How does one explain beauty if one believes in a materialistic (purely physical) universe? There have been heroic attempts to explain away human physical beauty as nature’s means of selecting the most vigorous agents for replication, but how does one explain the pleasure one feels when looking at a great painting? What possible evolutionary value could that have?
It hasn’t escaped my notice that evolutionists vary rarely speak about aesthetics in terms other than human anatomy and sexuality. You won’t see much ink spilled (or pixels lit) about the evolution of music appreciation. When contemplating aesthetics, Darwin-worshippers tend to get very ponderous and ill-defined, because their theory fails to explain heaping swaths of the human experience.
I would be greatly impressed at anyone who has a plausible materialistic theory for how man came to appreciate non-anatomical beauty. When we look at the things that define man, abstract aesthetics, self-conciousness, forethought, magnanimous selflessness, it seems that something quite key is missing from evolutionary theory.
Perhaps that something is truth.
Posted by poppies
