So far we have stressed the animal nature of
man, but have distinguished him from the beasts because of his heightened
consciousness (which, among other things, has given him the capacity to deny or
worship the power that may have designed him). Language is not unique to man,
since all creatures have various means of communication, and even the use of
tools is only an extension of nature, although our resultant technologies
clearly give us enormous advantages over all other species.
There are, however, some areas of our lives in which we appear to differ
strikingly from the beasts: we have an insatiable curiosity which has led to the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Animals may be inquisitive, but there is
no reason to suppose that they will investigate the world’s phenomena for any
reason other than their relevance to survival. We, however, need to know. It’s
true that the practical applications of science fit in with the whole
evolutionary process as it pushes on towards some kind of perfection, but we
will investigate all things, regardless of practical value. We are aware of
mysteries, and are uncomfortable until we have solved them. The atheist would
argue that religion is a misguided attempt to solve a mystery by manufacturing a
solution that entails another mystery, whereas the believer would argue that
atheism is a misguided attempt to solve a mystery by claiming that there is no
mystery.
Of all our human activities, art (by which I mean the arts in general) is the
one that seems to take us furthest away from the animals whose ancestry we
share. Music above all epitomizes the aesthetic sense which transcends
understanding. The animal kingdom produces its own sounds, of course, but so far
as we know, these are functional and form part of the communicatory processes.
They are indispensable to survival. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is indispensable to
no-one, and yet we rank it as a supreme human achievement. (If you don’t, then
substitute any piece of art that you regard as supreme.) Some of the greatest
minds in our culture pay homage to the work of the composers, the painters, the
sculptors, the writers, and our lives would be infinitely poorer without them.
And yet generally speaking, they are of no practical value. Literature comes
closest to practicality in so far as it may provide usable insights into the way
the human mind and human society function; painting and sculpture may challenge
our modes of perception, or draw our attention to facets of the world we might
otherwise be unaware of. But how many poems or novels, paintings or sculptures,
have actually changed the way the world functions? Not even the plays of
Shakespeare – even though they have spawned a vast industry and keep thousands
of people in employment – can be described as indispensable or even contributory
to the survival and continuation of our species. Music, though, is the art most
remote from the practical world, and its appeal presents an insurmountable
challenge to our understanding.
Why should a combination of sounds with no articulate meaning (let us, for
argument’s sake, consider only instrumental music here) have such a profound
effect on us? We can be plunged into darkest melancholy, or whipped up into a
celebratory frenzy, and yet there is nothing tangible to direct us. Why do I
want to weep at the end of Tschaikovsky’s 6th Symphony? Why do I want to cheer
at the end of Brahms’s 2nd? Why do I melt within at the adagio of Schubert's
C-major String Quintet? Why do I want to wave my arms, tap my feet, dance like a
dervish during the last movement of Beethoven’s 7th?
In everyday life we experience emotions such as love, fear, joy, etc. without
questioning what processes actually take place to make us “feel” them. We take
them – as we take most of our functions, both physical and mental – for granted
(until they go wrong). I blink, breathe, sit, stand, move, etc. without ever
thinking about how I do it. The body takes over as soon as the mind decides on
an action – or if it is an ongoing action like breathing, the body performs it
without my even instructing it to do so. Emotions are the same: my “feeling” of
love, fear, joy comes automatically according to the situation, and I do not ask
what is going on inside me. I merely relate the feeling to the situation. With
music, there is not even a situation to relate to. Only meaningless sounds. To a
degree, the same applies to art and sculpture – whatever the nature of their
appeal, they are normally unrelated to our own, real lives. Why, then, do they
“move” us?
The question inevitably takes us back to origins. In terms of the purely
physical universe, where do emotions and aesthetics spring from? Remember that
the atheist’s starting point is mindlessness – total inanimateness. Even if you
can accept the extraordinary coincidence of inanimate matter forming itself at
one and the same time into something live and able to reproduce itself, what
gave birth to the hitherto non-existent and – so far as we know – also
non-physical spheres of “feeling” and, especially, of artistic expression, which
in itself is of no practical value (the crucial force that drives evolution)?
