A fascinating discussion by John Horgan at Scientific American:
If there really is no God, if the world was not in some sense designed for us, why is it so heartbreakingly lovely?
Dawkins never adequately explained why nature evokes such a profound aesthetic response in us. His fellow biologist Edward O. Wilson gave it a shot. Wilson suggested that natural selection might have instilled in us a “biophilia,” or reverence for nature, that benefits both us and those creatures with which we enjoy mutually beneficial relationships. But why do we respond to so many things—butterflies, starfish, rainbows, sunsets—from which we extract no tangible, utilitarian benefit?
Another famous atheist, the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, eloquently explained his lack of belief in Dreams of a Final Theory (Vintage, 1994). Weinberg had no complaints about his own life. He had been “remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile.” But he had seen “a mother die painfully of cancer, a father’s personality destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust.”
Weinberg rejected the proposition that evil is the price we pay for our God-given free will. “It seems a bit unfair for my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for the Germans,” he noted, “but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?” Good questions. But then Weinberg added this line, which, like Dawkins’s recollection of how he disillusioned his daughter, made me smile: “I have to admit that sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.”
