The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

Musicians often say that music occurs in the space between the notes. There's also no reason to suspect creation ends with us. We may be early brush strokes in an otherwise empty canvass awaiting to be filled.

I've also been thinking that an argument involving beauty might be possible here. If we stop thinking of creation in economic terms, then our judgments become different.

The idea that a reasonable God wouldn't waste so much effort on space that's inhospitable to humans is primarily economic. It's about use, efficiency, and waste. That doesn't make sense for an omnipotent deity of course. But it also doesn't make sense if we approach things from an aesthetic standpoint. Liberal bourgeois values often consider resources spent on aesthetic pleasures to be wasted. But that's very much a contingent opinion of our own time. Other cultures don't necessarily think that way. 

It's too bad we can't talk here about the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian, because the desirability of waste figures into that. 

Not so long ago some very prominent art people considered vast empty spaces to be beautiful. The whole Romantic/Gothic school thought that way. William Morris, for example, took an expensive trip as far north as he could go -- to Iceland and the Arctic Circle -- because people at that time thought the "frozen waste" to be sublime. He could have gone to the Bahamas, but he found the empty frozen places to be better. 

There's also an ancient school of thought in China and Japan, in which the veiled, the misty, the humanly incomprehensible, is seen as more beautiful than what is seen clearly.

So if a God did make the universe for beauty it's entirely possible that he wouldn't share our current taste. It might be that the parts we consider to be wasted, from an economic mindset, would be the most important ones, from a different viewpoint. There is a Platonic argument to be made here, I think, in that beauty is inherently connected to the divine. 

It's very hard to extricate our economic ideology from our supposedly objective scientific analysis.