An Epiphany...Faith, Art, & Creation

I was recently on relevantmagazine.com reading a blog post by one of my favorite Relevant contributors Winn Collier. In his post, Winn tosses out a few ideas about art and how it relates to faith and our understanding of the Bible. Briefly, here are a few of the ideas he tosses out:

The arts can help us better understand the Bible

Modern paradigm has us equate truth with scientific rationalism so we often approach the Bible from this perspective

Our modern paradigm prevents us from seeing that the language used by the author of Genesis reveals a story that seems to be less concerned with the specifics of HOW the world was created but rather pointing us to the idea that the Creator began with an ugly chaotic mess and organized it into a beautiful art.

The question that Genesis points us to is not “How was the world created” but rather “Why was the world made beautiful”.

He finishes with this quote

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.
[Albert Einstein]

 
What do you think? Did we miss the point of the Genesis story? I think most readers of this blog will agree that we have a creator, but are the “How's” really as important as the “Why's”. “God loved us so much that He made the world in XYZ order” doesn't really stir us the same as “God loved us so much that He put his heart in to creating this breathtakingly beautiful earth.” Why are we drawn to beauty? I believe that we all possess our own artistic creativity. The question is why.