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Beauty Requires a God
The "Consider the Lillies" Argument for a God
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you're new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
The "Beauty Requires a God" claim is one of a large class of claims labeled as Grounding Arguments. The claim runs along these lines; "________" is proof of God because you couldn't have "________" without a supernatural deity to ground it. The blank might be replaced by beauty, consciousness, epistemology, knowledge, life, logic, love, math, metaphysics, morality, order, physics, or sentience; anything challenging to explain and thus appeals to be grounded by a god.
Attributing grounding to a god is an informal fallacy called an argument from incredulity, AKA the divine fallacy. It says I can't think of any more fundamental explanation of this, therefore God. The claimant might be incapable of thinking of a naturalistic grounding for a thing, but that doesn't mean nobody can find an alternative explanation without woo-woo.
I understand the urge to appeal to a God for grounding. If there is a tri-omni God, such a deity would provide an infinitely flexible grounding for anything that exists. But presupposing a god grounds everything ignores three things…