Beauty, Goodness, Truth, Science, and God

The search for both scientific and theological truth begins with beauty. In the Scriptural theological vision, humans are created to contemplate the cosmos that God has painted on the four-dimensional canvas of physical reality—being drawn through beauty into goodness and truth, and ultimately to God. In the scientific vision, beauty is similarly the doorway to truth which leads to a deeper reality. From physics to chemistry and from biology to cosmology, mathematical beauty has been a signpost pointing to truth.

The history of science is full of instances where perceptions of beauty and harmony have led to discoveries of empirical truths that have withstood the test of time. And for many pioneers of science, the same beauty that led them down the path of empirical truth has pointed them to journey even further—to ultimately arrive at the Mind of God.

Beauty and the Search for God

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, He saw that His creation was both very good and very beautiful—the Hebrew word tov in Genesis 1:31 simultaneously means both. God, as the beautiful One and the good One, is the source of the beauty, goodness, and truth in creation. According to the Hebrew Biblical understanding, humans are called to consider the beautiful works of the Creator and to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9).

Like the Hebrews, ancient Greek philosophers similarly envisioned the categories of beauty, goodness, truth, and God as inextricably intertwined. As Plato declares, “Beauty is the splendor of truth,” and “the Good” is “what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower.”¹ Furthermore, says Plato, “The Good is the One” who is the Divine Architect of creation. Beauty begins with the Beautiful One and because God is beautiful, He creates beautiful things.

Inheriting both Hebrew and Greek perspectives, early Christians likewise saw the beauty and goodness of the One Creator God as being reflected in the beauty and goodness of the world that He created. For them, the quest for beauty and goodness is the pursuit of truth, which, in turn, is the search for God. Basil of Caesarea affirms that “By nature, men desire the beautiful.” For, says Basil, “The world is a work of art, set before all for contemplation so that through it the wisdom of Him who created it should be known.” According to Basil, the natural world is the “book of creation that attests to God’s presence and to God’s character as a craftsman and an artist.”²

Consequently, says Basil, “Let us glorify the Master Craftsman for all that has been done wisely and skillfully; and from the beauty of the visible things let us form an idea of Him who is more than beautiful.”³ Similarly, for Athanasius, the beautiful and “harmonious functioning of all things tells about God’s activity in relation to the physical world.” The act of contemplating the created world, says Athanasius, will lead one to form “an idea of the Master who unites and binds the elements together, bringing them into harmony.”⁴

Beauty as the Path to Scientific Truth

The search for scientific truth likewise begins with beauty. For the scientist, “beauty is thought (and felt) to lie in explaining much with little, and in finding pattern, especially simple pattern, amid apparent complexity and disorder.”⁵ As the mathematician and theoretical physicist Henri Poincaré explains: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful: He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing.”⁶ 

According to historian of science James McAllister: “the history of science teems with instances in which indicators of beauty appear to have prevailed over empirical criteria in directing theory-formulation.”⁷ For instance, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler strongly believed that he had discovered scientific truth in his elliptical model of the Copernican Solar System because his theory’s “elegant beauty served as the best proof.”⁸ Such mathematical beauty was so central to Kepler that, says historian of science Thomas Kuhn, his “entire astronomical program is based in a metaphysical faith in mathematically expressed harmonies in nature.”⁹ 

Isaac Newton was similarly guided by the muse of mathematical beauty as he unveiled the laws of creation—laws which he believed were ultimately expressions of the Mind of God. For as Newton declares: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being.”¹⁰ The pioneering physicist James Clerk Maxwell was also “guided by a sense of mathematical beauty” as he discovered the equations that unify the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and light.¹¹ Like Newton, Maxwell followed the lead of mathematical beauty and the unity of physical law to arrive at a deep affirmation that there was One Divine Lawgiver.

A century after Maxwell, Albert Einstein affirmed that for physicists “the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.”¹² Indeed, Einstein doubted the truth of any theory that was not beautiful enough, and he rejected numerous proposals that, in his view, would mar the harmony of the universe. For Einstein, the mathematical beauty of physical reality was a path to a deeper type of beauty. Ultimately, said Einstein, “I want to know how God created this world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are just details.”

Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist Paul Dirac followed the path of beauty to scientific truth as well. Dirac became convinced of the truth of Einstein’s general theory of relativity primarily because of its beauty, and he reflected that: “One has a great confidence in the theory arising from its great beauty, quite independent of its detailed successes…Its foundations must be correct quite independent of its agreement with observation.”¹³ Founding father of quantum physics, Max Planck likewise reflected that with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, “the intimate union between the beautiful, the true and the real has again been proved.”

Planck, Dirac, and the other founders of quantum physics were all seeking beauty in their own development of quantum theory. Considering Erwin Schrodinger’s wave equation describing quantum phenomena, Dirac said: “It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, one is on a sure line of progress.” This is because, explains Dirac, “Schrodinger got this equation by pure thought, looking for some beautiful generalization.” Dirac even goes so far as to say that if one wishes to discover truth in physics, “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”¹⁴ Werner Heisenberg similarly remarked: “I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of the mathematical schemes” of quantum theory.¹⁵ 

The idea that beauty is a guide to truth remains important among current scientists as well. According to historian of science Harold Osborne, “Most of the great innovators in contemporary physics and cosmology have been strongly attracted by intellectual beauty and have combined this with faith that beauty will point the path to comprehension.”¹⁶ In this way, says Osborne, “contemporary science is infused with a powerful element of aesthetic faith.… It is a faith that aesthetically good theory will be confirmed by fact and experience because the universe itself is aesthetically structured.”¹⁷  As contemporary physicist and Noble laureate Richard Feynman says, “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.”

Agreeing with Feynman, physicist Steven Weinberg reflects on how “Mathematical structures that confessedly are developed by mathematicians because they seek a sort of beauty are often found later to be extraordinarily valuable by physicists.” Weinberg explains that “time and again physicists have been guided by their sense of beauty not only in developing new theories but even in judging the validity of physical theories once they are developed.” It seems, says Weinberg, “that we are learning how to anticipate the beauty of nature at its most fundamental level. Nothing could be more encouraging that we are actually moving toward the discovery of nature’s final laws.”¹⁸ 

Within contemporary physics, the appeal to beauty is particularly prevalent among advocates of string theory—a physical theory that is renowned for its mathematical elegance. Describing the early formulation of string theory, John Schwarz reflects, “We felt strongly that string theory was too beautiful a mathematical structure to be completely irrelevant to nature.”¹⁹  Nobel laureate and string theorist David Gross similarly remarks that “string theory could not be wrong because its beautiful mathematics could not be accidental.”²⁰ Mathematical and theoretical physicist Edward Witten likewise believes that string theory “must be true” because of “its wonder, its incredible consistency, remarkable elegance and beauty.”²¹

How Beauty in Scientific Truth Points Back to God

But why should physicists and other scientists assume that beauty will point to truth? Although “much tribute has been paid” to the nature of beauty in the sciences, comments philosopher of aesthetics Harold Osborne, a “systematic analysis has not been attempted but…it is taken for granted that anyone with a talent for scientific matters will recognize a beautiful theory when he sees it.”²² It is generally acknowledged that there is no purely empirical reason or justification for affirming beauty as a foundational criterion in science and, as Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner remarks, the reason for the effectiveness of mathematical beauty in physics “is something bordering on the mysterious with no rational explanation for it.”²³ 

While some researchers are comfortable seeing the role of beauty within science as a mystery, others have asserted an explicitly theological justification for why physicists focus on beauty. In this way, Heisenberg reflected that expressions of beauty such as the “miracle of symmetry,” harmony, and “the beauty of simplicity” reveal the “inner truth” of physical reality because they are reflections of “the original Archetype of creation.”²⁴

