The many facets of beauty. The emergence of mathematical beauty from mystical beauty - Science from Art (Chapter 1) - Astronomy from Astrology ( Chapter 3) The fractal beauty of nature, like evolution, is characterized by the interplay of variations and laws. (Chapter 5) The beauty of nature versus its utility: The Environmental Challenge Science and spirit have complementary beauty. Integration of the "how" of science and the"why" of religion can lead to a beautiful new story that transcends national and cultural differences.

1. Swallowtail Butterfly
with Divine Proportion 1.618
BEAUTY
in
SCIENCE &
SPIRIT
"If nature were not beautiful,
it would not be worth knowing.
Henri Poincaré, Mathematical Physicist
I find beauty in spiritual music
and story.
Science & spirit have
complementary beauty.

2. Outline
• The many facets of beauty.
•The emergence of mathematical beauty from mystical beauty
- Science from Art (Chapter 1)
- Astronomy from Astrology ( Chapter 3)
• The fractal beauty of nature, like evolution, is characterized by
the interplay of variations and laws. (Chapter 5)
• The beauty of nature versus its utility:
The Environmental Challenge (Chapter 9, October 10 )

3. WHEN WAS YOUR 1ST
EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY?
Jay Peak, Northern, VT

4. Mt. Norris reflected in Lake Eden, VT
“The big lake like a sheet of the clearest of glass,
Which is blue as the sky that does over us pass.”

5. Mystical beauty is difficult to define,
but you know it when you experience it.
Fractal Mountain Landscape with
Mystical & Mathematical Beauty
Richard Voss generated this landscape with a computer program having both
random and deterministic elements. Used with permission.

6. •“ If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be
no such thing as beauty.”
Charles Darwin, 1881
• “Beauty is the harmony of contrasts” A. N. Whitehead 1933
Beauty resides in the symmetric balance between order and randomness.
• “Scientific beauty is more than a personal experience of
aesthetic beauty.” Physicist Steven Weinberg
Objective beauty is much closer to a horse trainer’s
enthusiasm for a beautiful race horse. This sort of beauty can
be measured.
• Can the horse win a race?
• Similarly, can a beautiful scientific theory make verifiable
predictions about the natural world?

7. •Beautiful flowers have vibrant colors and harmonious
symmetries.
•This subjective aesthetic beautiful form contrasts with the
objective, functional beauty that attracts insects to pollinate
• Similarly, beauty itself is a delicate dance between:
-mystical subjective revelations and
-the mathematical, objective processes that maintain life.

8. "The Adventure of the Universe starts with a dream and reaps
Tragic Beauty” (A. N. Whitehead )
Carr Family in 1985,
the year before Karin died of leukemia.
Paul’s late wife, Karin
(1940 - 1986)

9. From FOREWORD by Philip Hefner
“Whether there is universal consensus on the
criteria of beauty may well be argued, without
reaching resolution, but the fact that every
individual and every culture hold to that which they
consider beautiful--is not contested."
“The thirst for beauty that permeates our
lives is an opening to transcendence…”
“Beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”
by Gerald Manley Hopkins, S. J.

10. Mystical Beauty:Bison Hunt
20,000 yr old cave painting from Eastern
Spain. FROM ART TO SCIENCE

11. Pentagram (Pythagoras 590 BC) Star Shaped Blue Pimpernel
• In the Divine Triangle ABC, AC/BC = AC/AB = 1.618
• This 5 point star appears in religious art because it has the Divine Proportion, 1.618.
The discovery of the Divine Proportion, 1.618, was a step in
the emergence of the mathematical from the mystical.

12. • The Divine Proportion or Golden Ratio, 1.618, also occurs nature:
and the human body.
Da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man

13. LOGARITHMIC SPIRAL WITH DIVINE PROPORTION, 1.618,
SEEN IN SNAIL & NAUTILUS SHELL
R = exp(0.315xAngle)
75.58/46.74 = 1.618
46.74/28.90 = 1.618
-100
-80
-60
-40
-20
0
20
40
60
80
100

14. Sierpinski's (1882-1969) Fractal Triangle 13th
Century Art
Artistic Premonition of
Math?
Pg 43 of Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of
Mathematical from Mystical Artistic Beauty

15. FRACTAL TRIANGLE
Generated by: (1) Random initial point & direction,
(2) Global Rule: Go 1/2 distance to vortex
and draw a point.

16. OLD METAPHORS:
“God does not play dice.” Albert Einstein
“I do not believe that God could have created
us in His Image by mutations of the genes.”
Huston Smith
NEW METAPHOR:
“God plays dice, but the dice are loaded.”
Chaos theorist, Joseph Ford

17. Each small dill cluster is a fraction of the whole.

18. The lower leaf, enlarged from the fern on top, shows similar fractal branching.

19. Fractal Branching of Trees and Leaves

20. Biochemist Arthur Peacocke
Ordained Priest in the Church of England &
Winner of 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress
in Spiritual Reality:
• “Chance operating within a law-like framework is the
basis of the inherent creativity of the natural order, in its
ability to generate new forms of matter and life.”
• “As in many games, the consequences of the fall of the
dice depend very much on the rules of the game.”
CONCLUSION:
God designs with dice (freedom) and intelligence.

21. BEAUTY as an eternal element in
THE EMERGENCE OF ASTRONOMY FROM ASTROLOGY,
the MATHEMATICAL from the MYSTICAL.
• The Greek God Helios drove his chariot pulled by four beautiful white
winged horses across the sky. The sun's brilliant light emanated from the
fiery crown that adorned his head.
• Pythagoras, 590 B. C. discovered the mathematical ratios of the
musical scale. He believed that the planets rotating around the earth
made the “Music of the Spheres,” because the intervals between the
planetary radii had the similar ratio.
• Ptolemy in the 2nd
century AD developed the beautiful mathematics for
his geocentric cosmology, predicting the motion of the planets.
• In 1543 Copernicus proposed his new theory of the "sun at the center of
the most beautiful temple."

