Aesthetic Beauty Defy Evolution
Philip Johnson, a Berkeley professor of Law, introduced the movement of intelligent design. His expertise in law was in the evaluation of the weight of evidence in court proceedings. While he was on a sabbatical leave in Oxford, Johnson read the book by Michael Denton “Evolution: a theory in Crisis.” Weighing the evidences, Johnson saw that the Darwinian evolution was not supported by valid evidence. And he was moved to write the book “Darwin on Trial.”
Johnson taught that intelligent design shows that without God the naturalist theories don’t work at all because they require chance mechanisms that are impossible to occur in nature. And since chance can’t produce the evidence, there must be a designer.
If, as atheists claim, the cosmos came from random events after the Big Bang, then the result should be chaos. So, why is there order in the universe? Why is there aesthetic beauty in nature? And how does evolution, which depends only on chance mechanisms, account for humans having the quality of appreciating aesthetic beauty?
And if living things developed through random evolutionary processes, as Darwin taught, the mechanism for development must have been the natural selection, survival of the fit and extinction of the weak. But order that is beautiful can’t arise as an accident out of nowhere. The theory of evolution is based on survival usefulness, on toughness not on delicate planned beauty.
Darwin can’t explain either the origin of the survival of a delicate flower or the beauty of a bird’s feathers. In Darwin’s world, we should be surrounded by life that is fierce, distorted, ugly and unplanned.
So, the origin of beauty is a huge problem for evolutionists. Steven Pinker, out spoken professor and atheist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted this; He has referred to beautiful music as puzzling gift and described it as “auditory cheesecake.” It enriches our lives, he said in Nature (March ,2007) but it makes no contribution to survival!
Intelligent design and specifically beauty in nature gives us: not merely a falsifying of chance mechanisms, but the clear fingerprints of a designer. It shows the aesthetic mind of an artist; it gives evidence that creation is the result of a thinking entity.
The carvings of the faces on Mount Rushmore could not possibly have come by chance over millions of years. They are the creation of thought and design. Chance mechanisms cannot carve beauty. Therefore, beauty must have come from a purposeful Creator.
Beauty is God’s signature in nature.
