Symmetry and Aesthetics
An examination of the big questions, and how we answer them
I am an armchair philosopher, and a dabbler of ink1. I do not have any particular qualifications as a philosopher, or mathematician, nor even theologian. Nevertheless I have made what I believe to be, an interesting observation, about questions and answers. Questions are important, and we certainly have a lot of them, with answers that are typically rather poor.
Questions
Questions are key to existence, you cannot exist in the world without posing questions, however not all question are of equal importance. There are certain question that are of much greater importance; those teleological, ontological and philosophical questions. Those questions which are believed to be only answerable by tweed wearing, pipe smoking, professors. Most of this essay will simply consist of observations that I have made in my so-far-very-brief life. Yet I do stand by my observations and subsequent conclusions; the first of which I don’t think is too controversial or outlandish. The observation is as simple as a question cannot be an answers.
We all inherently know this, evidenced by that one friend who falsely believes themselves to be funny, but is actually just far too sarcastic. That friend when you ask "why did you do that?" they respond "why do you think I did?" Or when you ask them how they are doing, they will reply "how do you think I'm doing?" No matter what you ask or what conversation you attempt to make they simply reply with you same question and a sarcastic intonation. Accordingly, “Is God Dead?2” is not actually an answer though increasingly we treat it as such. It is so, that a provocative question does not tautologically answer itself. Yet it seems to me that we increasingly believe that “people wouldn’t ask that unless they knew the answer." How much more so if we find out the asker is a hallowed “Academic” or “scientist” with three letters after their names. Another example is the often-seen headline, "does XYZ disprove God?” The very gravitas of such a questions presupposes that it was a very thought-out question, especially in this “Age of Reason” we treat all hard questions as thesis statements rather than musings. However, if we apply reason to such a question, and actually treat it as a thesis, we have a couple steps in the process. The first of which, is to conduct a literature review of the subject. If we were to do that, we would find several thousands books written on the subject. Some by the most brilliant minds to have ever existed, most of whom, say God is not dead. If you have come to such a contrary opinion I recommend you reevaluate your hypothesis.
Nevertheless few people go to that step, both reader and writer, because anymore a provocative question is every bit as good as a thought out response. I believe that this comes upon the sacred “Conversation.” I suspect you know of what I speak; oft I am sure you have heard this phrase or some variation of it. “We need to come togther and have a conversation about xyz.” Or “It’s important that we can create spaces where we can have conversations about xyz.” I am sure that you have heard those phrases before, yet rarely to we see, we need to debate xyz. Why is that? Well that would be because a debate presupposes an answer, and a correct one at that. A conversation is nothing more than a mutual sharing of thoughts, ideas, or questions3. You can have a conversation about “is god dead” with your weird uncle, and no one has to win it. However, if you debate that in earnest, one party will have a contrary idea and you will have to come to some conclusion by the end. This is why there is a hallowed conversation and the shunned debate.
When we think about these questions we have to understand what such a question does to the psyche. Such big and booming questions, especially in certain contexts, coerce us to a particular conclusion. Especially given few people will read the whole article, they willl see the provocative question and say to themselves “wow I wonder… is God dead?” We then extend to that author or questioner, the same credit we lend to he who is an answerer. Falsely assuming people wouldn't ask such questions, unless they knew the answer. In many cases, they will have an answer, but is it the correct answer? Moreover, are they actually pursuing truth honestly? The fact of the matter is that we live in a time of ubiquitous questions, and optional answers, the questions inspired by such philosophers a Nietzsche. A man made famous by such questions as “Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth?4” The postmodern realm that came out of such questions is one of questions only, because the question is sufficient. The reason that the question is sufficient is because there can be an unlimited amount of answers to any given question. Hence there is no need to actually answer the questions, because you can have one answer I can have another, and both are correct. This is yet another reason we give the questioner a place of honor, we live in the land of ubiquitous and sufficient questions. We now live in the land of “conversation” not pursuit of truth.
