Over a decade ago I wrote my last update on the science of aesthetics and how it confirms naturalism over theism (“Musical Aesthetics”), building on and updating my argument from visual science in Sense and Goodness without God with a discussion of music science. I also there listed scientific surveys of other domains of aesthetic experience, including the aesthetics of literature, poetry, smell, humor, play, even human bodies—and there has certainly been new science published since on every single one. I could have added tactile aesthetics and culinary aesthetics and all sorts of others, like the aesthetics of performance, and negative aesthetics, too (from disgust to misophonia). Wikipedia has a whole page now on neuroaesthetics (also known under other rubrics, like “Bioaesthetics: The Evolution of Aesthetic Cognition in Humans and Other Animals”), and the field has developed integrative theories of all aesthetic domains; and there are more recent field surveys than I cited then (e.g., G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience and Yan Bao et al., Neuroaesthetics: Exploring Beauty Within and Around Us).

The point being: you really can’t do philosophy of aesthetics without immersing yourself in a broad range of the latest scientific research addressing your concerns. Good philosophy can operate in no other way than “science first.” And just boning up on a general reference doesn’t cut it—every specific question and claim you may have often has an entire detailed literature addressing it, and you won’t get that out of hyper-brief summaries. This became especially clear in a recent discussion I attended with Noah McKay discussing his study “A New Aesthetic Argument for Theism” in Faith and Philosophy 40 (2023), which appealed to aesthetic experience as evidence for God on the grounds that evolutionary science doesn’t explain it as well as theism. McKay’s argument hinges to an extent on emphasizing a particularly intense kind of aesthetic experience scientists call “awe.” Why would we evolve that? Doesn’t God make better sense of it?

McKay himself has since changed his mind on various aspects of his paper, which he wrote years ago as an undergrad and thus not as a fully experienced philosopher, and so it would not be apt to fisk its various errors or confusions. And he already challenges in it other Arguments from Aesthetics, agreeing they aren’t always as sound as portrayed (such as Alvin Plantinga’s). And his paper takes the correct approach overall (quasi-Bayesian with stated falsification conditions). But its errors teach us some lessons we should all learn, especially if we ever intend to reach philosophical conclusions about anything—in other words, everyone who intends to do philosophy. Which, really, is everyone. Not just professional philosophers. The only difference is whether you are doing it well or poorly. Otherwise, everyone is doing it, and indeed depends on doing it, in almost every aspect of their lives and beliefs.

Methodological Lessons

I’ve covered this before (see You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…). But McKay’s paper commits several of the same methodological errors that need to be purged entirely from academic philosophy altogether.

1. Arguments should run from the particular to the abstract—not the other way around.

Much of McKay’s argument consists of positing a singular, overarching, abstract “Aesthetic Experience,” which naturally becomes hard for evolutionary biology to explain. But that is nonfactual. What we categorize under that label is an enormous and complex range of particular kinds of aesthetic experience, each with its own evolutionary history and explanation. And you can understand none of them without starting at the particulars of each one: how each particular kind of aesthetic response causally affects our physiology, our psychology, our thought and cognition, and our social interaction. When we approach the question this way, evolutionary explanations not only become more obvious, but we gain empirical ways to confirm those explanations.

Theism is incapable of this, of course. No theory of god makes distinct testable predictions about what we should find in any of these studies—at all, much less as empirically turns out to be true—unlike evodevo, which does. But even just at the point of phenomenology McKay operates backwards: discussing, for example, various kinds of emotional reactions to things (like “awe” at a landscape or “surprise” at the beauty of a dangerous animal), but not analyzing what in particular these experiences consist of (their psychosomatics), what in particular causes them (what exactly triggers the response, e.g. what properties of a visual percept are activating it), or what in particular they impel in terms of behavior (the locus of utility for any emotion). By contrast, scientists do do all that. They are doing good philosophy. McKay was not. His very method is incapable of ascertaining any true conclusion about this. Which is a bigger problem than simply being wrong.

2. Always check first.

This is The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking. But too many philosophers aren’t learning this lesson (as I have found before: see my Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism). McKay wrote mostly from the armchair. He relied on a few general summaries of the science but never checked any of the actual science itself. This was true for every aesthetic experience he argued over (his paper never cites any primary science, much less the latest, on any specific thing he was talking about, especially in regards evolutionary theories pertaining to each). But I will focus today on only one, as it was one I hadn’t studied before yet that held the most important place in his argument: the aesthetic experience of “awe.” McKay repeatedly leaned on the alleged difficulty of explaining the intensity and function of this specific emotion, and that was doing most of the heavy lifting for his case.

