#185: What Beauty Reveals About God, with Steve Peck

Introduction

From Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast: Faith Illuminating Scholarship.

I’m your host, Rosalynde Welch, and today I have for you the third in a series of interviews with the Maxwell Institute’s new faculty fellows, this time with Dr. Steven Peck, a professor of biology at BYU, a naturalist, and a novelist. But before I introduce our conversation, I wanted to let you know that the Maxwell Institute’s Wonder of Scripture lectures have started up again after our summer hiatus. Every Friday we host campus lectures by top scripture scholars from BYU and beyond, each one digging into a passage of scripture and surfacing new insights and inspiration. Look for more information on our website, mi.byu.edu, on how to attend in person or watch the recordings online. We’ve built up an archive of lectures that are well worth your attention.

Turning now to my conversation with Dr. Steve Peck. What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? What made it so beautiful? Is its beauty a question of science, or a matter of divinity, or is it both? Dr. Peck is at the Maxwell Institute to work on a handful of projects that circle the relationship between beauty, nature, science, and faith. He argues that our universe possesses an excess of beauty over and above what is strictly necessary for its operation. Not only beauty, in fact, but an excess of agency, consciousness, meaning, and joy; features that are evident across many species and can’t be explained away by scientific determinism. In fact, Steve goes so far as to say that we live in an aesthetic universe, and that beauty is God’s signature. Our human bodies, and the bodies of other organisms, are fundamental to any experience of beauty and agency, and science can help us understand how and why. But science needs art, poetry, and music to do justice to the richness of the world, and to help us make sense of the pain and loss that is everywhere in nature. Could it be that suffering is the price of the beauty and variety that God prizes in creation? And why does Steve call his project “a theology of birds”? Might it be true that “birds are that they might have joy”?

Join me for this surprising conversation with the brilliant Steven L. Peck.

Interview

Rosalynde Welch:

Dr. Steve Peck, welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Steve Peck

Thank you. It’s great to be here, Rosalynde. I love what you’re doing. So let’s see if we can make this a part of that.

Welch:

Let’s do it. So yesterday, Steve, I was on a cross-country flight, and I love to look out the window when I fly. I was looking down as we passed over the country, and we passed over the Wasatch Mountains right in the last section of the flight. The colors are at peak vibrancy right now, the yellow aspens painted and splotched through the dark evergreens, and then the red maples just catching on fire. It was just so beautiful. It truly lifted my soul, filled me with rejoicing. Just a couple of weeks ago, I took another flight, this one from Los Angeles to Utah, and we passed over the Mojave Desert. And if you look down over the Mojave Desert, it’s brown and gray. It looks very barren. It has no beauty; it does not lift my heart or cause my soul to rejoice. So what I want to know from you is: when I am looking at something that is beautiful to me, what am I experiencing? Why do I respond to some things as beautiful and not to other things?

Peck:

That is such a great question, because I think you’ve captured a couple of things there. One is that beauty is an experience. It’s private to us. Sometimes I’ve stood with people looking at a beautiful sunset, for example, and they may not have the same experience as I, because it’s literally an experience that draws on our memories, the past, other things that we’ve found beautiful, things that we’ve learned to be beautiful.

For example, flying over the Mojave, for me, being from the desert, might’ve been a very different experience than you’ve had. And it may be that it’s the trees in the mountains that would look crowded to me or something. It doesn’t, I’ve experienced that same thing you have, too. But I think that recognizing beauty is an experience that all humans share, and I’ll probably argue a little later, so do other animals and other experiencing beings. But it is an experience.

The interesting thing about beauty is it doesn’t lend itself to any kind of quantification. This is what we want to do in science: we want to quantify, standardize. And I think if we were looking at a sunset and we tried to rate it on that scale or something, or measure the ratio of yellow to red or something, it just wouldn’t lend itself. There’d be no capturing of what beauty is. And so it’s elicited a lot of debates through history: what is beautiful? Is it symmetry? Is it colors? Is it experiences that bring us closer to God? All kinds of things.

