Interesting essay at NYT about man's innate tendency to look for invisible verities. The writer says it's common to religious types and scientific types. His concluding paragraphs:
Religious belief that the universe is the handiwork of an all-powerful being is not subject to refutation. This sort of reliance on faith may itself have an evolutionary basis. There has been talk of a "god gene": the idea of an early advantage in the struggle for survival for those endowed with a belief in a hidden patrimony that gives order, purpose and meaning to the universe we experience.
Does the same evolutionary predilection lead physicists and mathematicians to see beauty in the unobserved, or unobservable? Does the longstanding human love affair with extra dimensions reflect something fundamental about the way we think, rather than about the world in which we live?
The mathematician Hermann Weyl was quoted as having said not long before he died, "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
Mathematicians, artists and writers may choose beauty over truth. Scientists can only hope that we do not have to make the choice.
There's a lot in these four paragraphs, though I'm not sure the writer knows it. A god gene? Perhaps, but that doesn't discredit the idea of God. Indeed, if there is a god gene, that's a good indication there's a god, just as the existence of my appetite is a good indication there's food.
Also: The idea that the true and the beautiful can conflict is puzzling. The three transcendentals--Truth, Goodness, and Beauty--are always in harmony. The individual might be skewed intellectually or morally, with the result that there appears to him that there's a conflict among them, but there isn't. This is easily seen by making "Goodness" the link between Truth and Beauty. If something is false or ugly, it can't be good (on the level of the falsity or ugliness; a physically ugly person can be spiritually good, after all, but not physically good looking). If something isn't good, it can't be true or beautiful.
The best I can do here is to quote Edward Oakes on the thought of the greatest theologian of the 20th century, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who did much to restore beauty's rightful place in Christian thought:
For we really cannot respond to the goodness of life, of creation, and of God's action in Christ unless we are also willing to respond with joy--something that is an essential aspect of the response to beauty. Similary, we really cannot judge the truth . . . unless we can perceive it, and . . . only the perception of the beautiful is so direct as to banish all doubt. Beauty, then, is an essential part of both the Good and the True, and to the extent that she is treated as the neglected step-sister of the other two, the damage will redound to her two elder sisters as well.
Pattern of Redemption (Continuum, 1994), p. 145.