I’ve studied a lot of evolutionary aesthetics, but this one was new to me. So I put “evolution of awe” in Google Scholar—and got thousands of recent, relevant hits. I collected the eight results that were the most recent and most directly on point for McKay’s argument. All of which took five minutes; sorting through them and assessing their arguments and merits, just a couple of hours. McKay should have done this before even writing his paper. By simply blowing past all of this, his study boxed with shadows instead, failing to adequately inform the field, and thus not making progress.

To make progress in philosophy, we need a real accounting of where we actually are on a subject, before we attempt any new or novel argument from that data. This is well illustrated by the example of the science of awe, so I will expand on what I mean below. But in short, when McKay tried arguing over evolutionary explanations of awe, he never once described any actual evolutionary explanation of awe—and thus could not even in principle argue against their merit. So, once again, his very method is incapable of ascertaining any true conclusion. Which is a bigger problem than simply being wrong.

3. Beware of fallacies like false dichotomy.

Part of McKay’s argument was to tackle both prongs of evolutionary explanation: adaptive features and spandrels. This was good. Creationists tend to fail at this, but McKay responsibly addressed both models. But McKay still dropped the ball in one key respect. First, his argument leaned on a false dichotomy between these explanatory models, when in fact most aesthetic experience is correctly explained by both (a fact that would have been more obvious to McKay if he had followed point one and started with particulars rather than abstractions). Consider the example of scientific or mathematical beauty: theists will say evolution can’t explain that; therefore, God. McKay might ask “What could that be a spandrel of?” But the answer is: itself.

What activates those aesthetic responses is the realization of an elegant fit between parts to accomplish a goal. Which would have evolved to enhance tool and craft production (as well as social organization, logistical planning, and other aspects of intelligent small-group survival), and is still to this day adaptively activated by tool and craft production (as well as social organization, logistical planning, and other aspects of intelligent small- and now large-group survival). This aesthetic experience is adaptive, not a spandrel. Once in place, it will be activated by any “elegant fit between parts to accomplish a goal,” even those we did not evolve for, like math and science. So the activation of this emotion in math and science is the spandrel. Of course, it is also adaptive (humans definitely increase survival by appreciating elegant goal-making in math and science; as our ability to defend ourselves against natural and even extraterrestrial disasters alone proves), but that won’t have been the adaptation that was selected for (we evolved this property before discovering the utility of math and science for survival: see The Argument from Reason and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience).

So the actual explanatory model for the aesthetic reaction to “elegant goal-making” (responding to properties like simplicity, neatness, efficiency, and copiousness of utility: see All Godless Universes Are Mathematical) is complex: the evolution of the experience was adaptive; and its extension to other domains of “construction and thought” is a spandrel; yet also future-adaptive (any further evolution will continue to select this trait now that it enhances our mastery of math and science). Some aesthetic experiences may have no future-adaptive function but remain explicable as spandrels of past-adaptive function. So it is ineffective to argue that a trait is “neither” adaptive “nor” a spandrel, when it could be an admixture of both.

False dichotomies are a failure at the fundamental laws of logic (violating the Law of Excluded Middle), an error philosophers should not be making; yet by making, they hobble the ability of their entire methodology to even get at the truth at all. Which is, again, a bigger problem than simply being wrong. Though this was a point McKay later expressed having learned even before the salon I attended, note that the error still passed peer review. So this is a field-wide problem.

4. Run your thought experiments with as much care as a scientist.

Humans are self-aware and intelligent and thus can artificially recreate emotional states. This is proved by method acting, whereby a genuine experience of sadness, for example, can be evoked in an actor by effective pretending. This means we can induce feelings of awe in ourselves too, by recreating the mental state that induces it. And this has been an observation of meditation studies. I can vouch for this personally. Once upon a time I was a devout Taoist and practiced Taoist meditation. In result of developing those skills I was (and still am) able to induce spontaneous feelings of awe in reaction to almost any circumstance whatsoever.