So is God then dead? Are there now infinite answers to one question? Well I would say certainly not, one question cannot have 1000 answers, anymore than 1+1 can equal 2, 3, and 73. Just as one cannot respond I was and wasn't at the bar last night. You must have one answer, you either were or were not at the bar last night. So then to answer "Is God Dead" you must either answer in the affirmative or in the negative. Moreover, you also cannot answer I don't know, is he? As we have already established, that is not an answer. I can see the reader saying "When does anyone try to do that?" People don't try give more than one answer to any given question. However we actually do that all the time, people constantly say things like “you do you.” Or “Whatever floats your boat” that’s “your lived experience” all such things suppose multiple solutions to the given problem. There are many other work-arounds to the idea that God is alive/dead, such as New-Agey ideas like God is only in the mind or God is just a force. This supposes that God can be one thing to Bob but a totally different thing to Jill or Richard. Yet, we don't realize that the moment God becomes subjective, he ceases entirely to be God.
Now don't suppose for a moment that I am saying there is only one answer to every question. To include the moment the waiter comes to your table and asks for your food order. Nor when one walks down the deli aisle there is only one possible cut of meat to acquire and all else is wrong. I started off by indicating we are here addressing those BIG questions, questions of ontology, theology, philosophy. Those questions of whether God exists, is God good, what is Justice. I believe that one cannot cogently hold two contradictory beliefs on those things without repercussions5. We are discussing the concepts of meta-narratives, and underlying realities of the world that are fundamental to living. Yet I believe that people do this all the time, they suffer from mental ambiguity because they are not resting on stable ground6. Even Christians… especially christians today suffer from what I am now calling “the axiomatic crisis.7”
It goes like this, God is all good, he is all powerful, and all loving. Yet for some reason he decided that his “crowning glory” would come about not by the formation of his loving hands. Rather he set off some impartial system of evolution, and even though he said “let us make man in Our Image” he first let them be created in Ape's image. All the while knowing in time, eventually a system of what would come to be called “consciousness” would form, mostly by divinely providential chance. Eventually though, man would figure out it is the naturally forming consciousness that would click into place when the atoms and molecules of the newly evolved creature align. Like an arrow from heaven NOW is the time for Man to be made in God’s image. For some reason, it was man alone that could evolve to have consciousness. Additionally, it is consciousness alone that makes us in God's Image. All of this God decided to do, rather than as his Holy and Infallible (in every other sense) Word says, in 6 days. Ever and anon do christians believe in evolution. Increasing so actually, because there is “just so much evidence for it.” Yeah sure, there is just about as much evidence that we went to the moon, yet increasingly do christian NOT believe that we went to the moon. There is also an increasing amount of “evidence” that men can suddenly become women, yet Christian wholeheartedly deny that implausibility. However for some reason Evolution is Kosher with the Word of God. Because God “couldn’t have done it like that” or “It wasn’t meant to be taken literally?”
This seems to me to be a very bad precedent to set, in fact it is a precedent that allows for many other convenient not-meant-literallies. Evolution - for the christian - is a very bad answer to a very good question. It is no wonder to me that so many Christians question God's goodness. They suffer crisis of faith and get angry at God, wondering why they wrestle so fiercely with their Faith. When it all stems back to the Axioms they built their faith off of, Genesis 1:1 “not literally true.” It is the axiomatic crisis that has people dropping from the Faith left and right. Because they built their beliefs on sand, not stone. Such that when the hard questions come around, they have nothing on which to stand, because every inconvenient truth or miraculous action “wasn’t literal.” So we are barraged with questions from ourselves or others, that we cannot handle. We cannot cope because our meta-narratives are self contradictory and illegible. Like a story written by 5 year-old it is full of plot holes. The reality on which we build ourselves must be flowing out of the Logos, it must be true, complete, and accurate. Yet to get to that, in many ways we must also address the second half of this little debacle, answers.
Answers
I think, or at least hope, most people will see what I said above is true. The answers we give are very important, and the means by which we get to answers equally so (questions). We often are dissatisfied with the answers that we get, and attempt to retcon them in post. The reason that we do that is to fit those answers into our presuppositions. We attempt to jerry-rig the answers to fit the questions that we asked and more-so the platform from which we devise questions8.