And so for me, beauty is one of those things that exceeds language. It gives us a feeling of awe, of wonder, and it’s hard to capture and it’s hard to describe. I don’t think I’ve ever read a description, even among masters like John Muir or others, or Thoreau or Emerson, who are describing beauty. I might bring up a picture from my own experiences that kind of draws me into that sense of beauty, but it really is ineffable.

I, again and again, am astonished at the beauty of the world and my inability to describe it. Sometimes I think poetry can capture it, or beautiful writing can capture it, but it has to elicit the experience. It’s not that there’s a switch that goes on when we’re engaging with beauty. So yeah, go ahead.

Welch:

Yeah, to experience beauty is a universal human experience, you’re saying, and perhaps even beyond humans, animals and other types of organisms experience something like beauty. But are you saying that each of us has our own subjective understanding of what is beautiful? Is it completely socially and personally determined? Or is there some basis for beauty beyond just my own mind and my own experience?

Peck:

I think there are commonalities. And the reason I say that, or that I’m drawn to that idea, is that we all have similar neurologies. We grow up typically in an environment. A lot of aestheticians argue: is beauty just a sense of taste? Are the things that we find tasteful what’s beautiful to us?

But there are commonalities that we seem to share. We can both look out that window and recognize the beauty, typically. It might not be specific, and it might not, again, be quantifiable. But I don’t think beauty is just a matter of taste. There are values associated with it, and I think that can be determined by the situation.

I think when we’re in an art museum, for example, there’s been this attempt to curate maybe the sense of beauty. It might capture other things as well, meaning or communication or a historical moment. But I think that beauty itself is drawing on something that is universal, and it isn’t just a matter of taste.

One of the things that intrigues me about beauty is when we share it across species. And beauty may not be the right word, I recognize it. I don’t want to anthropomorphize animals into experiencing beauty just like me, so that me and a chimp, say, would look at the same painting and go, “Beautiful, right? Yeah, it is.” But I do think that it is capturing something that exceeds our physical reality, if I can say it that way.

That there is something, and I’ll say it this way, I think God experiences beauty. I think that is one of our heavenly parents’ aims for this earth life. And, in fact, we hear language like that, that “it is good,” it is beautiful.

We get a sense that this is an attribute of our heavenly parents. And I like that. And I like that that may have been one of their aims: for us to experience it in ways we couldn’t before.

Welch:

Yeah. So let’s dig into that question. On the one hand, maybe one basis of the shared experience of beauty that you and I share, and then beyond that with our other cousins who are beyond our own species, the basis of that might be our evolved sense of perceiving what is good for us and what makes a partner sexually fit, right?

Peck:

Right.

Welch:

So there’s a kind of evolutionary basis for some kinds of beauty. But what’s a little bit mysterious is that what makes a flower attractive to a bee, its color and its form, there’s no reason why that should also be attractive to me. It is, though, right? It is. I’m drawn to it anyway. So things in nature seem to be more beautiful than they need to be to strictly satisfy the demands of a kind of sexual fitness in an evolutionary framework. Is that where we look to find God in the universe, in these places where the universe is more beautiful than it strictly needs to be?

Peck:

Yes, and there are a lot of very scientific and evolutionary biologists who are noticing this. It is strange. You’ve captured something really important there, in this idea that we and bees share an aesthetic sense. And that seems weird. I mean, it really seems weird. We evolutionarily diverged from the bees a long, long time ago.

And yet we are attracted to the smells. We’re attracted to the colors, the shape, just like a bee. So there does seem to be something universal about what we call beautiful that they share. And certainly, you could put this in reductive terms. A strict reductionist might look at that and say, “Well, we and bees are both utilitarians,” trying to capture something about, we’re using it as markers, or we’re using it as plant growth, or something just completely utilitarian. But even as I say that, it sounds silly to me. I have this sense that that just doesn’t make any sense. And we find that especially, as you alluded to, sexual selection is a big part of nature.