The reason this is relevant is again problem one: by ignoring particulars and jumping straight to the abstractions, McKay intermixed cases of emotional experience that are natural and those that are induced (personally, casuistically, or culturally, i.e. learned aesthetic responses). We might look at induced cases and ask “How is that adaptive?” but we would be misleading ourselves: those examples do not relate to what caused the ability to exist in the first place. So they are incapable of proving McKay’s point. Even those cases entail emulating the conditions that activate the emotion, so we can study those conditions to see what use there might have been for activations of those feelings when those conditions occur in nature (just as we can do with spandrels—and indeed, applying our adaptive ability to use exploratory imagination to artificially create emotions could itself be a spandrel). But we will make the most progress studying evolved reactions in nature. So, apart from self-induced or culturally-induced awe, what naturally induces awe (and, just as importantly, what doesn’t)? You can only answer that by going to the science and seeing what has empirically been found. Which brings us back full circle to my first and second points.

But here, I think, we are looking at the common philosophical error of failing at thought experiments (see On Hosing Thought Experiments). McKay was running thought experiments (trying to imagine conditions and observing what survival benefits might or might not accrue), but was not engaging adequate control conditions or tracking of variables. Are you actually running the experiment you described? Are you actually testing the thing you think you are? What could be confounding the experiment’s results? Thought experiments are subject to the same rules (and failure modes) as physical experiments. Philosophers neglect this fact to their peril. And this methodological error again ensures an inability to reach true conclusions, just as surely as it does in science. Which is a bigger problem than simply being wrong.

So, those were the primary failure modes here.

But McKay is not entirely at fault for this. Professional philosophy as an academic field lacks relevant standards and isn’t even concerned with ensuring its procedures are methodologically sound. In result, every mistake he made is common across the whole field. But they are still mistakes. Had McKay run his study from the particular to the abstract—nailing down concrete cases and particular data and building his abstractions from those, rather than the other way around—and checked everything first—if for his every argument about the alleged non-adaptive function of a particular aesthetic response he checked the latest and most pertinent science on that specific aesthetic response’s function (like in the case of awe)—and better policed himself against fallacies like false dichotomy (and thus considered complex explanatory models, rather than conflating everything together as the same, like original vs. modern applications of a function)—and run his thought experiments more carefully (and thus caught the distinction between natural and artificial inducement of emotions), he would have gotten entirely the opposite result. He would have found that evolutionary naturalism has as good or better an explanation of every observed fact, while theism does not perform as well (much less better).

Which is why there is no scientific literature from theological neuroaesthetics: theology can’t even do the science, much less prove it empirically; evolution is literally the only successful game in town. And there is a reason why that is (see Theism, Naturalism, and Explanatory Power and Why I Think Theology Is Ridiculous). It’s the same reason we don’t have faith healing wings in hospitals or theological Big Bang models in cosmological science journals, or anything else empirical in theology: theology is a failed explanatory framework; it has been overwhelmingly beaten by naturalism on literally every performance measure (hence Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them). Which is why theism is as implausible as faeries or astrology. It is literally going to be the least likely explanation of anything.

So Why Do We Experience Awe?

I shall now illustrate all those general points with a particular example: the explanation of “awe.” McKay describes aesthetic experiences several times in his paper that fall under the scientific classification of “awe” (e.g. being “moved to tears by a sunset” or anything “strikingly beautiful” or “overwhelmingly sublime,” or “reacting with awe, reverence, and delight,” such as perceiving a deadly sea slug as “the most beautiful living creature I have ever seen”). McKay challenges scientific explanations of these experiences thus:

It is terribly difficult to think of a realistic situation in which aesthetic appreciation of a phenomenon would have provided our ancestors with a significant adaptive advantage that a non-aesthetic kind of sensitivity would not have provided. Indeed, there is reason to think that aesthetic appreciation presupposes other kinds of sensitivity: I cannot find something beautiful without first noticing it and, at least in most cases, paying attention to it. So, it is doubtful that there is any adaptive work left over for aesthetic experience to do. But this implies that a capacity for aesthetic experiences is not truly fitness-enhancing. (p. 226)

And:

We are aesthetically attuned to many phenomena that had little or no relevance to our ancestors’ survival or reproduction: distant nebulae that can only be photographed by telescopes, for instance, or deep-sea creatures like the bioluminescent comb jelly. Our evolutionary forebears were so far removed causally from these phenomena that no reaction to them, aesthetic or otherwise, could have played a role in their struggle for survival. (p. 227)

That these statements are so far off base they are “not even wrong” I will illustrate with a survey of the actual science of the evolution of awe in a moment. But what I want you to keep in mind is that the real point here is not “correcting the errors” (though we need to do that too), but correcting how the errors were made.

