sign from an invisible beneficent god. When I look at the sun setting over the reddened sky, the magnificence of the spectacle shouts at me that there must be something out there, to create such beauty.
That I find wonder and beauty in the world is human and only human, for millions of years of human evolution has decided for me what I find beautiful. Does beauty actually exist in the universe? I recognise beauty because I sense colour, shape, texture and sound. It is my senses that create beauty. It does not exist objectively, outside human experience. Do dogs experience beauty? Only up to the point of base senses, such as hunger satiation and general well-being. The evolutionary associations, that have moulded my sense of beauty, have developed over the entire history of homo sapiens, and human beauty is unique to humans - but it is not objective beauty.
When I hear a Mozart piano concerto, I am moved by its exquisite artistry. Yet the music is essentially a series of harmonic pressure waves, emanating from the piano strings as the keys hit down. The strings have been designed to give off designed sound waves, which accompanied by others in certain proportions, give us a feeling of pleasure or well-being. This pleasure goes back in evolutionary time, to how we learn to hear sounds. The development of hearing was a survival evolutionary tactic, that granted an extra edge to organisms that had the accompanying ability to move or flee. The approach of a pressure wave, preceded the approach of a potential predator, and being able to interpret the pressure wave, was a major evolutionary advantage. In that first prehistoric moment of recognition of some unnamed organism, the Mozart concertos had their genesis. The first sound was heard. Perhaps the first sound in the entire universe, if Earth is the unique planet it's suspected to be. Up to then, there was no sound just an immense field of pressure waves that existed, if there was a medium to carry it. These waves came into being and were destroyed, as their energy spread out and was absorbed, into the general background complexity.
As evolution proceed along its tortuous path, the ability to hear sound became increasingly sophisticated. Sound was becoming more important in the young, evolving planet. At some unknown stage, the ability to create sound by a living organism arrived. This primitive sound was used to create fear, or to recognise one of kind. Sounds began to take multiple meanings. Down through the aeons of evolving life forms, the ability to hear and create sounds, developed chaotically, from the ferocious roar of a tyrannosaurus to the gentle song of a wren. But it was the evolution of consciousness, that led to sound becoming a much more potent force on earth. Homo sapiens used sound to develop sophisticated communication, and simple pressure waves from his mouth could now evoke strong emotions, associated with the primal longings of his existence.
The road to Mozart is charted from early, prehistoric times. Perhaps around the fire, after a day's hunting and having feasted on the bounty, the sound of hollowed chewed bones became a pleasant association of warmth, well-being and safety. The human love of percussion had been born. By beating hollow bones off each other the sound could be repeated over and over. The periodical nature of musical tones had been invented. From there to Mozart is a long and tortuous path, but one that can conceivably be charted in social evolutionary terms.
We, humans, invented our own beauty. We defined it for ourselves, and continue to do so. It is not a constant, no more than the mindset of humanity is a constant. It moves with the ages, but still retains the primeval core that was borne around some prehistoric camp fire.
So beauty is totally man-made. We like sunsets for perhaps the same reason. Our sense of liking for colour comes from similar associative evolution. We reflect, in our music and our art, our primitive environment seen through modern socially evolved senses. Modern art and music searches beyond the merely representational, looking deeper into the soul of humanity for the primitive origins of our sense of beauty.
So, is the beauty of existence evidence of a possible, at least pantheistic, god? Because beauty is a human concept, created from the bio-cultural evolution of the species, it cannot be ascribed to a god in that sense. We see beauty everywhere, because we are in a way programmed to see it by our evolutionary past. It is the bio-anthropic principle. We see beauty, because in our past we have decided among ourselves what we want to see as beautiful. There is no objective beauty in the universe. Therefore beauty, a human conception, cannot be a reason for god.
Yet, as I call to mind the sounds of Mozart's 'Elvira Madigan', I am moved in an almost religious way. The culmination of man's musical achievement, has led us totally away from its primal origins, towards a glimpse of heaven. Perhaps there is some teleological aspect to beauty that I have missed out on. Is beauty the end of mankind? Is god beauty? Is god the end of mankind? Are we progressively evolving our sense of beauty, towards the divine? Are we, through our existence, creating our own god?
But there is another side to god that I have not considered and it relates to the human experience, in particular, but not solely. A lion attacks a gazelle on the plains of Africa and kills it. It is acting according to instinct, and while we feel for the pain of the gazelle, we do not condemn the lion. If a man kills a gazelle we might accept it, if he were hungry, but we decry it, if he kills for pleasure. If he kills another human being, we cry foul, except in the extremes of war. We have an innate sense of justice built into us. This justice is premised on the concept of free will. If we are not acting under free will then justice doesn't apply to us. If we freely carry out an act then the strong arm of justice must apply. Those of us who live our lives within the narrow confines of just action are deemed virtuous. Because of our innate sense of justice, only the virtuous rest easy and can be happy. This is, in a sense, its own reward, but justice must be seen to be done, for even the virtuous to have a sense of justice. But in many cases justice is rarely carried through in this life, and that requires that it be done in a postulated afterlife. This gives rise to the need for a concept of god, who becomes a god of eternal justice. This is the god of Jews, Christians and Muslims, who is a god of punishment and reward. Has this god arisen in the same socio-evolutionary sense?
If we were all individuals living our lives in free will, without a sense of society or belonging, then justice would have little import. The criminal is always a loner, and outside of society. Even when criminals band together, they invent their own justice system. It is usually brutal, and barbaric, but nonetheless a justice system. Human beings are societal animals. It comes from the safety in numbers of the early hunter-gatherer social dynamic. Once a group of individuals come together, rules of conduct begin to emerge. To disobey these rules, brings the strong hand of justice down on the guilty.
But societies and groups live long beyond the lifetime of one individual, and develop histories. These histories sometimes display evidence of justice having missed its target, and not being done. If this were to pertain then the concept of justice would erode over time, and the group would decline in strength. The idea of justice carrying over after death was created. A whole mythology, of eternal life and a god who would dispense justice on those who had escaped their fate on earth, was created. The need for this god, became a fundamental of society.
This god of justice depends on the free will of his subjects. When the very religious Newton discovered his deterministic dynamical laws of motion, the concept of free will became challenged.
Newton's laws implied that, theoretically, if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, you could, admittedly with an infinite computing power requirement, calculate all future positions and velocities for all time. This left no scope for free will, and religion, based on a god of justice, was in deep trouble. Newton, himself, was very troubled about this, and decided that the laws did not apply to the realm of the soul - as a way out of the dilemma. Luckily modern scientific theory has removed the dilemma, by exposing the limitations of Newton's paradigm. Quantum theory replaces strict determinism by a weird world where every outcome is possible, but only to a weighted probabilistic exten
t. All outcomes progress through space-time in a totally deterministic sense but when we look or observe for a particular outcome, what we find is totally unpredictable outside a probability range. In the modern way of looking at free will, you have free will in your solipsistic world, but that world is one of a multiverse of worlds where all outcomes take place separately. Is this any solace to the god of justice? I think not, as free will is replaced by a sort of chance structure which, while making the future indeterminate, does not give you the freedom to do as you please.
Is all the world a stage? Are the lines already written down, and the props in place? The quantum drama is not one stage, but an infinity of stages, where our role changes from one to the other. In one, we may be the victim, while in the next, we may be the transgressor. So many stages, roles, cues! There must be a universal producer. For some he is god. For modern physicists, he is Schr?dinger's equation of state wave evolution, and its intermittent reduction by observation, as the producer looks into a particular theatre, in an indeterministic probabilistic manner.