Birds especially, their beautiful colors, their beautiful accoutrements, the things that make them beautiful and what makes a male sexy to a female bird, we can kind of pick up on. We kind of notice, yeah, there is something beautiful about those colors and that shape, that song. And we both share musical sensibilities. I love listening to the sound of birds and their calls; it strikes me deep into my sense of being. And so, I’ve come to believe that beauty is a part of the universe that we get to partake of, and many of God’s creatures do. It isn’t universal. I’m not sure that earthworms have a sense of beauty, but I don’t know that they don’t. “This dirt clod is like, wow, I love this thing.” But to me,

I take from that a sense that there is something about being an experiencing being on the planet Earth that seems to run deeper; that our evolution is buying into, in a way, rather than creating, if that makes sense.

Welch:

Is there anything else like beauty that seems to be excessive or emergent, something above and beyond what would be strictly required by evolution? Are there any other parts of the human experience that seem excessive in that same way?

Peck:

I think so. And people have written about this. There are people who look at value itself, or meaning itself, as one of those values that seem to be found all over nature. And we may have different values. For example, a lion on the Serengeti may value the sense of value that comes from assessing the catchability of this particular prey, this one’s a little weaker, this one’s a little younger, this one might be a little easier. But that sense of value and that sense of choice and agency is throughout the natural world. I’ve been reading a whole bunch of papers, in fact, recently. And these are not necessarily people who would be interested in theology at all. But they point out that agency is a big part of the animal kingdom.

In fact, there was a big paper that came out just a couple of months ago looking at the evolution of what we call eukaryotes, so, moving away from bacteria into something a little more complex with a nucleus that can do more. That becomes the basis of our cells and things like that. And they talked about it in terms of the evolution of agency and how that affected that. And to me, I think this is really kind of cool, because when God’s looking at the universe, you want to create a universe where agency is available to, in particular us, I buy that, but also a sense that agency is something that other creatures, even things like a simple single-celled animal, partake of. They make choices. They associate: “Okay, there’s some light over here. This is where the chemicals I like to eat tend to congregate. And so I like to go there.” And so the idea of choice in animals, the idea of agency in those choices, are really being recognized as an important part of the universe.

So in addition to beauty, things like agency appear; things like choice; values of a nature that things can be good or bad. All of those things. Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher who thought a lot about the kind of evolution of things like values, how they’re formed and how they’re framed and why they’re important, and how so many of Earth’s inhabitants take that into account.

Welch:

So if we were to kind of construct a strictly mechanistic, Darwinian universe, where the mechanisms of natural selection are at play, but you can imagine that that little machine could sort of run without anything being beautiful or being perceived as beautiful, without really having a strong sense of agency in any of the organisms that are involved, without really having the kind of rich consciousness that we have, or the emotions like joy that we experience, right? But it’s self-evident that our universe does include those features, right? And they’re shared quite widely, in fact, not only in humans, but across the spectrum of creation. A kind of minimalistic Darwinian picture may not be enough to explain the full experience of human beings in the world. Does that kind of get at what you’re saying here?

Peck:

Yeah, that actually, I think, picks out something that I think the mechanistic view of the universe does not capture at all, and that’s experience itself. There is no obvious reason why things couldn’t just be robots. We look at the biological mechanisms in place, the way they drive us toward things to satisfy our hunger or to protect us in danger. A robot could do that. A robot could recognize its energy stores and move toward energy sources. It could do that. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why experience even appears in the universe, and yet it does.

There’s a philosopher named Peter Godfrey-Smith. He wrote an entire book, it’s the most terribly named book ever. It’s called Metazoa. But what he looks at is, he’s trying to parse out where experience begins to appear in the evolution of life on Earth. And what he sees is that the brain, no one knows why, consciousness is still a mystery. Science has not got a handle on it, because it can’t really be studied with reduction.

What is experience? We don’t know. I mean, people are all over the place trying to think about: is it some kind of quantum mechanic thing, or some other thing? But, to be honest, we don’t know. And yet it’s common, and it affects the way we live, and it affects the way we engage with the world in important and, I think, necessary ways to being an existing creature that can act, can feel, can move in the world. I don’t think they have the kind of self-consciousness we have with our language and everything. But I have no doubt that my dog, when I’d say the word walk, was excited. You could tell. It wasn’t going through excited behavior, it was just behaving excitedly.

Welch:

No, he was having an experience of excitement and joy, the anticipation. Yeah.