For example, McKay’s first point sounds good from the armchair. Why is it that nature uses a powerful emotion to motivate us? It cannot be to make us pay attention to something, when we have to already be paying attention to it to activate the emotion. The error here is in assuming that’s what scientists say the emotion is for—to cause us to “notice” the thing activating it. That sounds self-contradictory—which means it is unlikely to be what any scientist has ever said (much less an entire field of specialists). That should have set off alarm bells immediately: McKay should have assumed he did not understand what scientists are proposing, and thus endeavored to look more closely at the actual science (“check first”)—and that means not over-generalized reference-book summaries, but actual scientific studies of the evolution of awe specifically (“start at particulars, not abstractions”). There he would have found a destruction of his false dichotomies (science journals avoid fallacies more often than philosophy journals) and his mismanaged thought experiments (actual studies of awe are entirely sensitive to the “just-so story” fallacy and discuss empirical tests, potential and performed; and are better-trained at constructing and running thought experiments correctly).

Likewise, McKay’s second point also sounds good from the armchair. Yet for the same reason that also should have raised his suspicions—that he must have something wrong about the science. Because it is very unlikely that scientists hadn’t already thought of this. So what do they say about it? You had better check. What McKay would have found is that he is engaging a false dichotomy between adaptive and spandrel models (distant nebulae and weird animals are activating the same mechanisms as evolved in response to other far more familiar things, like flowers and weather), and that he forgot to build his abstractions from real-world particulars: his examples here all refer to visual aesthetic responses, which are not caused by “entire things” like “nebulae” or “deep-sea creatures,” because recognizing those, especially for “all possible things,” is far too complex to pre-program in the brain through heritable DNA (see Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?). Rather, as he would have learned had he checked, visual aesthetics operates on a congeries of pre-programmed rules that are not particular to any specific whole “thing” in the world (which things thus have to be learned from experience, whereas the aesthetic coding that helps you do this is inborn).

I covered this in my survey of Ramachandran’s theory of visual aesthetics in Sense and Goodness without God. But, in summary, pleasure is caused by specific visual effects (like patterning, symmetry, contrast, grouping) that adaptively improve our ability to locate and track objects in our visual field. So, more than just “noticing” a melange of colors, actually detecting a leopard in that melange is rewarding—not only because the very event of recognizing it is what causes the emotional effect (this is the process that evolved: while McKay imagines they are separate things, noticing and then feeling something about it, they are in fact exactly the same psychophysical event), but also because that very emotional effect trains us to engage the same search patterns again and again, thus improving the training of our visual system, which has obvious survival value (this is the adaptive effect being selected). So there is no such thing as an inborn or evolved “leopards are beautiful.” There is, rather, an inborn and evolved “contrast grouping allows us to distinguish a leopard from its background.” This same “contrast grouping allowing us to distinguish” things is being activated by everything—including sea jellies and supernovae, and alien sea slugs.

Our brain at birth has no idea what is important (leopards or supernovae), so it can’t be pre-programmed for some and not others. It can only be preprogrammed for generic visual training, which will respond equally to all things (whether leopards or supernovae; our brain then figures out which is important from ensuing experience—which is also Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience: no one is born knowing what a tiger is, much less what to do about it). At the same time, we have inborn programming steering us toward paying more attention to ripened fruit, berries, and flowering plants, among other color-based brightness/contrast phenomena of use to us, which tend to track bright and primary colors (the very reason we see in color at all—many animals don’t). This is why supernovae and jellies are “beautiful,” whereas gritty colorless prints of either are less “impressive” to us aesthetically. Whereas being able to detect structure even in grey is “beautiful” precisely because of its value in training our visual system. A lot, of course, we become accustomed to and thus stop thinking of as beautiful, but that is a consequence of habituation. Put yourself back in the mindset of someone who has never seen a tree before and you will have a different aesthetic experience of it.

