Thanks, Matthew. Reading over my comment after I posted it, I was afraid my meaning wasn't clear, but you understood it perfectly.

Your article concerns beauty as found in the artistic expressions of humans, but it applies just as much- or perhaps even moreso- to the beauty of the natural world, the appreciation of which gains so much more depth if apprehended as expression rather than happenstance. What I have seen no Christian apologist take note of is the fairly recent, apparent attempt of new atheists to co-opt the beauty of the natural world as an asset to their cause.

Now of course, everything else I've said notwithstanding, the atheist has every right to appreciate the beauty of the natural world as a theist, but it seems intuitively obvious to me that if this beauty were to compel a person's beliefs in one direction or the other, it would be *towards* a belief in a benign Creator rather than away from it. Atheists seem to have decided differently, and you'll see it in IFLS-type facebook graphics which use Hubble images (which are for atheist "inspirational graphics" what crepuscular rays are for Christian inspiration graphics) and 3-D projections of the expansion of the Universe to advance the notion that Science >>>>> God (Of course, I don't need to unpack all the unexamined assumptions here.) I'm mystified as to why anyone would think it should make me believe in God *less*.

If I was in the neighborhood, and not trying to make weight for a competition, I would be up (or is it down?) for a beer. You may have persuaded me better with your piece if you had made, "The Argument from Guinness."
Good day.

Maybe the ocean.

Hey Max - Thanks for the great comment. And man, that Johnny cash picked and occasionally wrote music that was touching and beautiful!

But now, about that word, "beautiful..."

I think your and others' comments reveal very particular antecedent assumptions about the beautiful and how it might relate to God. In other comments I saw these phrases used in reference to beauty:

"attribute...to a 'creator'"

"associate these with a deity"

"slapping on a label of God"

In your comment you use similar language:

Do I really need to invoke gods to justify___...Do gods help us when contemplating ___...Do we need gods to understand ___...Must we resort to gods to explain ____?

What does this language imply? That beauty is a self-contained, natural experience to which an external, abstract concept - namely God - is affixed in order to render the experience justified, explained, understood, grounded, whatever.

That doesn't align with the understanding of beauty I'm proposing - and maybe the key is to consider it first as a theoretical framework.

What I see is that, paradoxically, the experience of beauty is more redolent of transcendence the more we let ourselves be overwhelmed witnesses to the "thing itself". Jean-Luc Marion's "Being Given" is a good tome to get lost in on this; but in short, the "saturated phenomenon" of beauty calls us out into the deep before we can frame it. It's not as if the God needs to be "attached" to or "associated with" the purity of beauty after the fact like some clunky artificial limb. In fact, it's not a move we can make at all. It's that beauty, in that moment of revealing itself, participates in something transcendent - which again, even Hitch had trouble denying - and that this something we can very naturally (though very hesitatingly) begin to think of as God.

(By the way, I think the distance between this view of beauty/God and the view of beauty/God atheists are quick to dismiss has lot this has to do with a certain understanding of God as uber-transcendent deity wrought by the Reformation and Enlightenment, replacing a sacramental understanding of the cosmos which Catholics never stopped holding to, and which is starting to look more comely in light of new discoveries in physics and so on. The disconnect on aesthetics is also there in discussions about morality, where atheists consistently attack a "divine command theory" or morality which Catholics generally don't ascribe to.)

Now that's the framework - the question is, should you buy it? It may sound coarse and even snobbish for Kreeft to say in his synopsis of the argument from beauty "you either see this one or you don't," but I think unfortunately that's sort of the shaky territory we're on here. I can't out-argue you on this, and I also don't pretend to "see" beautiful things more "accurately" than you do. Everyone experiences different things differently - and of course, you can reduce anything in the abstract if you're a committed reductionist. The question is, how honest a move is that under the gaze of beauty? I can only report what I've experienced in its throes - that it not only gets harder and harder to reduce the experience to material constituents, but it gets harder and harder to deny that God is involved. I share that not as an apologist but as a fellow human being!

Now after getting through that long and winding monologue I think we deserve a beer. Is it 5 o'clock where you are?

I think we all agree
that to know God through personal experience is not to know God by personally experiencing
him. The latter is only possible in the Beatific Vision, which no one but
Jesus, experienced in this life. Also, I believe very few of us have visions. The
observation by Pascal in Pensées
789, quoted in “Fides et Ratio”, clearly expresses our typical situation, “Just as
Jesus Christ went unrecognized among men, so does his truth appear without
external difference among common modes of thought. So too does the Eucharist
remain among common bread.” Yet, Pascal had to have grace to assent to this.

This is one of the biggest loads of bs ever uttered on this site. And that's no small feat.

I'm speaking from personal experience. Repeated personal experience. When my posts were completely "within bounds".

I have requested, and I've seen other people request, reasons for our deleted posts. Brandon has never seen fit to respond. The same is true for people being banned from the site.

I received your response because Disqus notified me of it. I'm made a decision not to bother with SN anymore. Brandon has clearly received his marching orders from Fr. Barron and is responding as a good "company man". Others can make their own decisions about SN--but I'm tired of wasting my time.

Cminca - The moderators at SN only aim to delete posts that cross the line in terms of charity and fairness, not posts that they disagree with. I know there's been some confusion about that in the past - and we probably haven't been perfect in executing that principle - but that's the whole goal here: to make SN a uniquely friendly place for dialogue about the big questions on the internet. Max's comment was perfectly within bounds.

I love this scene. In the States we have a radio station "K-Love" that by and large plays corny, predictable songs about how awesome, mighty, and great God is. Of course, none of the songs sound very awesome, mighty, or great - and if that's a preview of heaven, it leaves a lot to be desired! The truth of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection is that God enters into the darkest corners of our disorder and despair to be with us and ultimately to pull us out. Late Johnny Cash wouldn't work on K-Love. His covers of Soundgarden, Beck, Dylan, Cohen, even Nine Inch Nails were "something real," the kind of songs that "truly save people."

The claim by Williiam Lane Craig, "you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments, by personally experiencing him" is false.

By that line of reasoning, Saul's falling from his horse on the road to Damascus and subsequent blindness must've been an epileptic fit - and his entire conversion built on sensory disturbances - because he couldn't have come to know God by a personal experience!

I know that was not your point - and I think your overall point is correct - but I think we risk overemphasizing God's transcendence to the detriment of his imminence (and vice versa). The key to resolving an oscillation between the two is a sacramental view of nature, the recognition that in and through created things we can come to know the Creator (which you say in your comment). As Steve points out, "pure nature" doesn't exist; grace and nature interpenetrate.

But if your point was that God is not reducible to the natural order, and that we can't fully know or see God in this lifetime, of course I agree.