"And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground - trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." (Genesis 2:9)
With the start of a new year I've decided to do a read through the Bible in a year plan. I have always paused at this verse to reflect on the fact that God intentionally created things that were both useful and beautiful. There is really no need for beauty or aesthetics in a purely naturalistic world. The survival of the fittest does not require an aesthetic appreciation of the creation. God created us in his image, we reflect his love of all things good and beautiful. This aesthetic sense is as much an argument for the existence of God as any of the other rational arguments. Our appreciation of a beautiful landscape, the wonder of a dragonfly, Glen Gould playing the Goldbergs, Mozart's Requiem Mass, the poetry of a Dylan Thomas or a T.S. Eliot, all these things reveal that the world is about much more than mere survival of the genetic material of life.
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