Dante Aligheri, the author of The Divine Comedy, wrote that "Nature is the art of God."
It's certainly true that there's an astonishing degree of beauty in the natural world. In fact, there's so much in nature that's gorgeous, from microscopic diatoms to the exapnse of the Milky Way, that one wonders how it is, if we're simply the product of an evolutionary process that fits us for survival, we would have evolved such a keenly sensitive aesthetic sense.
If we're the products of a purely material evolutionary process why do we appreciate beauty? After all, an appreciation of beauty is hardly necessary for an animal to survive and produce offspring, so where does it come from? How did it evolve through some unintentional, mindless process?
No one seems to know.
Indeed, the fact that we do have an appreciation of beauty, beauty that often takes our breath away, points us, perhaps, to Dante's artist.
Here's a short video whose theme is the quote from Dante and which illustrates the beauty of the earth as seen from space. The photography is spectacular, and as you watch, and as you marvel at the stunningly glorious scenes, you might reflect on how your sense of beauty could've ever come about solely through unguided collisions of atoms.
Even the most thoroughly secular folks among us should at least contemplate the possibility that there's so much beauty on earth because the earth was painted, so to speak, by an incredibly talented artist, and we were designed to be able to appreciate the artist's work.