I mentioned earlier that a question cannot be an answer, something we all know to be true. Evidenced by that one annoyingly sarcastic friend we all have. But how do we know that 1+1 does not qual 3? Well for one reason we’ve all probably graduated Kindergarten and so know that 1+1 doesn’t equal 3, nether 4 or 5. Despite that obvious answer I believe there is another explanation for how we know that the right answer is two. Aesthetically we know that it makes sense because of the symmetry of it. People often make subconscious decisions, decisions based off aesthetics rather than logic. It is that aesthetic symmetry that is integral to the constitution of reality. I would argue that this symmetry exists for two primary reasons. In the first place, because our world follows according the laws of mathematics. Mathematics are symmetrical at all times, remember back to algebra, what happens on one end must happen on the other. In other words, math must be symmetrical, because math is in some ways the language of the universe, it is written inside of us to recognize the beauty of symmetry
In the second place, I would say the cause of symmetry is due to a creative God. He is a God that loves beauty, something which we consistently see in scripture9. Because of this beauty that God so loves, because he is creative, he created the world according to the laws of mathematics. A system that made the world intelligible as well as beautiful. One can see this in a multitude of ways, such as the recognition of symmetry. Immediately we know when something is askew we notice the asymmetry. Take for instance an asymmetrical face, we recognize it almost immediately, whether in person or over a sketch. We know when something isn’t aesthetic or symmetrical, and we tend to dislike it or find it unappealing. Just as when something looks ugly, we can typically point to how it is simply “ugly.” We know immediately when something is aesthetically displeasing, whether color clash, pattern clash, or otherwise.
To illustrate the point of nature & math I don’t think there is a better example than fractals.
Figure 1
We see here that on the left are fractals that appear in nature, on the right side is their mathematical counterparts. Obviously, nature is finite, so they are exactly the same. However it certainly appears that nature has aligned itself in the manner of mathematics.
Fractals are in some ways the mind of God as says Dr. Jason Lisle10 an opinion that I would tend to agree with. Fractals as we know them can find their history in the Mandelbrot set. which is on the bottom left of Figure 1’s mathematical fractals. discovered by a scientist named Mandelbrot. I don’t intend to go too deeply into them now11, I recommend you watch the video by Dr. Lisle. Suffice it say though Fractals are an amazing thing, while the modern version can be seen in the images I showed, they are much older then one might expect. Think of Celtic knots for instance, these are also fractal. Long before the science and technology were there to create an actual infinite loop. Celtic knots have that same looping and repeating pattern with beautiful symmetry.
Why did I bring that up? Well for one because Fractals are rather cool, but also because it illustrates the previous point. God is interested in the aesthetic and the beautiful. I think Fractals point towards a great scripture, that being Romans 1:20. God will leave us without excuse, because he has put his very creative breath into nature, into its laws and into mathematics. Secondly I think that they can help us understand one of the more difficult scriptures that we encounter.
God works out all things for the good of those who seek after him and are called according to his purposes Romans 8:28. We all know that verse, and we all struggle with that verse because it just doesn’t seem right! We all know people who suffer, indeed suffering has ever been one of the greatest stumbling blocks of the faith. I have called this section On Answers, so what exactly does this have to do with questions and Answers? Well, as people, we often as questions of God, questions we presume to know the answers. Conversely, we often ask questions of the world, and presume to know the answers AS gods. This is inherently the claim of modern science. Often times we do not like the answers that we get but I would tentatively suggest… maybe the answers haven't come yet.
When we ask such as questions as “is God dead?” or “why does God allow these sorts of bad things to happen?” maybe we are, as JRR Tolkien might say, A little too hasty in believing that we have actually gotten an answer. Perhaps we have interrupted the process a little early, cut the formula off half way then got angry when we got a bad number out of it.
I believe that God is a god of Beauty and Aesthetics, he has a master story teller, and he is telling a masterful story. When one tells a story there is a sort of law of symmetry to the stories. If the antagonist kills a bunch of people, he can't simply get in trouble with the law at the end. If he is a murderer in the story, jail won't suffice, that wouldn't be just. Just as if the bad guy is simply the mean boss if he is killed in the end that would also be unjust. The outcomes of the plot and story must have a kind of symmetry. There is the mantra "if a gun is introduced in act 1 it better be used by act 3." Otherwise it's called a plot hole, it would be the same an unfinished equation, X(2-X) = 3X(4...
Another law of story telling is that the villain cannot win, something that could spur an article of its own. If at the end of the plot, the hero has lost, it simply means the story isn't actually over. The villain must loose because he is the villain, if he wins he is the hero. This is because of the reality of Christ coming to Earth, he prolongs the narrative so that the villain must lose. Before Christ comes the apocalypse is usually some great event of the death of the gods. Look to Ragnarok for instance, the world ending where everyone dies, even the dead die again. But it doesn’t end there, after the world is reborn, the serpent flies back over head and lands at the roots of Yggdrasil. Thus, the whole story, the whole cycle is doomed to repeat, the future perpetually means death.
