The phrase “The beauty of the Lord” is thrown around a lot in Christian circles, especially in song. It’s a wonderful thing to sing about, but what is the beauty of the Lord? How can it be appreciated when there is nothing of Him for us to see but His creation?

For a long time I had no idea what it meant to marvel at the beauty of the Lord. I had not even but the vaguest idea of what beauty really meant. In retrospect, my first glimpse was the testimony of a missionary who had been working with Campus Crusade at various universities. He recounted the story of a grad student he met one day, who told him though she was not a Christian, she knew “there must be a God, because math is so beautiful”.

Though I didn’t grasp the profundity of that statement at the time, I could appreciate what she was saying. Math is elegant, cohesive, and infinitely interconnected. Though it’s Simple enough to say 2×8=8×2 and know that fact, one could spend a lifetime on the mechanisms behind that truth. Concepts can be generalized to the point where we get things like imaginary numbers and the complex plane. I recall one day several years ago reading through Wikipedia and stumbling upon Roots of Unity, and almost being brought to tears because of the beauty of it. It’s easy enough to know that i to a power divisible by four gives you 1, but who knew that the same mechanism behind that was also behind -1 returning 1 when raised to even powers? Who knew that the cycle of i, -1, -i, 1 when counting up powers of i is actually circling around the complex plane? Who knew that these concepts could be extended and generalized geometrically so that you can figure out complex numbers that will return 1 raised to any power?

More recently, I have been astounded by the elegance of God in orchestrating all of Biblical history - even all of total history - to one singular object. All of the Old Testament points to Christ. All of the New Testament points to Christ. Christ points to the glory of God, and all of history points to the glory of God through Christ. Realizing this was the same feeling as first comprehending roots of unity - a supreme awe at the elegance of it all.

What then is beauty? What does the beauty of math have in common with the beauty of God? What does a beautiful woman have in common with a beautiful song?

Purpose. Unity of intent and reason for existence and action.

In a beautiful theory, everything that it describes is accounted for and subsumed under a single process or intent, and all variety is a manifestation thereof. Nothing is arbitrary. This is why physicists are after an “equation of everything”: right now, a multitude of (as far as we know) unrelated physical forces populate the theory. A plethora of arbitrary constants litter textbooks, and we have no idea why they are so (for example, the gravitational constant, the speed of light). Scientists as much as anyone else are searching for beauty - looking for the commonality among the forces, looking for reasons behind the constants - for example, the equations that subsumed electromagnetism and the weak force under the electroweak force were a major step forward in the beauty of mainstream physical theory. Likewise, much of the popularity of string theory is because of its beauty and elegance in tying so many disparate branches of science together (though it is well to keep in mind that though truth is beautiful, not all beauty is necessarily truth).

Aesthetic beauty is a bit harder to pin down, because there are so many conflicting conceptions of beauty. What is the purpose of a painting? Of a song? In most cases, the beauty of a song or a painting is self-referential: it is a form of beauty, but only a shadow, because its purpose is itself. A certain melodic fragment is put in a song, and built upon - this is beauty in song. The repetition thereof is a form of pseudo-purpose - arbitrary melodies that never lead anywhere make for an incoherent song. Similarly in painting and other aesthetic arts, beauty comes from thematic coherence. Superimposing the subject of The Scream onto a pointallist painting, though both are arguably beautiful in their own right, does not make a beautiful product. Though they are both internally consistent, they are not consistent with each other.

This is the way that God is beautiful. We know that all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). The scriptures have singularity of purpose - pointing to the glory of God through the work of Christ - and are at no point arbitrary. We see that all things work together for the good of those that love God (Romans 8:28), and that good is God. We know then that none of history - every event, down to the fly on the strawberry - is arbitrary. It is all oriented - the good, the bad, even the downright evil - by God towards good (Genesis 50:20) - the glory of God through the redemption of mankind. Though we mean our actions towards any number of evil things, God works it for good. God is, more than anything temporal, completely internally consistent and singularly oriented towards one goal. God is therefore the pinnacle of beauty - the beauty from which all other beauty derives itself.

To be continued. Coming soon: Taking comfort in a selfish God - How God’s beauty translates into our good.

If you’ve been here over the past few days, the more astute among you will have noticed a few things different. Normally I don’t write about site changes, but I think this one is significant enough - as the biggest single design change to the site since its inception in current form - to warrant a post. The changes include:

1) It’s wider. I’ve been designing for 1024 wide screens for quite a while now - Dragonblade (defunct), Epta Astera, Campus Crossroads, NetUtopia (what ever happened to that anyway? Sheesh) - in fact, this was one of the last 800 wide designs I ever did; almost three years ago. High time to bring it into the future, I figure.

2) The Header is different. I’m not a fan of change for the sake of change - I change because I believe things can be made better. The old header, after a while, came to seem very unbalanced - both horizontally and vertically. This header, while using the same themes as the last, balances itself much more nicely than the last, and comes in a good 44 pixels shorter, saving valuable vertical space (and bandwidth; it’s a pretty wide image). This newfound balance also led to…

3) The navigation has moved! No longer is it in the sidebar, but in the header. I believe it’s much more prominent and accessible there. The sidebar as it was was the only holdover from the last incarnation of the site (anyone remember the gray bevelled border? No? Good) - in almost exactly the same form, though with a black background and different icons. But they were Apple’s icons. No points for originality there. And though they were nice icons in their own right, they didn’t match the theme of the site. I briefly considered a horizontal navigation, but the treeline doesn’t lend itself well to that. Moving them into the header also reclaims a lot of wasted space up there, frees up vertical space in the sidebar, and saves bandwidth by getting rid of that image there.

4) There’s a Twitter there… Yeah yeah, fad, trendy, whatever. For a long time I’ve wanted something like a tumblelog on which to post quick, short thoughts (a Youtube video I enjoyed, a band I just discovered, etc.) - separately from the flow of the rest of the blog, which is more for longer articles. Twitter serves that purpose well enough, and, why the heck not? If it’s trendy, that just means more people to connect with - which is definitely a plus with this sort of thing.

On the backend, 5) It’s completely Wordpress powered. No more static PHP pages patching into the Wordpress loop from the outside. The entire site - pages and all - are all Wordpress now. This brings a few disadvantages with code flexibility, meta keywords (I imagine there are plugins for that), and permalinks (working on getting those fixed - hopefully old blog links should work soon) - but these can for the most part be mitigated, and it brings in a whole host of advantages like pages now being searchable (!) and (so much more) ease of maintenance.

There will be many tweaks and refinements over the next few days and weeks, so if you notice anything strange or broken (like the contact page [UPDATE: Contact page works!] - that will hopefully be up again soon, and work this time), leave a comment and let me know so I can fix it up.