Ludwig Van Beethoven
O God, my heart is fixed; I will make songs and melody, even with my glory.
Give out your sounds, O corded instruments: the dawn will be awaking with my song.
I will give you praise, O Lord, among the peoples; I will make melody to you among the nations.(Psalm 108: 1-3)
Albert Schweitzer said,
“Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.”
Below is a quote from a warped, ridiculous article that a friend emailed me this morning. In this article, we have Godless Darwinists, once again, spewing their naturalistic fairy tales.
These under-worked and overpaid ne’er-do-wells have now set out, evidently, to destroy the arts with their atheistic, dehumanizing and more-than-suspect theory of evolution.
It seems that these lab-coated malcontents won’t be satisfied until they have relegated every blessing that God has ever granted mankind, including the arts, to nothing more than mating and survival techniques. They want to bring humanity down to its lowest common denominator where they exist and thrive. Where nothing is beautiful, majestic, wondrous or sacred.
“The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” suggested that the need to find a mate being the pressing requirement that it is, a lot of the features of any given animal have come about not to aid its survival, but to aid its courtship. The most famous example is the tail of the peacock. But Darwin suggested human features, too, might be sexually selected in this way—and one of those he lit on was music.
In this case, unlike that of natural selection, Darwin’s thinking did not set the world alight. But his ideas were revived recently by Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary biologist who works at the University of New Mexico. Dr Miller starts with the observations that music is a human universal, that it is costly in terms of time and energy to produce, and that it is, at least in some sense, under genetic control. About 4% of the population has “amusia” of one sort or another, and at least some types of amusia are known to be heritable. Universality, costliness and genetic control all suggest that music has a clear function in survival or reproduction, and Dr Miller plumps for reproduction.
One reason for believing this is that musical productivity—at least among the recording artists who have exploited the phonograph and its successors over the past hundred years or so—seems to match the course of an individual’s reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the demands of parenthood.
Beethoven, as well as many other composers, were driven to write to the point of insanity. Beethoven, had an incurable illness, which would ultimately leave him in excruciating pain and almost totally deaf. Yet Beethoven was driven to continue to write. His composing had nothing to do with survival or “getting laid,” it was something innate, something which had been instilled in him, by God, that drove him to compose!
Even Hitler and his brood, who used eugenics and survival of the fittest as a green light to murder and torture, recognized the majesty and beauty in music and the arts.
“Death to God, death to beauty and majesty, death to the arts! Long live Darwin, long live the cosmos! Praise science, evolution and eugenics!” These are the cries of the atheist-Darwinist lunatic-fringe!
Albert Einstein, stated, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
This particular variety of developmentally-arrested human, who can no longer “pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,” was foretold by Paul in his second letter to Timothy:
But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers…ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these… always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. (2Timothy 3: 1-5, 7)
“Always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” A prophecy fulfilled in our science labs everywhere!
You can read the rest of the article here:
via Human evolution and music | Why music? | The Economist.
January 20th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Miller is apparently pooping out of the wrong orifice. But I suppose there’s probably a Darwinian explanation for that.
January 20th, 2009 at 10:59 am
No doubt, Mike! No doubt!;-)
January 20th, 2009 at 11:06 am
You know, I’ve recently pondered that if man evolved by pure chance, via a hypothetical molecular concoction, then what should we expect to see with regard to creating a piece of music? I suppose that on any random day, some guy would randomly compose, for any random reason, by taking a random bunch of frequencies (not a scale, since scales are organized for a purpose), and let them randomly interact for for a random amount of time. That is how I suppose music would be composed. Don’t expect to get Beethoven out of that! Don’t expect anything other than static! Because Entropy would be the law of creation we would be under. The creative process would be predetermined to follow this paradigm of evolutionary randomness.
January 20th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Yes, I guess if everything that exists came about by chance and then mutated somehow, then your example of music composition would be correct. I guess, in this sense, Miller would love John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, since they dealt with aleatory and electronic music (”making noise”).
Thank God, this isn’t the way music is designed and created!
January 20th, 2009 at 11:55 am
But even Cage and Stockhausen made conscious decisions to make their music in the way they wished. They are not really operating in a pre-determined random way. As Mynym has noted in Shrink’s blog, there can never really be randomness if there is a free choice of mind behind the decision to create. Chance is really just an admission of ignorance of how things are designed. For the composer, he can combine all sorts of textures without knowing ahead the resulting timbre (until he hears it). But that “ignorance’ doesn’t at all change the outcome, which is designed into the natural laws. If randomness was designed into natural laws, we might be floating in space today, and tomorrow (which could be a 32-hour or 76-hour day, for who knows?), we might weigh 8 tons and be able to see into the fourth dimension!
