The Guitar Wizardry of Eric Johnson and the Limits of Naturalistic Evolution
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.
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