Nature- Objectively Beautiful

So, a couple weeks ago, over Easter break, I realized something–it's spring. I realized this when I got home to find my yard absolutely filled with roses and irises and other various flowers (my dad loves gardening). And this sight reminded me that even though our world is fallen, there is still something in nature that remembers when God looked on what he had created and called it good.

In today's culture of relativity, the concepts of objective truth or objective beauty are often disregarded as outdated and naive. What is true to one person, the world says, may not be true for another person. What is beautiful to some can, just as correctly, be called ugly by others. As Christians, we have to recognize that this idea of relativism is false. I am not writing today to address the obvious existence of objective truth. But I am writing to say that nature, Creation, is objectively beautiful–it is not something that has anything to do with relativity or opinion.

If you look at a garden, or a hill-side covered with flowers, or snow-capped mountains off in the distance, or the night sky and the stars in the heavens, it is not up to you to determine whether these things are beautiful or not. The Grand Canyon does not rely on people to view it for it to be grand. The stars are beautiful even without people to declare them so. When God created the world, he declared that it was good before there were even any people on it. We are told that the stars sang with the angels while our world was made, before we ourselves existed.

The sheer arrogance of humanity, who assume that we are the ones who decide what is true and beautiful! Beauty has nothing to do with our personal preferences, with what is or is not pleasing to look at with our fallen eyes. The heavens declare the glory of God, the psalmist tells us, and they would go on declaring even if we were not here. If you look at the night sky and decide that you are unimpressed, that the stars in the heavens are only so-so, then you are wrong. If you claim that you have the right to deny nature's beauty, you are wrong. Straight up wrong.