Why is the Universe Beautiful?

The beauty of the universe is a fact much-referenced in the arguments for intelligent design. It’s a slippery fact — one of those that requires the speaker to do a small amount of getting-the-audience-onside before it can be taken as a premise on which to build the concurrent argument. Beauty, as we all know, is subjective — in the eye of the beholder. At least in theory. But somehow the same people keep ending up on magazine covers, more people visit the Grand Canyon than visit California’s Puente Hills landfill site, and more people flock to see the Taj Mahal instead of standing in awe outside of №27 next door. Beauty is subjective to an extent, but extremes of perspective away from the norm is rare. And so, to near-universal acclaim, we can confidently say that the universe is beautiful. In the right light. From the right angle.

And so it must have been designed for us, right? I mean, any idiot can bang a couple of planks together, but it takes a master craftsman to make a truly beautiful chair.

The problem with that is, of course, the question of which came first. The chair was indeed designed to please the human eye. Just ask the carpenter, she’ll tell you. The human eye was there, and the carpenter did her job with that eye in mind. She didn’t change the nature of the observer, she created something to be observed by preexisting eyes and found to be beautiful.

The thing about the universe is that it predates the eye. I am unaware of any creation story that refutes that. The human eye evolved in response to its environment — the universe — not the other way around.

So why would humankind develop a sense of beauty? Consider the two pillars of natural selection — reproduction and survival.

When selecting a mate, in other humans we see as beautiful face shapes which are as mathematically average as possible, body shapes which are likely to survive and breed well, communicative skills which portray intelligence and understanding, and environmental surroundings that suggest security and success.

The “average” German face — made up of samples of a wide variety of face shapes and skin colours.

To survive, an organism needs to know which things in the world to move towards, and which things to move away from. Things we should move towards are things we have grown to find beautiful — a perfectly photographed salad, a sunny day, the girl next door. Things we should move away from we have evolved to find ugly or unattractive — an unsanitized latrine, an infected wound, a dark and stormy night.

We also find other things beautiful as byproducts of these, such as patterns in nature (humans have found order to be a great evolutionary ally), which make the complex easy to understand and takes up a lot less mental effort than analysing a disordered space.

Finally, when thinking of the universe in terms of stars and galaxies, the beauty of the lights and patterns can be compounded by a feeling of awe at its sheer scale. We fear and admire that which is beyond our understanding, knowing that both exploration or immobility may be the key to our survival depending on the situation, but knowing that we should undertake either with a sense of respect.

And when we do see the beautiful in the universe, at any scale, we should remember that we find it beautiful because we evolved within it, and those times when we are granted a moment of peace to consider its beauty, then these are the times which are best suited to the food-chain-beating and ever so human habits of reflection, cooperation and understanding.

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