Here's the deal... Notwithstanding the heartfelt claims of many a wrongheaded scientist or misguided animal lover, there are many creatures which, just... Well, they're not pretty. For example:
the naked mole rat,
the aye-aye,
and the elephant seal bull.
This just can't be what things are supposed to look like. Bottom line, beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. That is to say, while it is true that we receive our standards of beauty from cultural and environmental conditioning, these standards themselves are not arbitrary. Here's why:
All things that exist receive their existence from something else. We received existence from our parents, they from their parents, and so on. Keep going and it all gets traced back to the Big Bang (if you believe in the Big Bang, which I do). But the Big Bang had to be caused by something. Basically, you can't keep going on forever. Eventually there has to be a First Cause that is itself un-caused by anything else, an Unmoved Mover, from which every other thing that exists received (and is currently receiving) its existence. This we call God, (cf. Acts 17:28).
Okay. So everything that exists comes ultimately from God. What about evil? If evil exists, then it must come from God too. Thankfully, it doesn't. Evil is the lack of good. You see, "the Good" is what is desirable. But God is the ultimate cause of everything that is desirable. As a result, he must be the ultimate definition of all those desirable qualities. In other words, God is not only the best thing, he is Goodness itself, in all its forms. "None is good but God alone," (Luke 18:19). All other beings are only good insofar as they participate and share in his supreme goodness.
One of the forms of goodness is beauty, for we all desire beauty. There is, then, an ultimate standard of beauty, Beauty himself, against which all other beautiful things must be judged. Ugliness is the lack of beauty, and boy is there plenty of that to go around. How, then, do you end up with animals like those above that were supposedly created by the supremely good and beautiful God? You don't. God didn't create them.
Look forward to the rest of this series in which we shall journey through the most disgustingly horrifying animals Nature has to offer and discuss a possible explanation for how they could have gotten here.
UPDATE: Part Two to be found here.
One of the forms of goodness is beauty, for we all desire beauty. There is, then, an ultimate standard of beauty, Beauty himself, against which all other beautiful things must be judged. Ugliness is the lack of beauty, and boy is there plenty of that to go around. How, then, do you end up with animals like those above that were supposedly created by the supremely good and beautiful God? You don't. God didn't create them.
Look forward to the rest of this series in which we shall journey through the most disgustingly horrifying animals Nature has to offer and discuss a possible explanation for how they could have gotten here.
UPDATE: Part Two to be found here.
Those animals aren't beautiful? Are you sure you're thinking as God thinks?
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the hagfish.
You're right that everything is somewhat beautiful. It is only through participation in God that anything has existence at all, so sheer existence means some beauty--even for Satan.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I would argue these creatures (and those we'll be looking at in the upcoming sequels to this post) aren't exactly what God intended for the world.