Music

Note: Last Updated 6/3/2025.

John Polkinghorne:

     The recognition of other forms of value opens further windows into reality. The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view, it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain. How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity has the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by a performance of the Mass in B Minor, and on to the mystic’s encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the centre of our encounter with reality and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless. From the practice of science to the acknowledgement of moral duty, on to aesthetic delight and religious experience, we live in a world which is the carrier of value at all levels of our meeting with it. Only a metaphysical account which is prepared to acknowledge that this is so can be considered to be at all adequate. This is an issue which frequently comes up in conversation with scientific colleagues who are not believers. I am repeatedly seeking to encourage them to take a generous view of the nature of reality, to recognise that a quasi-objective scientific description constitutes a metaphysical net with many holes in it, to reflect in their thinking those same personal qualities that they enjoy and exercise in their lives.

(John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998], pp. 18-19.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria