Bill Dembski posts this photo of a "fire rainbow" and wonders how a materialist can account for the human appreciation for beauty. How does random mutation and natural selection explain our sense of wonder and awe at such phenomena?
Dembski writes:
This is a fire rainbow - one of the rarest naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena. The picture was captured this week on the Idaho/Washington border. The event lasted about one hour. Clouds have to be cirrus, at least four miles in the air, with just the right amount of ice crystals; and the sun has to hit the clouds at 58 degrees. It's the gratuitousness of such beauty that leads me to rebel against materialism.
The world is filled with beauty. Why, on Darwinian terms, we should appreciate it as something special, why it should move us, is difficult to imagine. The poet Keats observed that beauty is truth and indeed there is a truth to be discerned in the beauty of a fire rainbow. That truth is that our ability to appreciate beauty such as this is no accident of vibrating atoms and blind forces, but rather the product of a purposeful, intelligent artistic mind which has created us to enjoy the aesthetic richness of the natural world.
