Beauty, Providence and the Biophilia Hypothesis

In recent years, there has been a renewal of interest in the spiritual significance of the natural world. This development is evident for instance in certain strands of the environmental movement, and in the growing interest in the religions of indigenous peoples. In this article, I consider one important attempt to give the natural world such significance in terms of the framework of traditional theism, namely F. R. Tennant’s argument for design from natural beauty, published in 1930. A re-examination of Tennant’s argument is timely, I believe, not only because of these developments in the wider culture, but also in the light of certain newly formulated ideas in the social and biological sciences. These ideas appear to offer striking confirmation of the basic premise of Tennant’s argument; but at the same time they pose a challenge to his case, by advancing a purely naturalistic explanation of the phenomena which he wishes to explain in terms of divine agency. Given this new intellectual context, a contemporary discussion of Tennant’s argument has a broader relevance, since it invites a more general consideration of human responses to the natural world, be they aesthetic, moral or religious. The thought that natural beauty in some way signifies divine activity or presence in the world is likely to strike many as a truism, or at any rate as having no need of argumentative support. For instance, Erazim Kohák remarks that: