The Guitar Wizardry of Eric Johnson and the Limits of Naturalistic Evolution
Music can’t get you all the way to the good news, but it should move you as far as faith in a God who is good
Earlier this week, my wife and I enjoyed a concert at the Mercury Ballroom from one of my favorite musicians, Grammy Award-winning guitarist Eric Johnson. Listening to song after song that coupled extraordinary technical skill with blinding flashes of improvisation, I could not keep myself from considering the absurdity of thinking that such order and complexity could emerge from nothing more than random chance and fortuitous mutations.
Naturalistic evolution ought to reduce, or even to eliminate, creativity that makes no net contribution to survival. And yet, there are forms of music that require far more from the composer and performer than the music could ever give back in the form of survival and reproduction.
Beyond that, our own appreciation of these minglings of melody and harmony and rhythm requires something deeper than naturalistic models of evolution can adequately explain. Philosopher Anthony O’Hear recognizes as much in his excellent book Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation:
Appreciation of things external to us [reflects] a deep and pre-conscious harmony between us and the world. ... But how could we think of an aesthetic justification of experience ... unless our aesthetic experience was sustained by a divine will revealed in the universe? ... This is a dilemma I cannot solve or tackle head on.
Even if I lost every other vestige of faith, I would still believe in God because I cannot explain the reality of music without some appeal to a Creator. Kurt Vonnegut spoke more truth than he knew when he wrote,
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
Music alone isn’t enough to get anyone to the good news of Jesus, but it provides plenteous evidence for the existence of a God who abounds in goodness and beauty.
Maybe, if someone where to say, "What can I give (or say to) my non-Christian/atheistic friend to help them believe in God?" Maybe we should give them a video of this guitar solo or some classical masterpiece of music from Bach, Beethoven, etc., before we give them an analytical philosophy book that builds the traditional arguments for God's existence!? OR, maybe we should send our atheist friends to the ocean, or to view a sunrise, or some great mountain-range and ask them how "beauty" could be derived from such natural processes such as the blaze of the sun or a large piece of "rock" (a mountain!) or the simple movement of water (waves in the ocean)?
Another thought: I've been listening a good bit to the compositional music of Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.) over the past few years and am simply astounded at the music this man has written. Well, after I did some research on Zimmer himself, I've become even more astounded at Zimmer's music, and it is for this reason: Zimmer has no formal training in music! If we take, then, this argument about music being a pointer towards the existence of God, then I wonder what it says about prodigies such a Zimmer who have no training in music, and yet are able to combine not only traditional orchestral pieces, but even add something like an electrical guitar to the mix as well? It just defies reality, to me, to think that evolved brains could put multiple instruments together to create a unified piece/whole in order to illustrate some moving scene in a moving and/or bring about some intended emotional response from the listener. There's more behind this than meets the eye! -Billy Reinhardt
Perhaps specific evidence of diety involvement is that, like with visual beauty, appreciation of aural beauty doesn't have to be learned. It's something inherent in us even before birth. (We've seen or heard of those in the womb responding to music.) We are 'hard-wired' to know beauty.
It's not coincidence that the greatest musician in human history, J.S. Bach, repeatedly stated that his composition and performance of music were focused on God and glorifying Him.