Peck:

He was having, yes, yes, exactly, exactly. And I kind of like Peter Godfrey-Smith’s approach in asking the question: where does it seem to be? Where agency is apparent? Where, like, bees are actually a really good example, going toward flowers. Each individual bee doesn’t go to the same flower. If they were all machines, you know, the whole hive would leave and they’d…

They’d all do the same thing, and then they’d zip off and all go to the same flower, or do the same mechanics. But they make choices. They decide. And then they come back. If they find something really good, they’re kind of using randomness and things to each individually go out into the world. But then they come back to the hive, and they do a little dance, and they can communicate both how excited they are.

They do a waggle dance, and they waggle way more if it was a great source. And then they pass out samples to everybody, the only way to communicate this experience is for you to taste this nectar, because this is so delicious. And then the other bees get excited and say, “Yeah, this is good.” And then they watch the dance that tells them where to go to find the same flower. That’s very complex. But the experience is all over the place in that. They’re noticing how excited the bee is. They’re noticing the great taste of this particular nectar. They’re looking at the place where they might find it, and they go out and make a choice. And they all don’t make the same choice. Some of the bees aren’t impressed. I’ve had that all the time: “I’m going to go to the other place. Yeah, yeah, not that flower again.”

Welch:

So bored of that type of nectar.

Peck:

But those are genuine responses of bees experiencing the world. And so, for me, this does exceed evolution in the sense that, and when I say exceeds evolution, I need to be careful, because I don’t want to leave the impression that this kind of dismisses evolution, like evolution is not a big part of the way biological beings come into existence. What I mean is that you could do it with way less cost. You could do it without experience. All of the mechanisms that we see in evolutionary procedures, we also could get robots to do that a lot.

Welch:

Well, let’s push into this question of science a little more. So we started out with beauty, the connection between the aesthetic, what is beautiful, and what is sacred. That seems very clear to me, right? Human beings have always been elevated by their encounters with beauty and had their thoughts and their minds uplifted towards God and the sacred.

Peck:

Yeah.

Welch:

And then I see where nature fits into that too, right? You know, Moses went to the top of a mountain to have his experience with divinity there, right? So I can see how art, how the sacred, and how nature can all combine in our relationship with God. Science, it seems like, can be a little bit of a trickier fit. On the one hand, a skeptic might say, not a skeptic of science, but a skeptic of your project, “You know, science is exactly what disenchanted this world, right? Science is what has put us in the predicament where we are today, where it does seem like we live in a universe that is shorn of all meaning, that really isn’t headed in any particular direction, and where nothing really matters. There really is no value.” So why would you think that science could have a role in kind of re-enchanting this world that we now live in? Make the case for science’s both responsibility, maybe, and its possible contributions to where we go next.

Peck:

I think that’s such a great question, and I think it’s an important one. Because there are scientists today that completely dismiss any sort of extra consciousness. I mean, one of the great consciousness theorists wrote a book called Consciousness Explained, and he really disenchanted it, like, it doesn’t exist. And maybe for him it didn’t. I don’t know. But,

Welch:

He didn’t think it existed because he wasn’t actually conscious. He was the robot inside, the crypto-robot.

Peck:

Right, I can’t know that that’s not true. But I think the history of science, science was the first time that there were systematic attempts to get to objective knowledge. And science uses reductionism. Reductionism is really important to science because we want to be able to repeat what we’ve done; we want to communicate to others how to get these same results. And so, for the most part, it focused over the history of science on the mechanical, on the things that are repeatable, the things that we can do. Some science, I mean, I think of Descartes, who thought dogs were just biological machines. I think of Newton, who turned the universe into a clockwork, that there was no free play at all. Laplace’s demon, this idea that if you knew every particle in the universe, its momentum, its direction, then you could recreate the entire universe exactly as it is.

And strict determinists still hold to this. I’m not a strict determinist. I think determinism is kind of almost getting passé right now. A lot of philosophers of science talk not in terms of laws, but in terms of regularities and relationships, and trying to capture those. But it really works for science when you’re trying to explain the why and the how of those mechanical aspects of the universe, and there are a lot. I just dissed on Newton there for a second, but we still use Newton to get a rover to Mars. And to me, that’s an amazing achievement. And this is what science can bring us, those things that are highly regular and where it’s easy to recognize the causal mechanisms between things. And there are causal mechanisms in the world, I’m not trying to say there aren’t.

