Hey DoctorDJ - I don't think "beauty, therefore God" is her theme, but: what best explains beauty and our experience of it? (The author was an atheist, but didn't convert because of those peak experiences listening to music. She remained a materialist.)

Music certainly doesn't have to be God-directed or God-inspired to be godly, and believers certainly don't have a monopoly on making or appreciating beautiful music (just tune in to any insufferable "Christian rock" station). But the very "otherness" of an encounter with beauty demands an account. Creativity and culture avoid dragging God into it - although they do fail to account for natural beauty - but do they account for it? Do creativity and culture account for being absolutely transported by Terrence Malick, Faulkner, or Vivaldi? Perhaps biochemistry is better. "The cochlea transmits information along the auditory nerve as neural discharges into the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe." To my mind, this is a raw deal too - but more importantly, it doesn't finally explain the event at all.

I once asked an atheist about that sublime, indescribable feeling of longing, aching that one feels when moved by a piece of beautiful music. I was absolutely stunned when he said that he suspected the feeling was his "envy" at the composer! I had never heard anything like that before (nor felt envy when I am deeply moved by music). Would you agree with the other atheist that that incredible feeling is simply "envy" directed at the composer?

Tain't true. Human creations that we find beautiful (music, art, architecture, etc) are human-designed and made. Nothing more, nothing less.

As a singer I've especially enjoyed the sacred and secular works of John Rutter over the past couple of decades. Learning his Requiem a couple of years ago, I found his description on YouTube of the creation process; where he got his themes, what he was going for. Nothing god-inspired here; just a very good artist.

Beauty is also a product of our culture. No matter how hard I try, my Western ears cannot fathom Chinese opera.

"The sense that there's something beyond the material - or, if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is I think a very important matter. What you could call the numinous, or the transcendent, or at its best I suppose the ecstatic...I think religion has done a very good job in enshrining it in music and in architecture."

I think most atheists would describe this as a natural - or, like you once did, and Hitch did, "spiritual" - part of the human experience that Catholicism co-opted and corrupted. But I think you show that the affinity, even if we call it misguided, is anything but forced - that music itself pines for faith, just as faith pines for music. Beauty doesn't need a sermon grafted onto it. The more we enter into song itself, the more we admire it and let it saturate us, the more it transforms into a signpost of something above, not an accidental outgrowth of the world below.