Once you understand that this is the actual scientific explanation of evolved visual aesthetics (which you would if you had checked the actual scientific explanation of evolved visual aesthetics), and that it is backed even in particulars by a lot of empirical science now, McKay’s objection becomes very naive. We are not “aesthetically attuned to many phenomena that had little or no relevance to our ancestors’ survival or reproduction.” We are aesthetically attuned to many phenomena that have enormous relevance to our ancestors’ survival or reproduction (like object detection, food location, and visual training), and those evolved processes simply work on everything, because they have to: the brain cannot be born with information telling it what it can ignore. So there is no way to program our DNA to “stop” applying these visual system triggers to supernovas and sea jellies. That they must be applied to whatever we encounter is the entire point of them.

Then which detected things are useful to us we have to learn from experience. But we have to be able to see and track them first. And that requires being motivated to train our visual systems to do that without a rational instruction to (because animals can’t follow rational commands, and neither can human infants as they build their visual skills). And that is what mammals evolved to accomplish with emotion: the pre-rational motivators of all mammalian behavior (and we are mammals). The very reason we feel something is to cause us to behave in a certain way—before it can be rationally explained to us why we should. Which makes sense for an unintelligently designed system. The opposite of what McKay drove himself to mistakenly think, by a broken methodology that steered him away from rather than toward correct understanding.

When we apply this to modern aesthetic experience, it becomes clear our being born with these emotional motivators is happenstance (whereby the Wise Jellyfish People of Alpha Centauri 3 might have evolved different aesthetic responses); but, at the same time, we can then seek out the most intense stimuli, or pile them on top of each other, or push them to their limits, solely for the intensified pleasure-effect that it produces and for no other reason. All this can also happen by accident, since there are so many random conjunctions in existence (hence supernovae are pretty by accident for exactly the same reason that a gravel pit is not). But that does not mean those stimuli-responses didn’t get there by blind natural selection over eons of time. The evidence confirms they did. Just as “we evolved for differential reproductive success” left us with self-consciousness that could then capture our lives back to pursue more worthwhile purposes than mere reproduction (because The Robot’s Rebellion is what we get at the end of The Objective Value Cascade).

Which is the same outcome we got as for reason and morality. Evolution gave us an “okay” kit of “almost there” stuff that was gradually driven in the right direction but nowhere near all the way there. Hence, just as with our inborn practical and moral reasoning, so with our inborn aesthetic responses: they don’t always work or sometimes work contrary to purpose, which indicates the absence of intelligent design. But now that we have the cognitive ability to understand and invent stuff (an ability that evolved for other reasons), we can use that ability to perfect reason and morality (with science, math, logic, and philosophy), and so, too, beauty (for example, we can reason our way out of misfiring beauty responses and manipulate our environment to make better use of those responses when they work). This is all just the same as any other problem solving and tool-making we evolved for (see The Argument from Reason and The Real Basis of a Moral World).

The Evolutionary Function of Awe

I will here summarize the top eight scientific studies of “awe,” in descending order of utility for correcting the KcKay study:

• Matthew Richesin and Debora Baldwin, “How Awe Shaped Us: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Emotion Review 15.1 (January 2023) 17–27.
• Antonia Lucht and Hein van Schie, “The Evolutionary Function of Awe: A Review and Integrated Model of Seven Theoretical Perspectives,” Emotion Review 16.1 (January 2024) 46–63.
• Elliott Ihm et al. “Awe as a Meaning-Making Emotion: On the Evolution of Awe and the Origin of Religions,” in The Evolution of Religion, Religiosity and Theology: A Multi-Level and Multi-Disciplinary Approach (ed. ByJay Feierman and Lluis Oviedo; Routledge, 2019).
• Alice Chirico and Andrea Gaggioli, “The Potential Role of Awe for Depression: Reassembling the Puzzle,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021) #617715.
• Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral Spiritual and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17.2 (March 2003) 297–314.
• Joshua Perlin, “Why Does Awe Have Prosocial Effects? New Perspectives on Awe and the Small Self,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15.2 (2020).
• Edward Bonner and Harris Friedman, “Conceptual Clarification of the Experience of Awe: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis,” The Humanistic Psychologist 39.3 (2011) 222–35. 
• Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin, 2023) [And another expert treatment since recommended to me is Helen De Cruz, Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think (Princeton University Press, 2024).]