22. • In the 17 century, Newton discovered the laws of gravity and
dynamics that predicted the motion of “this most beautiful system
of the sun, planets, and comets.”
• In 1859, Darwin concluded his Origin of the Species with “from
so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
• Today Einstein's general relativity
frames the whispering cosmos,
the “cool” remnant radiation
for the hot big bang.

23. From the “MUSIC OF THE SPHERES”
to the BIG BANG’S WHISPER
The scientific story of the origin and evolution of the cosmos has intrinsic beauty
and transcends national and cultural differences. The images of modern science and
cosmology have aesthetic beauty and the potential to birth a new sacred story.
Hubble OpticalDeep Field Image of
Galaxies 12 Billion Light Years away,
about 2 Billion years after “the
beginning.” (1996)
Image of the universe 0.4 Million years
after “the beginning.” This this image
of temperature fluctuations was
measured by the Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe. The cooler regions
“seeded” the stars and the galaxies.

24. Cosmological Aesthetic Principle.
Of Astronomer Mario Livio
Even though our concepts of the universe have changed, we
perceive it as awesome and beautiful.
In this sense, beauty is an eternal, ultimate reality.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
“The universe in not a place where evolution happens,
it is evolution happening.”
(Loyal Rue, Everyone’s Story)

25. CONCLUSION
The interplay between chance and necessity in evolution and
fractals can be extended to science and spirit.
Both science and spirit can be beautiful in their own way,
because spiritual and scientific stories have different purposes.
--Spiritual stories answer "why" and give guidance and
motivation for living now and in eternity.
--Scientific theories explain "how," give a coherent rational
account of measurements, and make predications.
Integration of the "how" with the "why" can lead to a beautiful
new story that transcends national and cultural differences.
Science and spirit have complementary beauty.

26. TO TAKE HOME:
•The complementary beauty of science and spirit
is needed to prevent extremism and materialism.
- Spirituality without scientific validation can lead to
religious extremism & terrorism.
- Science without spirit can result in consumerism &
the exploitation of nature’s intrinsic beauty.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul H. Carr’s web page
www.MirrorOfNature.org

27. CHAPTER TITLES of
Beauty in Science and Spirit
INTRODUCTION
…Origin of This Book …What Is Beauty? …Chapter Overview
1. FROM ART TO SCIENCE TO ART
2. COMPLEMENTARY BEAUTY & INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
3. FROM THE "MUSIC OF THE SPHERES" TO
THE BIG BANG'S WHISPERS
4. BEAUTY: FROM THEOLOGY TO FRACTALS
5. BEAUTIFUL FRACTALS: DOES GOD PLAY DICE?
6. A THEOLOGY FOR THE "FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL"

28. CHAPTER TITLES of
Beauty in Science and Spirit
7. THE BEAUTY & POWER OF
TECHNOLOGY TOUCHING THEOLOGY
8. THE BEAUTIFUL HOLY LAND: SPIRITUALITY & SCIENCE
9. THE BEAUTY OF NATURE VS. ITS UTILITY:
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE
10. THE COURAGE TO CREATE BEAUTY
11. A BEAUTIFUL NEW STORY

29. Science & Religion have complementary beauty

30. Pollination. The act of transferring pollen from the anther to
the stigma. The pollen may be carried by the wind or water,
but is usually transported by a go-between insect, bird or
bat.
Pollen grains. The powdery particles that contain the male
sex cells (gametes). Also a nutritious, protein-rich food for
bees.
Stamen. Male part of flower consisting of anther and
filament.
Anthers. The bright yellow sacs that produce and contain the
pollen grains.
Stigma. Sticky surface where the pollen lands and
germinates.

31. Intelligent Design
Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box: The
Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1998).
The first living cell, was too complex to have emerged
by the gradual Darwinian processes of mutations and
natural selection.
It required an Intelligent Designer.

32. • I.D. is basically "God of the gaps".
If science can not explain it,
God fills the gap by intervening.
•My book gives historical examples of
how this has been a losing argument.
When science progresses to the point of
being able to explain, God is then no
longer needed.

33. •At the American Scientific Affiliation Conference, Messiah
College, PA, 7 Aug 2005, I asked mathematician and theologian,
William Dembski, Southwest Baptist Seminary, Fort Worth, TX
the following “God of the Gaps” question:
•“If God is the designer of the irreducible
complexity, which science cannot explain at present,
shouldn’t one become an atheist when science
explains it in the future?”
INTELLIGENT DESIGN
• Two minute video of Prof. Dembski’s answer.

34. Prof. Dembski’s Answer
Some people have left the faith as a result of biologist Richard
Dawkins' assertion that evolution is a result of blind chance.
In making this atheistic, materialistic claim, he is invading
theological turf, which a scientist should not do.
Dembski has received emails from scientists who were brought
back to the faith by I.D.
He is not betting that ID will fail, but if it should, those are the
breaks.
There are other reasons for believing.

35. Does not Dembski’s answer reflect a double standard?
If biologist Dawkins (1986) should not draw atheistic
conclusions from science, should not mathematician/philosopher
Dembski refrain from his theistic claim?
The scientific process - not necessarily the scientist - should be
agnostic in trying to explain the "how" of the natural world.
When theism had political power in the 17th
century, the
Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for believing that the
earth was not the center of the solar system. Three centuries later,
the Church confessed that it had erred.
The complementary beauty of science and spirit
is a better alternative than intelligent design.