Tag: aesthetic value

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A Theology of Sports—Part 2

By Jim Spiegel

In the first installment of this series, I discussed how sports provide clear examples of excellence.  In this post I want to highlight another significant way in which sports are valuable.

2. Sports have aesthetic value. Why is it that we are so drawn to sports as spectators?  Why are we willing to spend hours of our valuable time going to games and watching them on TV?  And why are we so enthralled by game highlights, even of plays that we’ve seen hundreds of times, from Franco Harris’s so-called “immaculate reception” in the 1972 NFL playoffs to Bill Buckner’s booted groundball in the 1986 World Series?  Why are Peyton Manning, Michael Jordan, Maria Sharapova, and Tiger Woods household names, even celebrities?  I can sum up the answer in one word: beauty.  No, I’m not referring here to the physical appearance of these people.  The point is that their athletic performances are aesthetically pleasing.  We all are naturally drawn to things that are beautiful, and the best athletes satisfy this longing by the precision, efficiency, and even elegance of their performances.

In one sense, this is another facet of excellence within sports which, given Paul’s mandate in Philippians 4, warrants our attention as spectators.  But beauty is a particularly important biblical category and thus deserves special attention.  This is evident in the Genesis creation account, where God’s first recorded value judgment is an aesthetic judgment.  When he declares of his creation “it is good”—repeated no less than seven times in the first chapter—he is calling the world beautiful.  Divine concern for aesthetics is also clear from the construction of the tabernacle, as he makes painstaking artistic requirements for the workers and specially endows Bezalel and Oholiab with artistic talents to bring the plans to fruition.  Thirdly, the form of Scripture itself is a testament to God’s concern for beauty and aesthetics.  The Bible is an artistic masterpiece, a showcase of literary genres, including poetry, parables, song lyrics, and even drama (cf. Ezekiel 4:1-3) and featuring a wide array of literary conventions, including irony, metaphor, simile, and hyperbole.  I should add that even the phrase “the glory of God” is aesthetic language, as this refers to divine beauty in its most expansive sense.  It appears that the whole point of human existence—to glorify God—is itself an aesthetic concern.

So what does this have to do with a Christian view of sports?  Simply this:  If beauty is a fundamental biblical concern, then the fact that sports provide vivid instances of beauty should draw our interest as Christians.  This, of course, is a strong argument for Christian involvement in the arts (though, given divine creativity, this should need no argument).  To lack involvement in the arts is to live a truncated life (and, I would claim, also to be morally stunted).  To recognize the significance of aesthetic values is also to see the significance of sports for this reason.  I suppose there will always be those who fail to see the beauty in an alley-oop, a triple-axle, or a perfectly executed suicide-squeeze play.  But then again, there are also those who are unmoved by Pachabel’s Canon in D, Shakespeare’s Henry V, and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.  In each instance the failure to perceive beauty reveals a flaw in the observer, not what is observed.  What such a person needs is to be educated about the subject, whether it is film, a fugue, baseball or badminton.

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An Anti-Naturalist Argument from Beauty

By Jim Spiegel

The history of philosophy has seen many “theistic proofs” or arguments for the existence of God, dating at least as far back as Plato in the 4th century B.C.  Some of the standard arguments reason to God’s existence from apparent design in nature (the teleological argument), human consciousness (the argument from mind), the causal dependence of the cosmos (the cosmological argument), the existence of moral values (the moral argument), and the very concept of God (the ontological argument).

There is another line of reasoning which I believe holds much promise as an argument for theism—the argument from beauty.  While aesthetic evidence for God may be presented in a variety of ways, I prefer to appeal to beauty as an argument against naturalism.  If successful, such an argument serves, ipso facto, to prove the truth of supernaturalism, which in turn provides strong evidence for theism.  Succinctly put, my argument is as follows.  According to naturalism, the entire physical world is fully describable in scientific terms (statements about the physical world).  However, beauty and other aesthetic features cannot be captured in purely scientific terms.  Therefore, it is not the case that the whole of reality can be described scientifically.  So naturalism is false.

Here is a modified version of the argument which makes explicit a crucial assumption about the nature of beauty. 

1. Beauty is an objective quality in the world.

2. Beauty is an evaluative concept—specifically, an aesthetic value.

3. Therefore, there are objective aesthetic values.  [from 1 & 2]

4. If naturalism is true, then there are no objective aesthetic values.

5. Therefore, naturalism is false.  [from 3 & 4]

Propositions 3 and 5 each follow validly from prior premises (1 & 2 and 3 & 4, respectively).  Proposition 2 is a widely accepted observation about the meaning of the term “beauty”—that to describe something as beautiful is to recognize that it has significant aesthetic value.  And proposition 4 follows from the meaning of naturalism, which asserts that the physical world can be completely described in terms of physics (i.e. assertions about physical entities and relationships).  Clearly, beauty (and other aesthetic features, such as “ugly,” “elegant,” “insipid” and “poignant”) cannot be physically analyzed.  Thus, according to naturalism, aesthetic values cannot be a real or objective quality of things.

So, then, what about the crucial first proposition—that beauty is an objective quality of certain things?  What grounds do we have to believe this?  In my next post I will defend this claim, but for now it seems that I have at least shown that the naturalist must reject the first premise—and thus deny the reality of beauty.  That is, if my argument works, the naturalist must accept the implication that neither the world as a whole, nor anything in it, is beautiful (or ugly) in itself—from artworks such as the Mona Lisa to a Shakespearean sonnet to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos to aspects of nature such as a tiger, butterfly, sunset, or human face.  This is a significant—I would say unacceptable—price to pay for naturalism.  But, again, as I will show later, even this option is not open to the naturalist.