Some “particulars” you will learn that will change your understanding of the issue include the fact that (as some of these studies report) the experience of awe appears to be present in other apes. It is thus pre-human. Another particular finding discussed by all these studies is that awe modulates our sense of meaning (at all levels of analysis), which increases effective goal-directed action (by emotionally rewarding certain behaviors and not others). Which is the same adaptive role all emotions perform.

The best example is Richesin and Baldwin. They survey the literature on awe and propose a new framework that makes the most sense of all past theorizing and results. This is an effective methodology that usually works: develop a theory that explains not just the phenomenon but all theories of it. Some theories may be so divorced from empirical evidence as to be entirely discardable (with the result that the answer to the question Is 90% of All EvoPsych False? is “yes”). But usually good theorizing is on to something, even when it’s wrong. This is true even in McKay’s study: he correctly adduces what sorts of things are needed for a successful theory even on naturalism. So even when he was wrong he was on to something. Like the role of spandrels, the need of emotion to activate survival-enhancing behaviors, and the way the resulting mechanism can be appropriated to enrich human life entirely apart from its adaptive function.

The best theory will thus usually combine all good theories, in a synthesis that explains why those theories looked good while simultaneously filling in what they missed or got wrong (for examples of this, see my Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same, and how compatibilism unifies and explains all theories of free will, e.g. Dennett vs. Harris on Free Will, and how a hybrid semantics resolves all defects in its subsumed theories of meaning, e.g. My Monthly Recommendation: Ayer and Polanyi, and how a hybrid capitalist-socialist political system is better than both by having each check and balance the excesses of the other, e.g. That Luck Matters More Than Talent, and the fact that we all know the correct theory of fundamental physics is going to be the one that explains why both quantum mechanics and relativity theory are true, e.g. Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism). This is what Richesin and Baldwin do with awe—a project then expanded by Lucht and van Schie.

Richesin and Baldwin (and all the others on my list) point out that extensive previous science, looking for the particulars, found that what we mean by “awe” breaks down to a conjunction of two particular features (in the presence of which we experience awe and in the absence of which we don’t): “vastness” and “need for accommodation.” Vastness refers to the scale of what is being apprehended—when it exceeds everyday experience by a considerable margin—and studies show this reaction activates regardless of “what” is vast, whether it’s a landscape we are seeing or a symphony we are hearing or a concept we are contemplating. The need for accommodation refers to the fact that our brain cannot immediately accommodate what is being perceived or comprehended, and thus must work out what to do about it, how to integrate it into its understanding, its “world model.” Surveying all the particular examples, Richesin and Baldwin find that “all of these ideas point to a need to search for new information” as the behavior motivated by awe (and thus what “awe” would be selected for in evolutionary terms).

Richesin and Baldwin’s thesis “situates awe as a critical component in the cognitive success of the human species” through important mediating mechanisms. Empirical studies show that “awe increases curiosity and improves learning,” and has many prosocial effects (e.g., we are more considerate and less selfish in the wake of awe). So their theory is that “the adaptive function of awe is a systematic form of curiosity that allows for a relatively safe and sustainable drive toward exploration.” It helps control for indifference and thus excess sedentation (doing nothing, ignoring phenomena, and thus not learning or exploring, a failure mode) and thus enhances knowledge acquisition. As such it sits functionally in between curiosity (a different but related emotion causing impulsive engagement) and fear (another different but related emotion causing impulsive avoidance).

As explained by Robert Evans Wilson Jr. in “What’s the Opposite of Fear?” in Psychology Today (February 11, 2022), “The opposite of fear is knowledge and understanding,” which begin instead from “curiosity, which initiates an investigation, which leads to learning, which, in turn, creates knowledge and understanding.” Fear is thus the opposite of curiosity (just as love is the opposite of hate). And mediating the two is “awe,” which de-activates the impulsiveness of curiosity and fear by essentially “stunning” the percipient into pausing to evaluate what is being perceived or contemplated before taking action (whether exploratory or avoidant), thus creating a “safety” that improves survival by modulating impulsivity without shutting down effective reactions (as indifference would). To this point, Richesin and Baldwin cite Keltner and Haidt, whose studies established the “vastness and accommodation” understanding of “awe,” whereby vastness describes “something that is larger than the self, or the self’s ordinary level of experience or frame of reference.”

