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The need for beauty: Dawkins recognizes

...the need for beauty. In fact, The Greatest Show could be seen as a persuasive argument that evolution is beautiful.  And he offers such an argument perhaps because he recognizes the divide between beauty and truth that besets a positivistic culture.

One might object that if evolution is beautiful, then how are we to understand all of the ugliness that so often attends life?  Here Dawkin's answer would seem to be like that of Augustine: the beauty of the whole is not undone by the ugliness of some of the parts, for they  lead, ultimately into something beautiful (the latter point made rather well by Michael Dowd in his sometimes touchy-feelie Thank God for Evolution).

In such as case, however, what becomes of all of some of Christopher Hitchens'  complaints about the ugliness of nature (thinking here of his allusion to the horror of human existence prior to modern medicine)?  If Dawkins/Augustine are right, then even these horrors are more adequately grasped as  parts contributing to the beauty of the whole.

And beauty comes from God.

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