Dirac similarly affirms a Divine origin for such beauty. Contemplating the mathematical simplicity and profound logic of the laws of physical reality, Dirac expressed: “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.”²⁵ Contemporary string theorists have likewise grounded the equating of truth and beauty within the Divine. Thus theoretical physicist Michio Kaku reflects that in string theory “the mind of God is music resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace,” and Harvard string theorist Lubos Motl concludes that owing to its extreme beauty, “Superstring is the language in which God wrote the world.”²⁶ 

1.  Paul Endokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Oakwood Publications, 1990), 1.

2.  Jame Schaefer, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics (Georgetown University Press, 2009), 68.

3.  Saint Basil of Caesarea, On the Hexaemeron, 1.7, 112. 27; 1.1–3, 3–54. 28; 1.11, 19.

4.  Saint Athanasius, Contra gentes, ed. and trans. Robert W. Thomson (Clarendon Press, 1971), 35, 95–97.

5.  Herbert A. Simon, “Science seeks parsimony, not simplicity: searching for pattern in phenomena,” in Simplicity, Inference and Modelling: Keeping it Sophisticatedly Simple, ed. Arnold Zellner, Hugo A. Keuzenkamp and Michael McAleer (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33.

6.  Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (T. Nelson, 1914).

7.  James W. McAllister, “Truth and beauty in scientific reason,” Synthese 78 (1989) 25–51, 29-31.

8.  Lawrence Principe, The Scientific Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2011), 57.

9.  Roger Trigg, Rationality and Science: Can Science Explain Everything? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 224.

10.  Sir Isaac Newton, General Scholium of the Principia Mathematica.

11.  Robert Gilbert, Science and the Truthfulness of Beauty (Routledge, 2017), 65.

12.  Albert Einstein, quoted in Graham Farmelo, It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science (Granta Books, 2002), xii.

13.  James Mcallister, “Is Beauty a Sign of Truth in Scientific Theories?” American Scientist 86 (1998), 174.

14.  Paul Dirac, “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature,” Scientific American 208:5 (1963), 47.

15.   Werner Heisenberg, “Letter to Albert Einstein,” in Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry (Basic Books, 2008), 278.

16.  Harold Osborne, “Mathematical Beauty and Physical Science,” British Journal of Aesthetics 24 (1984), 291–300, 291; “Historically, this faith was actually vindicated to a great extent in the works of these scientists. Theories which they created on what were considered primarily aesthetic grounds were later confirmed experimentally.” Gideon Engler, “Aesthetics in Science and in Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (1990), 24.

17.  Osborne, “Mathematical Beauty and Physical Science,” 293. Beauty is also important for non-physicists. James D. Watson reports that, when Rosalind Franklin learned of his and Francis Crick’s model of the structure of DNA, she “accepted the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true.” J.D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, ed. G.S. Stent (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 210; Evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll says “beauty, in science, is much more than skin-deep.” Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 13.

18.  Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (Pantheon Books, 1992), 90, 153.

19.  John Schwarz, “Superstring-A Brief History,” in History of Original Ideas and Basic Discoveries in Particle Physics, ed. H. Newman and T. Ypsilantis (Plenum Press, 1996), 698.

20.  Leonard Susskind, “Quark Confinement,” The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle physics in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Lillian Hoddeson, L. Brown, M. Riordan, and M. Dresden (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 235.

21.  John Horgan, “Physics Titan Edward Witten Still Thinks String Theory Is ‘On the Right Track,’ ” Scientific American (September 29, 2014).

22.  Osborne, “Mathematical Beauty and Physical Science,” 292.

23.  Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Science,” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13:1 (February 1960): 1–14.

24.  Gideon Engler, “Aesthetics in Science and in Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (1990):25.

25.  John Polkinghorne, The Particle Play (W.H. Freeman, 1979), 2 and 126.

26.  Michio Kaku, “Interview on the Leonard Lopate Show,” WNYC (January 2, 2004); Lubos Motl quoted by Bert Schroer, “String theory, the crisis in particle physics and the ascent of metaphoric arguments,” International Journal of Modern Physics D, 17, 2373 (14 Mar 2006) http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0603112, 21.