But I think we’re also recognizing that it’s more than that, that the behavior of life on Earth, what is consciousness, all of these things don’t fit neatly into that kind of strictly deterministic universe. Science does not understand the existence of experience at all. We can’t even measure how it’s used. We can see the results of it, but all of the underlying things are being explored. And the way I would say my approach is: I don’t think I know what the limits of science are. I really don’t. And I think we should try. I’m not for giving up early.

Welch:

I hear what you’re saying. So on the one hand, yes, science does, a kind of reductive, methodological form of science has its places. I’m so very grateful for all the aspects of my life that are improved by that form of science. But yes, it probably has contributed to the kind of meaning crisis that many people experience today. But what you’re saying is that we haven’t pushed science as far as it can go. And when we push it to its limits, maybe we can force the scientific method to acknowledge what lies beyond its own limits, right? And hold hands with things like poetry and music and artistic expression to get at some of the frontiers of experience that lie beyond it. But maybe also we can use those same methods of science in an open and expansive way to continue to look at the universe and understand it better, and understand better these things that are emergent from the “machine,” as it were, right? The consciousness and joy and beauty, and values, in fact, right? Values. So I wonder, in this investigation as you’ve carried it out so far, when you look at the universe in the fullest way that you can, what are the kind of values that you see emerging from this universe that our Creator has placed us in?

Peck:

So the one that I see most clearly in my own life is the value of love. I see that in, this is more of a human value. But I see that as so encompassing to so many things that matter, that we learn to love each other. It makes society run better. It creates opportunities for friendship and for a chance to experience a deeper element in the universe. And so, for me, that’s a very clear value. And I find it all over the scriptures, this injunction to love.

Welch:

Yeah. So what do we make, then, of also the immense suffering that we see not only in human communities but, you know, “nature red in tooth and claw”, when we begin to look at the world and see how, you know, things progress through death and decay and predation. How does that fit into this picture of values?

Peck:

That is such a great question. I mean, it caused me, in my life, a lot of pause, thinking about that. And there is a temptation to look at the immense suffering in the world. I mean, evolution doesn’t care about suffering. It only looks at what survives and what doesn’t. And it’s a very cruel process. It’s very, very heartrending. There’s no selection on lowering suffering except as it affects an animal’s ability to compete and do things. And I’ve thought about that. And when we look at what’s happened in the world, suffering, I don’t know quite how to put this, but I’ll say it this way: I think that God suffers.

I don’t think suffering is something that Heavenly Parents escape. Watching some of their children depart, it hurts, just like it would hurt us.

And I’ll never forget the scene in the Doctrine and Covenants. I was listening to a lecture by Eugene England, and he pointed out that in the scripture he says, again, I’m paraphrasing really badly because I don’t have it in front of me, but it’s the suffering “that caused even me to suffer” because of pain. And I think that sense that God suffers shows me that maybe suffering’s cost, maybe the cost of existence, and that beauty so often emerges out of that suffering, in our own lives and in the way that the beauties of nature have unfolded. There have been, to create this beautiful cardinal, a lot of cardinals suffered to get that shade of red into the universe.

God allows it. It goes on. To me, these kinds of values, like agency, like beauty, like goodness and love, all of these appear; they emerge despite, maybe that’s the better way to say it, despite suffering. That suffering opens up the ecology of beauty in ways that are necessary, and part of God’s experience as well. I love the Restoration thought, that God is a part of this universe, and that that’s a big part of our theology as I read it. And I think, the way I’ve put it sometimes as I write, is that existence is an adventure. And God doesn’t design this like it’s a play; he invites us to join him in the adventure of existence. And that’s why we don’t get to escape from things. It’s not that God likes suffering, but it seems it’s a part of existence. And so we don’t get to escape from it. It’s baked in.

