Changes

Jump to navigation Jump to search
→‎Beauty: comment
Line 310: Line 310:     
:: Earlier you seemed to think that evolution could explain the undeniable beauty in autumn foliage, but it plainly can't.  The color arrangement arose before man and has no plausible evolutionary purpose.  Survival of the fittest to produce such beauty?  It's absurd, and thus remains as a counterexample familiar to all.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 22:51, 27 October 2008 (EDT)
 
:: Earlier you seemed to think that evolution could explain the undeniable beauty in autumn foliage, but it plainly can't.  The color arrangement arose before man and has no plausible evolutionary purpose.  Survival of the fittest to produce such beauty?  It's absurd, and thus remains as a counterexample familiar to all.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 22:51, 27 October 2008 (EDT)
 +
::: I had been under the impression that leaves change color as a result of their chlorophyll dying due to a lack of water. If this is, in fact, true, I do not think that it is impossible to describe how and why the leaves change using a purely naturalistic viewpoint. (To be honest, I haven't really given this much thought before, and your view on it is very interesting. I'll have to dig out my old Wile biology book and see if it covers this. It's so hard to find science books written from a Christian perspective.)
 +
:::With regard to whether there is a set-in-stone definition of beauty, this idea intrigued me, so I searched the King James Version of the Bible for various words and phrases meaning "pretty", "beautiful", and the like, using a software concordance. The Hebrew word used is almost always the same one, "יפה". Here is Strong's definition of it:
 +
:::::H3303
 +
:::::יפה
 +
:::::yâpheh
 +
:::::yaw-feh'
 +
:::::From H3302; beautiful (literally of figuratively): -  + beautiful, beauty, comely, fair (-est, one), + goodly, pleasant, well.
 +
:::H3302 is simply a root (and unfortunately, I can't get the Hebrew letters to render correctly. Oh, well...):
 +
:::::H3302
 +
:::::יפה
 +
:::::yâphâh
 +
:::::yaw-faw'
 +
:::::A primitive root; properly to be bright, that is, (by implication) beautiful: - be beautiful, be (make self) fair (-r), deck.
 +
:::Most of the time, the word "beauty" was used in the phrase "the beauty of his [God's] holiness". "Beautiful" and "comely" generally referred to people or things that looked good, or, pretty. "Fair" was often used to describe various women, such as Sarah and Vashti. ("fairest" and "fair one" were only used in the Song of Solomon). "Goodly", "pleasant", and "well" (when it was used in this sense) likewise were used to describe things, but no definition of the ''words'' was offered in the text. In short, I was unable to find any hard-fast definition of what God considers to be beautiful (in a physical sense, at least). Based on this, as well as my own experience, I think that while there are things which practically anyone would agree is beautiful, such as a sunset, beauty is largely subjective. [[User:Samd|Samd]] 23:24, 27 October 2008 (EDT)
    
== Sarfati reference ==
 
== Sarfati reference ==
143

edits

Navigation menu