One evening, after dinner at a conference in California, their stomachs filled with good food and better wine, a group of mathematicians and physicists went for a stroll on the beach. As they discussed some of the finer points of the papers they and their colleagues had delivered that day, one of them suddenly cried, “Look!” and pointed to the west.
Far beyond the whitecaps breaking on rock formations along the shore, the sun was sinking into the sea. The few clouds in the sky seemed lit from within, in various hues of red and orange and purple. Golden rays of light so strong that they seemed almost solid played across the waves as the ocean swallowed the fiery orb. And then, just as the last bit of the sun disappeared beyond the horizon, they all gasped as a sudden burst of emerald green, dazzling and brilliant, appeared briefly where the sun had been before fading away, leaving behind only their collective silence and a sense that they had witnessed something irreproducible, unrepeatable, filled with a deep meaning that they all were privileged to share.
They stood staring off where the sun had been as the horizon darkened to a deep indigo, headed toward black, and Venus and a few distant stars and the Moon itself emerged from the mantle of the sky, where they had been all along, of course, hidden by the brilliance of the sun.
‘No such thing as beauty’?
No one wanted to break the silence, but in the end, someone did. “Wasn’t that beautiful?” he whispered. A few heads nodded, and voices murmured assent, and then one of the mathematicians turned and began walking back whence they had come.
“Of course, there is no such thing as beauty,” he said, his voice rising as his pace quickened. “What we just saw can all be explained by atmospheric conditions, particles of light interacting with moisture in the clouds, the rotation of the earth’s axis, and – let’s be frank – our response to it can be explained by just a bit too much wine.”
Sad laughter rippled through the group as they all turned and followed their colleague in silence once again, their eyes fixed firmly on the ground, their vision freed from their collective flight of fancy.
But that night, after one last drink with his fellow scientists, one young physicist returned to his room, where he lay in bed thinking not of the rotation of the earth and the refraction of light, but of the many sunrises and sunsets he had seen. And as he drifted off to sleep, he could have sworn he heard a voice, low and stately, utter words he remembered from his youth: “Let there be light.”
The mathematician was right, of course: Everything that he and his colleagues had seen could be explained in terms of material causes and outlined on a blackboard in a handful of relatively simple equations. Yet there is no equation that can capture what they experienced. Some people spend a lifetime scanning the horizon at sunset, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive green flash, only to go to their graves without seeing it even once. But all of us have seen sunsets and sunrises, and we experience them not as the Earth rotating on its axis as it travels along its orbit around the Sun, but as echoes of the words of Genesis: “And evening came, and morning followed: the sixth day.”
Beauty points beyond this world
Both ways of looking at the world are true; one of them is meaningful. And it is meaningful because it points beyond this world, further up and further in, feeding the hunger in every human heart that yearns for something more than equations that purport to explain the seemingly random clash of atoms in a universe that will have no end because it had no beginning – a universe that dominates our minds even though it does not correspond to our experience.
In the modern world, the scientific worldview is (in the jargon of academics) “privileged,” which means that we have to struggle sometimes to see the world as most of humanity has seen it throughout most of history. But when we do break on through, when we experience the beauty of a sunset and that yearning in our soul, we may grasp for just a moment what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God.
Scott P. Richert is the publisher of OSV.