Los Alamos Church of Christ
Ten Reasons Why I Believe in God
Reason #1 Beauty of Nature
This morning I want to begin with a YouTube video. As you look at these pictures I want you to emotionally connect to them and then share with me what you are feeling.
God's Creation: video show on YouTube.
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/gods-creations/837ce0eb0b2010a0c989837ce0eb0b2010a0c989-170305388887?q=beauty%20of%20god%20slide%20show
What feelings are there when you see such pictures?
What one word would you use to describe those pictures? Perhaps beauty?
Here is the question I want to start with this morning, "What is beauty?"
"Well, beauty is the pretty stuff." Okay…
"Beauty is this symmetry and appealing colors and pleasant to look at." Can we do any better?
" Beauty is us recognizing something special about something." Getting better.
What does the dictionary say? I hate dictionary definitions. They rarely catch the real meaning. But here it is. "Beauty is the quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality." I was right, it doesn't help much.
I know let's listen to some poets. Maybe they can help us define beauty.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness." - John Keats - Beauty is this transcend kind of thing that never goes away.
"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." - Leo Tolstoy -
That helps beauty and goodness are not the same thing.
"Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms." - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Beauty is something that moves us to change into other things.
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." -David Hume - Where does beauty exist? Only in the one who perceives it. It is inside us. Not in the other thing.
"Ask a toad what is beauty ...; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back." - Voltaire - It is in the eye of the beholder.
"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man." - Dostoevsky - Wow, beauty as a battlefield for the hearts of man. I can feel that tension. I see beauty in nature and then disasters make me wonder.
"If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get about the best thing God invents." - Robert Browning -
That is why I ask the question this morning. By asking what is beauty, and not really being able to answer the question, we begin to see into God and realize there has to be a God. He has placed this thing called beauty in our hearts and we struggle to even define it, yet we know it is there. What is this thing we call beauty? It has to be an echo of the image of God. It has to be a foreshadowing of eternity. It has to be evidence that God made us!
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This morning we are exploring reason #1 on my list of Ten Reasons why I Believe in God. We are working on the Tree List of God.
1) Beauty: Nature's beauty speaks to our hearts. God is beautiful.
2) Ought: Our sense of morality points to God. God is just.
3) Existence: Mind created matter or matter created mind. God is almighty.
4) Design: Eyes, brains, and mouse traps point to God. God is intelligent.
5) Creativity: Art, Music, Games, Invention point to our inherited creative nature. God is creator.
6) Sacrifice: Self-sacrifice mimics God. God was willing to sacrifice himself.
7) Odds: - What are the odds of everything being right for our existence? God is kind.
8) Babies: Just look at a baby. God is our Father.
9) Purpose: We all feel a sense of purpose. God has a will for us.
10) Worship: We all have a need for worship; a God shaped hole. God is worthy.
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The premise of this sermon and Reason #1 for my belief in God is the very concept of beauty; the way our hearts connect to beauty. Visualize yourself standing in a beautiful place, and watching the sunset and staying there till the stars come out and seeing all kinds of beauty. To me this unequivocally speaks of being made in the image of a beautiful God!
Genesis 1:26-27 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.(Let's say beautiful) And there was evening, and there was morning-- the sixth day.
We have been given an image which sees and responds and knows beauty! Because our God image is beauty!
Psalm 27:4
One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what
I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to
gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his
temple.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.
The God, who is beauty, created beauty and placed a resonance for beauty in our hearts.
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I want to be careful here. It is easy to crank out reasons why we believe in God. I want my Ten Reasons to be real and persuasive and powerful. The last thing I want to do is give cynics a reason to mock my belief in God. I want to make sure my ten reasons are solid. I don't want to be silly. Here is an example of silly and what I don't want to be.
http://hubpages.com/hub/the-atheists-nightmare- How a Banana Proves God; The Atheist Nightmare
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In order to be taken seriously I want to be fair. Are there other plausible explanations for our resonation with beauty? If I claim because of the beauty of nature I know there is a God, what might someone in Starbucks, say in response? "Okay, guy at Starbucks who doesn't believe in God, but who thinks his double shot caramel venti frappacino is beautiful, how do you explain beauty without a god? How might Joe Double Shot answer?
Here is how the Minnesota Atheists answer:
"Some religious people argue that without a god there would be no goodness and/or beauty in the world. However, goodness and beauty are defined in human terms. If the Earth’s environment had been so nasty that it was impossible for life to evolve, then we wouldn’t be here to ponder this question. So, obviously, at least some things about the Earth’s environment are life-affirming, and we are naturally drawn to these things – our survival depends upon it. As for the beauty of art: we are naturally drawn to life affirming images, shapes, and colors. However, there are many examples of art, such as the paintings of the Cubists and the Surrealists, that are loved by some people and hated by others."
Here is another answer from RationalWiki:
"The biggest problem with the argument from beauty is that it ignores the fact that the perception of beauty is a psychological phenomenon that is easily described in terms of evolutionary principles and neurological models of sensory processing. Also it ignores all the non-beautiful and even down right disgusting things in the universe. One example of the argument from beauty is to say that the autumn leaves are very beautiful, meaning that the trees on which they rest could not have been the product of "ugly" random chance. However, from the objective standpoint, the leaves' colors are simply variations in the wavelengths of light they reflect, and this does not infer a leaf designer any more that it infers the existence of Jack Frost; as evidence of this, a color-blind person would not be likely to infer the existence of God from the autumn leaves."
Let me summarize these thoughts and respond to Joe Double Shot.
1. Beauty is defined in human terms. Beauty does not actually exist in the observed object or scene. Instead the sense of beauty exists within the observer.
Sure beauty exists in the beholder. But that is my point. Where does this idea of beauty as a concept come from? This answer misses the point of the argument. Where does beauty within us, come from?
2. People disagree over what is beautiful. Beauty is culturally
defined.
Once again that is not the point. We may disagree over what is beautiful or not, but every person in the whole world, all 10 billion of us feel beauty; resonate with beauty.
3. We wouldn't exist if things were ugly. Therefore beauty is what is life-affirming and necessary for survival. The argument is beauty is an evolutionary development which helps us survive.
When it comes to food perhaps Joe Double Shot is right. I can see beauty in food helping survival. Except for: Holly which is poisonous. Beauty in a Venus fly trap. Beauty in a sunset helping to survive. What about a cliff?
4.The brain just glitched. Given that important brain circuits have evolved for detecting beauty in potential sexual partners, food or prey, they may be "misfiring" to detect beauty in other places. The evolution of the brain may create this impression as a byproduct of its main function.
Beauty is a glitch? It certainly doesn't feel like a glitch.
5. What about ugly.
Because there is ugly there can't be a
god.
Why do we respond with revulsion? For the very same reason we respond to beauty. Ugly makes the same point. Why do we feel things are ugly unless there is some exterior standard of beauty? Why would random evolutionary beings think anything was ugly? If there is no God then things are what they are. There would be no basis for ugly or beauty.
Joe Double Shot's answers are not convincing. We intuitively connect to beauty. The only explanation, which makes sense to me, is we are made in the image of a beautiful God.
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A couple of weeks ago we were up in Chama wilderness at Dave Yeamen's cabin. I was thinking about these sermons I was going to preach on the existence of God, so I asked the teens there why they believed in God. Tim Hoffbaur simply went… (Show hands) The people who are listening to this on MP3 I held my hands in an gesture that encompasses the world around us. Let's end this sermon by together quoting Tim (Hold out hands out to show the world)
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