True art seeks to tap into transcendental awareness for both the artist and the admirer. Impressionism was the last Western art movement to hold that beauty, objectively existing beauty, was the goal of art. Subsequently the idea that what constituted beauty was equivocal gained ascendance. Now, the musical octave on which mainstream Western music is based creates sounds that are pleasing to the Western ear. The musical scales of Indian classical music are based on different musical spaces and such music is pleasing, or at least more immediately pleasing, to the Indian ear. The Indian ear will more readily understand this form of music. It is true, therefore, that the appreciation of beauty has a culturally relative element but it is not so that beauty is simply ‘anything at all one chooses to like.’ Cultures develop over millennia but over the last century in the West the very concept of beauty as a valid goal in art has been all but overthrown. In music, at least in the modern musical inheritors of the classical music idiom, atonal scales are much more widely employed than the traditional octave. But does this music sound nice? Perhaps this depends on ones definitions.
The inspiration for the Beatles ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ came, in part, from a Stockhausen tape loop event. Most who are aware of these two musical events would hold that a very real difference between the two is that the Beatles piece, while innovative and challenging, actually sounds nice. But does not the Stockhausen piece sound just as nice to one who has an appropriate grounding in this type of music? There is no simple answer to this question. The Stockhausen is intended to be interesting and challenging first and foremost. If the listener perceives beauty, per se, it is as a consequence of this interest being generated and maintained. Tomorrow Never Knows is musical in the mainstream meaning of the term firstly and is challenging and innovative in terms of musical structure at a secondary level. Its primary parameter is beauty. While much modern high art, musical and pictorial, is valid within its own terms of reference it can frequently descend to cheap shock tactics which centre on ugliness rather than beauty. The challenge is all. But is this progress? And where does it lead?
Plato argued that one recognises, for example, a table, a real physical table, because it resembles the ‘form’ of the ideal table which exists in a realm where pure ideas exist. There exists the form of the ideal chair, the ideal tree, the ideal man… a form for everything. And there is a hierarchy of forms. The forms of Truth Itself, Beauty Itself and Justice Itself are amongst the most important. The form of the Good is the highest and most fundamental form and the Christian concept of God, when addressed from a philosophical viewpoint, borrows strongly from Plato’s concept.
The question arises as to where these forms actually exist; where is this realm of pure ideas? Aristotle proposed an analogous concept to the Forms - the Universal. When one is born into the world one encounters, for example, real physical tables. We experience real tables, of all shapes and sizes, first and as we mature we develop a concept, in our minds, of what a table is as a general principle. This is the universal of the table and the particular is ontologically prior to the universal, the opposite to Plato’s model. We develop a generalised mental concept of what tables, chairs, trees, dogs etc are from encounters with the varied examples of particular instances of these things.
Aristotle argued that there are many goods, many types of good. A good joke, a good wine, a good goal - in a soccer game, in life, or a destination. We will develop a Universal of Goodness, a generalised concept, which we derive from experience of the various ‘goods’ we encounter in life. Aristotle held that Eudemonia, or happiness, was the greatest Good as we desire this for its own sake whereas anything else we desire because happiness is a by-product. Eudemonia refers to the fulfilment of a life well lived rather than any euphoria or temporary good humour.
If Plato’s ‘Good’ is God perhaps Eudemonia is the result of a life spent genuinely in the service of God. This would be so even if ‘God’ is an entirely internal Universal. Some say we make ‘God’ in our own image but goodness is not a function of the whim of the individual, at least of the honest individual.
Some years ago I saw a documentary on a Catholic priest working in India. His mission was to build wells for villages with no clean water supply. It would be normally inappropriate, he said, to seek to convert people of an Eastern religious persuasion to a Western religion except in unusual circumstances. The concepts of God and salvation are too different in these two main forms of religions.
When an atheistic Westerner says that he does not believe in God he will, if he is honest, be aware of a concept of the God that he denies exists. At the very least this concept exists in his own mind. He may, perhaps, speak in ridicule or caricature of this, possibly non-existing, God but he will have in his mind the actual God-concept that believers hold to objectively exist.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an atheist, I believe, but held that religion had a validity as a form of human endeavour akin to high art. The ‘God-question’ is not “does God exist?” but “what does the word ‘God’, the concept, mean to the believer?” and “how does this effect his behaviour?” What rituals does the believer engage in? What is the depth meaning of these rituals? If behaviour is body language what is the depth grammar of religious behaviour? What morals derive from this nexus of beliefs and behaviour? What are the beliefs concerning the afterlife? What social controls arise in a society with a particular religious composition? And all this, and more, regardless of whether or not God actually exists.
Once the validity of there questions is recognised it follows that, in a very real sense, any society has, must have, a religious dimension. A large proportion of people have experiences which they describe as religious or spiritual so the question really is how these are fostered, cherished or otherwise. If God really exists only as a Universal to say that He does not really exist is to miss the point. It does not follow that God is a private idiosyncratic invention of the individual. Of course the God-idea is vague and will vary from individual to individual. We sense rather than define God.
God is, at the very least, a tool, a psychological tool, which humans use to negotiate their path through this life. An innate tool. We learn of God’s nature in the same manner as we learn about other cultural artefacts, concrete or abstract. And we, validly, relate to God even if death is the end and so on. Atheism is often a sterile argument for a metaphysical proposition that cannot either be proved or disproved. What is really in question is that a description of the majesty of human existence is absurd without reference to God or religion. Ultimately atheism entails psychological impoverishment and a narrow world view even if an atheistic world view might possibly contain a higher number of, narrowly defined, facts compared with a believer’s impression of the world. Many human concepts such as beauty and justice are also vaguely defined. That God exists is certain. But the manner of His existence tends towards the unknowable.

Brendan Burke MA(Phil)
Cork Unitarian Church 4th October 2009.