There is an additional mystery here. Any writer who visits a primary school will
confirm that one of the most frequently asked questions is: “Where do you get
your ideas?” Small children are aware of the problem, even if they do not see
its implications. In the creation of artworks, there are strange mechanisms in
operation. Ideas generally spring from the so-called subconscious mind.
Suddenly, out of the blue, a writer will get an idea: some will then begin to
plan their tale, whereas others will simply allow the idea to develop of its own
accord. Even those who plan will tell you that more often than not the
characters force them to abandon the plan. They take on a life of their own. We
do not understand the mechanism ourselves, but it can be summed up by something
Michelangelo once said – namely, that the statue was already in the marble; he
only had to find it.
The artist knows what he is doing – he is conscious of sculpting, painting,
composing or writing – but in most instances he feels that the material is
guiding him rather than the other way round. Of course, if you take away the
brain, or even a certain part of the brain, the composer will stop composing,
but the same applies if you take away the heart or the lungs or the liver.
No-one is claiming that in this life we function without our physical casing.
The question here is why physical matter is able to produce concepts that have
nothing to do with physical matter, or with the survival of that physical
matter. The atheist may say that this, like all organs and organic processes, is
the result of chance mutations which create totally new though primitive
phenomena, and these become more sophisticated as time goes by. Chance created a
D, and then over thousands of years the D converted itself into Beethoven’s 9th.
But why should it have done so?
Scepticism over the creative powers of chance will not, however, answer the
primary school question: where do ideas come from? The honest answer is: we
don’t know. And we should not pretend that we do. But we can speculate. If there
is a designer, and if that designer is not a physical being like ourselves, it
is possible that the force that gives us life (I have called it the “spirit”) is
also possessed of the non-physical emotions and aesthetics we have been
discussing. This makes the artist a vehicle – the material is not coming from
him but through him, although he may have to work on it many times because he is
not a pure filter. In other words, those elements of our nature that are not
physical may have a non-physical source.
A religious artist will claim that his inspiration comes directly from God. God
is dictating to him, and it is only because his “hearing” is imperfect that he
is sometimes forced to work on the dictation – perfecting it until he is
satisfied that he has come as close as possible to the message transmitted from
on high. An atheist will claim that the “message” emanates from globules of
matter emitting electrical impulses that somehow by sheer chance have developed
a sense of aesthetics. An agnostic will admit that he is mystified. There is no
shame in this, and there is if anything a great deal more excitement, because an
unsolved mystery is always infinitely more fascinating than one that has been
solved.
Of particular interest is the possible parallel between the playwright/novelist
and the designer. One must acknowledge the fact that if there is a designer, we
do not know where its ideas come from either, but that is no proof that there is
no designer, any more than our ignorance of the playwright’s source is proof
that there is no playwright. The parallel, however, lies in the autonomy of the
characters. If we imagine the designer now as the writer, it comes up with its
brilliant idea of living creatures imbued with its own spirit, and then
eventually hits on the variation of characters with complete consciousness of
themselves. From then on, it watches – and maybe even records – what they do.
According to the Bible, it occasionally interferes, but eventually it probably
decides not to do so. The characters themselves must run the story, with
built-in natural disasters to maintain a degree of unpredictability and to
present renewed challenges.
This scenario at least has the advantage that it explains many of the problems
that face religious believers. There is free will, humans are subjected to
suffering that is partly of their own making but partly caused by nature as
created by the designer, prayers may or may not be answered because of the law
of averages (for example, if both sides pray to God before a battle, one of them
will have its prayers answered), some crises will be resolved and some will not,
and the co-existence of good and evil springs from the designer itself. Once you
accept the principle that a design in some way reflects the designer, many of
the trickier theological questions become remarkably simple.
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