January 20th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Is there an argument as to why intelligence and creativity could not have emerged from an unguided process? Or is this simply a case of “I can’t imagine how it could have, therefore it couldn’t have?”
January 20th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Mike,
I agree completely, I was being a little facetious in my remarks about Miller enjoying Cage and Stockhausen.
Exactly!
January 20th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Carl said,
Carl, I take exception to this, ““I can’t imagine how it could have, therefore it couldn’t have?” We see the world and all it entails very differently, Carl. I see the beauty of God in art, whereas, I can only go by your responses, you think everything to death. It’s as if you’re living in a monotone, color blind world. I know that sounds insulting, but I can’t help but believe there is some truth to it!
But to your question (and I’m not shocked that you would go there), yes there is, Carl! It is, among many of us who create, a sense of something sacred, something that is invisible and yet very real! An experience beyond the five senses, beyond our worldly knowledge, beyond our egos and cynicism about life. I hear the majesty, beauty and mystery of God in my music and other’s. If I thought that music was by some random chance happening, it would mean nothing to me, just as human life, including my own, would mean nothing to me in that nightmare that so many people hold to!
January 20th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Carl, I’m not saying they didn’t come about unguided, only if they did that they would be meaningless.
If intelligence and creativity are set in motion (or incarnate, if you will) by a mind freely choosing to act, then intelligence and creativity have meaning. It is this very freedom what imparts meaning. Otherwise, intelligence and creativity are just static – no different from random noise. Abstractions made from static are illusions.
January 20th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
You are right, DB, to indicate a fundamentally important gulf in attitude between you and me, but I don’t think you put it quite the right place. I’m neither a materialist, in the sense that you mean it, nor a reductionist. In fact, my attitude is best summed up in thoughts such as this one:
From Beyond Reductionism by Stuart Kauffman
This attitude is certainly no friend to the insistence that we need a transcendent God as an absolute basis for morality, but it is a friend to spirituality and to a sense of the sacred — and for me, at any rate, spirituality does not transcend sensuality, but is present within the sensual and natural world.
January 20th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Carl,
I guess we all have to find our own path!
January 20th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Well, I’m not entirely sure about this — a lot of creativity and meaning results from giving oneself over to the process and allowing something to emerge through canvas, or an instrument, or words. I don’t know if any artist would claim to be in total control of her own work. But there are also different “models” of creativity at work here too — you think of a composer writing a symphony, I think of a freestyle rap artist or jazz improv session.
That aside — if you like — of course I recognize that mental activity of an extremely high degree of sophistication and complexity is required for the creation of works of art, for scientific discovery, for the appreciation and creation of beauty, and for living lives that are reflective and virtuous. I’ll even allow for the claim that there is a radical discontinuity between us and other animals. I’m neither a materialist nor a reductionist.
(However, DB is right about me in one major way: I do think a lot, and I became convinced that materialism is false based on arguments, not based on emotion.)
So thus far I’m on your side. Where I get off the bus is at the thought that the ultimate origin of meaning, intelligence, creativity etc. must lie outside of the physical world. I have no problems with seeing minds as emerging within nature and parts of nature. (And that is in fact how I experience myself and those around me.)
January 20th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Well, if one can somehow define morality without a creator, I guess it’s not too much of a leap to define creation without a creator, is it Carl? Still to me, that affirms that your mind is just a mess of meaningless abstractions from static (see my post above).
For one who goes on about common descent, it boggles my mind that the intangibles unique to man that you so like to positively affirm, are somehow NOT descended from a living being, while everything else is descended from some organism. That’s a logical inconsistency to me.
January 21st, 2009 at 9:00 am
Carl, you evidently equate my experiences in life and my faith in God with unreasoned “emotion.” Well, that’s fine. I won’t defend myself, since my experience and faith, as well as all else, comes from God! You know, that entity (God), according to you, who “must lie outside of the physical world.”
January 21st, 2009 at 9:13 am
Sorry if that was taken as a shot – it was not written properly or directed toward Carl.
What it should have read was:
Still to me, that affirms that THE mind is just a mess of meaningless abstractions from static (see my post above).