That is the way people view the world without Christ; He who comes in and ends that cycle of perpetual death. He reverts the Grand Narrative to the way that it was supposed. No longer can the villain win, you must merely wait a little while longer. This is inherently true in the Human psyche as well, there is the occasional movie in which the villain wins. This called a “subversion” of expectations, but it also a subversion of the norm. We do not like the fact that the villain won, rather we like the subversion itself. The very fact that the norms were inverted is what scintillates us. Just as people do not love ugly things, they love that ugliness is inverting a normal order of thing. An ugly painting is not prized because of its ugliness, but rather what that ugliness says about beauty. It is the exception that proves the rule, those sorts of things say more about us rather than the state of art and what art represents. Neither do the bad things in life say much about your life, rather they are preparation for the wonder God will do.
So I believe that this is the thought processes we must take when we approach those metaphysical questions. We look to the states of our lives and perchance we are unhappy. We look to the state of the world and say “vanity of vanities!12” We look all over the world and we see disparity, we see baseness, we see ugliness. I would say we have no perspective, we have no vision, and we are ending the story early. We are not the writers of own story, as such platitudinous pop-psychologists would attempt to convince you. Rather we are characters in God's great tale, a tale of which we see in part and know in part.
God Loves beauty, he loves aesthetics, he loves symmetry; the hallmarks of a Creative. we see this in his creation, the very laws of mathematics he set into order. Why would he do all of that, yet not apply those same laws into very lives of his crowning glory? If they pervade all of the world; the heavens reflect the laws of mathematics, the very trees as well. Why would God not also take care with us? He does in fact and he makes it pretty clear that he will13. I would answer that all of the questions we are faced with come down to one simple thing. Ultimately it comes down to aesthetics and symmetry. It comes down to beauty, to those songs that are our lives, of course a song is ugly and strange, bizarre even, if you cut it off half way through. Of course a painting is ugly if you stop painting it when its only a quarter done. God cannot be dead, because there is beauty in the world, and beauty means design. If God were dead the world would be asymmetrical, in two ways. Firstly, if beauty remained as we now know it, nothing would make sense. If God were dead but beauty remained how did the beauty and design get there? Two, the world would actually stop being symmetrical, aesthetics would die away because there would be no Creative intellect behind it all. Along with every idea of justice that we have that comes from symmetry.
I believe that this is a system that makes sense, at least it makes sense to me, we know that God is creative, and we know that he loves. There is allegory after allegory of us being God’s “Masterpiece” whether pottery or otherwise. Perhaps it escapes our overly materialistic minds that allegory and analogy are meant to describe the things that words themselves can often not describe. A deeper truth about a person which escapes academically precise language. So saying that “God is like a potter and we his clay” means God is a creative God, and out of us he is making the perfect vessel. So if we are not yet perfect, that means the story isn’t over yet.
Thus concludes another article of mine, I hope you all enjoyed it. I suspect that I will continue to write on this subject, and the writing it has already spurred several follow up thoughts. Nevertheless, given the state of despair so many people are in (enough to effect so many suicides that our life span has shrunk) I thought it an important subject. I hope that the essay made sense, I am always at risk of rabbit holes or blabbering on the page.
Yes this is a reference to the Inklings (pun intended)
https://time.com/isgoddead/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conversation
https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
For the perfect example of this you must read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The protagonist’s name is Raskolnikov, which is a derivative of the word Raskol, which literally means divided mind.
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. - Matthew 7:24-27
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/axiom
This platform is that axiom of which we spoke of beforehand, it is the base reality we rest everything else off of.
1 Kings 10:1-13, Genesis 1:1, Exodus 25: 31-32, Psalm 104:24, Romans 1:20, Ecclesiastes 3:11, Psalm 139:14, John 1:1-3, Genesis 2:7, Genesis 1:31, Psalm 19:1, Colossians 1:16, Isaiah 45:7, Hebrews 11:3, and Psalm 50:2 just to name a few of the verses that reference God as a creator and a lover of beauty.
https://www.youtube.com/live/taKaFUNJ6Ec?si=i4ZN34k8acFSvULE
I really love fractals, and I could write a whole essay on just fractals, and possibly will at some future. If you guys would like that you can definitely let me know and I will work on it sooner rather than later.
Ecclesiastes (You should just read the whole thing)
Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? - Matthew 6:26 - 27