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1 Introduction
In the eye of the beholder
This book is grounded in personal experience and reflects an engagement with an ancient tradition of thought that Peter Brown, in his biography of Augustine of Hippo, summarises thus:
My aim is to explore the different ways in which the human sense of the aesthetic empowers, guides, inspires, shapes and brings understanding to natural science. What do I mean by the aesthetic? What do I include in the arc of ‘beauty’?
I think that, at its most basic, I would say that the beautiful is what pleases, or gladdens, human beings. The beautiful is whatever draws me in, fascinated; whatever engages my mind’s attention and my body’s ability. When we see something beautiful, there is a transfer of feeling and/or meaning between it and us.2 You can see my definition is not a narrow one: it is as broad as you care to allow. Beauty is whatever causes delight in me – and it is delight that causes me to act.3 I would like us to explore how delight in the world drives scientists.
The contemporary writer A.L. Kennedy provides an appealing starting point. Her BBC Radio 4 essay ‘The power of art’ (broadcast as part of the series A Point of View, on 25 January 2015) was a remarkable reflection on beauty and meaning.4 Part of what makes it so appealing is the very beautiful way in which it was written (and spoken).
A.L. Kennedy begins and ends with a single rose petal, placed by her mother next to a bowl of rose petals, a petal that A.L. Kennedy tidied away into the bowl with the rest of the petals, before realising her error.
The out-of-place, the deliberately left rose petal, can for someone be as much a thing of beauty as anything made through human skill or found in the world around us, as much a thing of beauty as a rose window or the magnified image of a snowflake. This rose petal led A.L. Kennedy to reflect on the power of art to make sense of the world. Why should one rose petal matter when much in the world is tragic and wicked and where beautiful things are destroyed just because they can be? By contrast, why should one rose petal matter in a world in which many people live quite beautiful lives or perpetrate acts of outrageous generosity and kindness? The petal seems so little. And her answer is, that the rose petal matters because it is an example of unnecessary beauty, and that unnecessary beauties are statements of hope and of a belief in the meaningfulness of human life. She says: ‘Even if all you can do for now is put a petal where you want it – that’s a promise to your future and a light.’
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A.L. Kennedy is not alone in making this point. In a recent book, The Edge of Words, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams says something similar. We will focus on Dr Williams’s detailed arguments later on, in Chapter 7, but, in his discussion of the power of silent communication between people, and made by people, he notes the meaningfulness of something like a single bowl or flower being deliberately (which is the point) placed in an empty room.6 However dismissible by someone who wants to dismiss it, the deliberate placing of an object of beauty – or what, by the way, or with the intention, it is placed, becomes an object of beauty – communicates meaning.
Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder; the perception of beauty is personal. So, how can it be reasonable to argue, as I want to here, that the sense that scientists have of the world as a place that is beautiful and that can be understood by acting in beautiful ways (for example, by doing experiments) is equivalent to other experiences of beauty we have in other parts of our lives? Especially as I then want to argue that this begs profound questions of the way in which science and scientists are often presented by themselves or others, because it reminds us that science is a far more subjective affair than many like to pretend. Ultimately, I will want to suggest that the role that the human estimation of beauty plays in objective scientific discoveries supports the claim that humanity is made in the image of God. But, if my argument relies on the idea that beauty is generalisable (like science is supposed to be generalisable, in its case seeking universal truth), when actually what you think beautiful is very personal, how can my argument be coherent?
In a sense, the fact that the experience of beauty is fundamentally subjective, is personal, is precisely my point. The personal nature of aesthetic sensibility implies that there will be a lot of different versions (to understate) of what is beautiful, of what is personally pleasing, of what seems gorgeous, harmonious, balanced, coherent, elegant or awesome. But, at the same time, there is a wonderful agreement, among some quite large groups of people, that certain things are beautiful. We collectively apply the idea of beauty to some very different phenomena – to the sublimities of a sunset and a mountainscape; to Bach’s B minor Mass and the singing of Cilla Black; to a portrait by Rembrandt, 40,000-year-old cave paintings, tapestries by John Piper or the pattern on animal skin; to a mother and child by Henry Moore or a teapot with a crack in it; to a poem by U.A. Fanthorpe and a novel by George Eliot; to a mathematical equation and a molecular structure; to another person and to a dog. You can argue that this makes the term far too broad for use in the way in which I am applying it. But, for myself, I think we know what we mean when we say something is beautiful, because it’s something we say. Of course, we also qualify the term – it’s a beautiful horse or a beautiful child, or a beautiful symphony or a beautiful proof – but it is (or they are), ultimately, beautiful. They all please us. They don’t have to please everyone, but they please some of us, some of us agree – and the pleasure we have relates to something common to all human beings. The principle is, that we can be pleased, gladdened, thrilled, excited, overwhelmed, turned on, by beauty. What matters is that we can and do respond, and in common ways that characterise our response as human. The common ground on which we universally recognise beauty in our world and in each other is our humanity. We will return to this in Chapter 5.
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It is easy also to point out that my use of terms such as ‘beauty’ here is rather slipshod. Aesthetics – a branch of philosophy that relates to the human appreciation of beauty – is a very large area of thought. I am not intending to try and address the whole field of aesthetics here – I couldn’t, I don’t have the space or the time or the ability. What I can do though is to address this one issue, why scientists can’t stop talking about beauty and what that implies for them and for all of us, from my own particular position as a researcher, a teacher and a priest.
It has been asserted ‘that beauty is an innate, hardwired response’7 – although our wiring is not really hard at all, of course, but rather soft and wet and dynamic, and subject to constant modification. But, the idea that we are ‘hardwired’ in this way is supported by some common themes or ingredients in what is rated as beautiful by people around the world. The recognition of beauty might relate particularly to motion, to movement and dynamics,8 as in dance (but this is only a very special example of the general point). The reason we find something beautiful can often also derive from the origin of an object or experience we find beautiful, what its principal characteristics are, and how it relates to its audience.
Aesthetics has traditionally – at least, since the eighteenth century – been concerned with two kinds of experience, the beautiful and the sublime.9 Whereas the beautiful is something we marvel at, the sublime is something that awes us; whereas the beautiful is exquisite, the sublime is impressive; whereas the beautiful is elegant, the sublime is gargantuan. As explored by the philosopher and social historian Charles Taylor, the emergence of ‘the sublime’ as a philosophical category derives from an experience of the world become ‘disenchanted’ as humanity got an improved grip on what makes the world tick.10 We lost a sense of ‘intra-cosmic mystery’ while gaining a sense of the universe as vast, ancient and minutely structured – and, in some sense, tragic. For one key writer, Thomas Burnet (who prefigured a Darwinian sense of the evolution of species), mountains were ‘the ruins of a broken world’.11 We marvel at the beauty of something but, presented ...
