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Natural Aesthetics and Grace: the Reality of the World and the Reality of God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Scientific disciplines seek a truthful description of how things are. One way to think of the way that science does this is to say that science seeks to show how things fit together. In doing this the scientist implicitly makes use of aesthetic and ideal categories, such that aesthetic relationships of things to each other in thought somehow stand for the actual relationships (involving energy, charge, mass and the like). This relationship of ideal thought in the medium of human language to the reality of the world is remarkable. Why is it that we can know anything truthful about the world on the basis of the way we talk to each other? Why is there anything instead of nothing? Scientific practice suggests ways in which these are the same question. It may be that the createdness of the world underlies all truthful human discourses, whether artistic or scientific, mechanical or philosophical.
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- Copyright © The Author 2007. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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