Welch:

It’s baked in. Well, tell me more about birds, because it seems like birds, in some ways for you, kind of capture this paradox, as you mentioned, right? They’re just exquisitely beautiful, yet they can be quite ruthless. They’re the descendants of the dinosaurs. You’ve called your project a “theology of birds.” So tell me more about why you’ve chosen birds as your case study here.

Peck:

So, for me, how do I say this without saying that birds are the highest form of creation excluding humans? But to me, and this is why I came to birds, a lot of times I think a lot about our theology of embodiment. One of the things that I said as a missionary over and over again as I showed a picture of God standing there: we loved that he had a body, and we wanted one too. But we really don’t talk about why. And I thought, what if I decentralize the idea of embodiment away from humans, just to think about what embodiment gives us instead of just sort of the human attributes that we like to talk about?

When we talk about theologies of embodiment, and birds, decenter the human for a second. I come back to it, but they decenter it for a while. And let me think about: what do birds gain in this ability to hear music, to listen to music; this ability to enjoy colors and have joy? There are a lot of people right now writing from a philosophical perspective on the observation that birds seem to have joy in their activities. And I think I see, in bird embodiment, a beautiful theology that these are part of God’s aims as well, to bring joy not only to us, but to all creatures who are experiencing beings. Unlike Descartes, looking at birds as fancy machines, fancy cuckoo clocks, that joy is kind of an aim of the universe, even.

And that it had to evolve. It had to evolve bodies to get to a point where joy could enter in; where creativity could enter in; where improvisation and play, and all these things that bring us so much joy, could enter into this universe. At one time, the universe was just a bunch of hydrogen floating around. There was no joy there. It wasn’t, I don’t think. Some people think there might be, but we’ll just say there wasn’t a lot of joy in the universe when it was all just hydrogen. But now we see it appear in abundance, in lots of creatures. We see it as something that we can point to in the natural world that we share. And I love being a natural creature in the universe. I love the idea that these are our kin, that we have a shared relationship. I wrote a blog once on doing my genealogy by studying the emergence of my fish grandmothers.

And to me, that’s a beautiful thought. We believe that the Earth is the ultimate destination of the celestial kingdom, for example, and that all of these creatures have a stake in that as well, that they were part of this unfolding of experience and joy and these values that I think exceed humans in very lovely and wonderful ways.

Welch:

Steve, this has been such a great conversation. I’m really excited to see how these projects around nature and beauty and science and joy, and birds, how do they unfold over your time here at the Maxwell Institute. Always my last question on these podcasts: what questions do you think Latter-day Saints should be asking when they are thinking about beauty, about nature, about God, and where science fits into all of this?

Peck:

That’s such a great question. And I’ve never thought of that before. But the one thing I find in nature is that it grounds our thinking. And to ask questions that are grounded, a lot of times, in this age of TikToks and conspiracy theories, what grounds those things often is very shallow.

So I guess that’s the question I’d ask: What grounds your beliefs? What is grounding your beliefs right now? And be open to the idea that you could be wrong. I do believe that. But there are things that have withstood a lot of tests. And those, to me, are the things to hold onto, that I examine things, and when I find consistency and… I’ll even go here: beauty and value. That’s where I want to stay. That’s where I want to. That’s the aim I want to move through. That’s the waters I want to swim in. So challenge yourself.

Welch:

Steve Peck, thank you so much for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Peck:

It was so good to be here. Thank you for your questions, they’re very insightful. They made me think even more, a little more, about some of the things that I’ve been trying to write about. So thank you.

Welch:

Well, let’s do it again. Bye-bye.

Conclusion

That’s it for my interview with Dr. Steve Peck. We’re delighted to have him with us for the next couple of years, and I can’t wait to see what he produces during his time at the Maxwell Institute. If you want to read more from Dr. Peck on science and religion, check out his 2015 book, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist, one of the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith series. It’s available for purchase or to read for free online on BYU’s ScholarsArchive.

If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you’ll tell somebody about it and subscribe to our feed wherever you go for podcasts. And don’t forget to follow @BYU_Maxwell on social media and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu.edu. I’ll be back soon with more interviews with our Maxwell Institute fellows. Thanks for listening.