Taylor Swift and Proof of God: The Argument from Beauty

WE WILL CONCEDE THAT EXISTENCE IS NOT SELF-SUFFICIENT, AND THAT SOME X-FACTOR IS NEEDED TO ACCOUNT FOR IT. 

THIS DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE GRATUITOUS LEAP TO "GOD," BECAUSE WHICH GOD? THE WORD IS SO EQUIVOCAL AS TO MEAN ANYTHING TO ANYONE.

Your point is well taken, for if we wish to "prove God," the very use of the word God implies that we already have this or that concept in mind. 

Your "x-factor" is what we call it O: an empty category that may only later be filled with content, whether from experience, contemplation, logic, or "revelation" (the latter being a special category that we hope to show is not unreasonable once certain necessary attributes of O are discovered and accepted).

But you are correct: to prove the God we begin with will be tautology dressed up as proof -- a deduction in disguise, whereas we are beginning at the other end, with the everyday objects of everyman. In other words, no hidden assumptions, just existence as it is revealed to us in our experience.

You could say that this approach is identical to existentialism minus the atheistic presumption. Rather, we will approach existence with an open mind and follow it wherever it leads.

But even this naked existence contains buried assumptions, doesn't it? For example, it must assume that our particular universe includes living and intelligent beings capable of reflecting on its existence. 

Thus, before we even begin, we can't help noticing that this is a rare universe, assuming an infinite number of possible universes without mind or life. 

No one can know anything about those latter universes because there's no one to know them. Then again, these universes would still be contingent and therefore dependent on a higher cause that gives them existence.  

But let's confine ourselves to the universe in which we are confined. 

There's the first rub, because the word "confined" contains the hidden assumption of pure immanence, when our universe is aglow with the light of  transcendence. 

And no, we're not just being poetic, because everywhere we look there is beauty and truth -- the universe is intelligible to our intelligence, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it: meaning is everywhere.

Beauty, by the way, is no less an adequation to the object than is truth. For example, to say that Aretha Franklin is better than Taylor Swift is as objectively knowable as any law of physics.

The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.

The argument from beauty, as it were. We don't need Balthasar's seven volumes on theological aesthetics to know that

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. 

And that ultimately, 

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

This actually goes to Thomas' Fourth Way, the argument from Degrees of Being, that

Among beings, some are more and some are less good, true, noble, and so on. But more and less have a meaning only in so far as things approximate the quality under consideration to that which possesses the quality in the supreme degree (Mascall).

 SO, ARETHA IS PROOF OF GOD?

Works for me. But one needn't go that far. One could also say Mavis Staples, or Etta James, or James Brown.  

From where does the beauty emanate? What is its source? There must be a "being that possesses the quality in the supreme degree" which is "the cause of its occurrence in other beings in lesser degrees." Unless you say that Aretha is God. Or some other artist.

But we don't go that far, for even the Trane was one of the cars and not the engine. He wasn't the Love Supreme, only it's instrument. 

At any rate, "the concrete existence finite good necessarily implies the concrete existence of an absolute maximum good," otherwise we inhabit a chaotic or topsy-turvy universe in which my caboose is your engine, with no objective way to arbitrate between them. 

But a universe in which there is no objective difference between Miley Cyrus and Dusty Springfield is a kind of hell:

I don't know whether in another world the devil punishes an irreligious society. But I see that here it is soon punished by aesthetics.   

We can imagine the sound of hell, which would be like the Grammys, only forever. If you are sensitive to beauty. 

If you are sensitive to truth, then hell is a university humanities department. Nevertheless,

The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain. 

Or maybe I'm just too sensitive. 

Schuon, of course, wrote a great deal on art and beauty, for example,

The cosmic, and more particularly the earthly, function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent and sensitive creature the recollection of essences, and thus to open the way to the luminous night of the one and infinite Essence.

That's the train I want to board: the vertical one: 

It is not the sole obligation of art to come down towards the common people; it should also remain faithful to its intrinsic truth in order to allow men to rise towards that truth. 

Ultimately, 

The purpose of art is not a priori to induce aesthetic emotions, but to transmit, together with these, a more or less direct spiritual message, and thus suggestions emanating from, and leading back to, the liberating truth. 

All aboard!