objects of beauty that tantalize us are bright shadows of a reality we long to be a part of—a reality yet unseen, unheard, and unfelt. The beauty in nature stirs up a “memory” of something we were meant to enjoy but have never fully experienced. It’s as if something hovers at the edge of our comprehension that requires a not-yet-developed sense to grasp it fully. Yet we occasionally catch dim, fleeting glimpses through the five senses we do have.

Beauty calls with a Siren’s voice, and our longing to abandon all and chase after it can be overwhelming. But we find that beauty is like the rainbow’s end: it beckons but eludes. In the presence of beauty, we are like a child with her nose pressed to a toy store window. We look and yearn, but a barrier prevents the full experience of what is before us. Even at the most intense moment of ecstasy aroused by the symphony, the sunset, the painting, or the embrace, we realize that what we really yearn for lies yet beyond. These beautiful things are only images of the real object of our desire. Whatever it is we long for, beauty is not it. Beauty is merely a window opened toward it.

In beauty we hear the chords of the supernatural reverberating within nature. The glimpses that invade our world provide tangible evidence that beauty in its fullness does exist. And that taste of it underscores the promise that we can ultimately ascend to that higher dimension and find the true object of our desire.

J.  R.  R. Tolkien expressed this yearning to abandon all and plunge headlong after beauty in his short story “Leaf by Niggle.” Niggle is a struggling artist enamored with the beauty of leaves. In time, Niggle’s vision of beauty expands to include trees, then the forest, then the vista beyond the forest, and then the light that bathes the vista. Niggle would spend every waking moment painting his unfolding vision of beauty, but the recurring needs of his lame neighbor often interrupt and prevent him from ever finishing his painting. (Spoiler alert!) When Niggle arrives in the afterlife, he finds that the heavenly reality awaiting him is the country of his painting, more glorious than his earthly ability could conceive or execute.

The Image of Perfection

Christian theology reveals the reason behind our desire for, and alienation from, beauty. We live in a fallen world where all beauty is flawed. No form is quite symmetrical, no face without blemish, no color pure, no balance perfect, no harmony without a touch of dissonance. A veil has fallen between our world and the source of perfect beauty.

A shadowy but tantalizing image of this perfect beauty beyond the veil remains embedded in every heart. This is why those dim rays of beauty that filter into our flawed world so touch our emotions. At such moments we glimpse subliminally that original perfection which is beyond our present capacity to experience fully. This awareness that pure beauty is real, though currently unattainable, is the source of our longing and our hope.

All beauty invites us to look beyond nature and art and embrace the greater reality that is the invisible object of our desire. The beauty of a magnificent painting calls us to engage the artist. The spine-tingling harmonies of a grand anthem draw us toward the composer. A mountain sunrise, a delicate flower, the elegance of an Olympic skater, the grace of a soaring eagle—all draw us toward their Creator.

Beauty not only points us toward God, it also reveals something about God that even believers often find surprising. Just as reason shows the reality of God and morality shows the character of God, beauty shows the joy, the delight, the smile, and the laughter of God—the ecstasy of God. Beauty reveals that God created us to experience more than just bare, mundane existence; he desires for us to revel in supreme delight.

—This article was adapted from How to Know God Exists: Solid Reasons to Believe in God, Discover Truth, and Find Meaning in Your Life, by Josh McDowell and Thomas Williams.