Query:

C.S. Lewis said, "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create).  It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."  This prompts me to ask you whether you believe beauty is "necessary" for life.  I am thinking that it’s technically not essential for survival, but still key to a good life.  Would you share your thoughts on this?

Reply:

I do think beauty is necessary for life, but to make my meaning clear, I had better make a few distinctions.

Sometimes when we say that having P is “necessary” for doing Q, we mean that we can’t do Q as well without P.  This is how we are speaking when we say that an automobile is “necessary” for getting to San Antonio.  Sure, we could walk there, but it would be slow and difficult.  Is beauty necessary for life in this sense?  Yes.  God has endowed us with such a powerful longing for beauty that if we are drowning in ugliness, we will probably be sad and listless even if we do stay alive.  We will not be living well.

On the other hand, sometimes when we say that having P is “necessary” for doing Q, we mean that we can’t do Q at all without P.  This is how we are speaking when we say that lungs are “necessary” for breathing.  Remove my lungs, and I die.  Is beauty necessary for life in that sense?  Probably not – yet in some cases it can be.  One can imagine a person who has no beauty whatsoever in his life, who finally becomes so listless that he stops eating and taking care of himself, so that he does die.

Your introduction of the expression “survival value” brings in another complication, though, because this expression too can be taken in two senses.

A person who asks whether beauty has “survival value” may mean, “Given that we are creatures who powerfully long for beauty, will we die without it?”  I’ve just answered that question above.  We probably won’t die without it, but we might.

But a person who asks whether beauty has “survival value” might instead mean something quite different.  He might be asking, “Can I explain the human longing for beauty in terms of adaptation, as Darwin would have explained it?  That is, would a creature which did long for beauty have a better shot at passing on its genes than a creature which didn’t long for it?”

And to that question, the answer is plainly “No.”  Consider a creature which desires only food, water, shelter, and a mate.  If it can get these things, it not only survives but thrives, and if it doesn’t get them, it dies.  Now consider a creature which not only desires food, water, shelter, and a mate, but also longs for beauty.  The conditions for its flourishing aren’t easier to achieve, but harder, because even if it does have the other four things, it still may not have beauty.

For this reason, one would expect a mere process of natural selection to work against the development of a general longing for beauty.  Yet here we are.

From a sheer biological perspective, this looks like a miracle.  The suggestion that creatures like us are merely the meaningless and purposeless result of a process which did not have us in mind is staggeringly implausible.