Awe is thus activated by size, which can be physical, social, or conceptual—any outsize phenomenon. Hence encountering a famous person can implicate social size, while encountering a profound sense of love or any other deep understanding can implicate conceptual size. Geometrical depth can be represented in many conceptual domains that are not simply large, e.g. a painting can be small yet communicate something deep and vast, and the brain reacts the same to them all: with awe. Provided the second component is present, which is also necessary for awe to be triggered: exceeding an immediate ability to accommodate the experience (it’s in some way “too much” to grasp at once, thus overloading our discernment circuits). This builds on an entire empirical background in the psychology of “accommodation,” which “refers to the adjustment of mental structures to assimilate a new experience; specifically, experiences that cannot be assimilated through the use of existing mental structures,” at least without some thought (thus this emotion was selected to hit a “pause and contemplate” button).

As such awe is an intensified form of more common emotions, surprise and admiration—or their converse, horror, since awe can cascade through contemplation into fear or horror, as for example during warfare or other natural disasters, and thus not simply cascading into curiosity or reverence, which would be the positive contemplative output from awe. Causing us to take and use the requisite time to decide between these responses is the purpose of awe itself (the behavior it motivates). And just as with all other aesthetic responses, we can “grow used” to something and no longer immediately feel an aesthetic response to it, yet reverting to our patterns and habits that didn’t accommodate an awe-inducing phenomenon can then reactivate the experience in reaction to that phenomenon, reminding us to accommodate it.

Hence Richesin and Baldwin conclude we should see “the evidence that awe increases curiosity and learning as a clear evolutionary advantage.” Just as with any other emotion, “the function of positive emotion is to broaden and build our thought-action repertoires, thus increasing approach behaviors such as play and exploration,” which result in the survival advantage of gaining skills and knowledge, which on net become useful to survival (and in some respects essential to survival). Awe mediates between curiosity and fear by forcing reflection before action, reducing impulsivity. And so, “To explain how the awe experience can be both curious and tentative, we propose that awe leads to a more systematic form of curiosity. Rather than an impulsive search for information, the awe experiencer will approach the uncertain stimuli more thoughtfully,” itself a survival enhancing caution: not abandoning the potential benefits of a curious response to what is perceived, while not risking the potential dangers of “curiosity killing the cat.”

The entire point of awe is thus to compel more thoughtful, yet still highly motivated, attention to something. So:

The advantage is twofold. First, awe makes the unknown or uncertain salient and tentatively approachable. This allows for information searching and subsequent progress in learning about the world. Second, systematic curiosity has a survival advantage over a more impulsive form of curiosity [because] knowing when it is safe to explore and when to avoid danger is of utmost importance.

So any emotion that impels us to evaluate that risk (rather than simply fleeing it in fear or jumping into it unreflectively—or ignoring it with indifference) has advantages to survival and thus reproductive success: both the individual and their community benefits from this effect. Because everyone benefits from their companions in a co-survival group experiencing this motivated caution-taking behavior. For example, deadly behavior causes the loss of a community asset: the person who died; likewise injury, which reduces the community labor pool; or an error that creates costly social complications. Conversely, any gains produced by thought or exploration motivated by this cautious curiosity can be communicated and thus enjoyed by everyone.

This means the experience must be positive (pleasurable) to impel engagement rather than avoidance; and yet at the same time it must be overwhelming (thus “awesome”) so as to “stun” the percipient into contemplation rather than action. Richesin and Baldwin show how this works for conceptual awe as well—since resolving “vast thoughts” that cannot be immediately accommodated also requires careful reflection as to whether to accommodate useful results or avoid dangerous ones. And the evidence that awe counteracts depression (as empirically confirmed by Chirico and Gaggioli) confirms this survival function as well: awe becomes a partial safety against certain failure modes of advanced cognition. Similarly, “one prediction” of the Richesin-Baldwin model “is that dispositional awe would be positively associated with curiosity, which evidence has shown to be the case,” and “dispositional awe should also be negatively associated with impulsivity,” which is also empirically confirmed.

Accordingly, Richesin and Baldwin present a corresponding causal graph demonstrating the benefits of awe to differential reproductive success:

This pretty much crushes McKay’s entire argument. And all from attending to the actual empirical science of the specific emotion at hand, rather than superficial generalizations about the entire science of aesthetics.

Lucht and van Schie expand this model to accommodate other function pathways, proposing that “awe is adaptive through three mechanisms: (1) it promotes social cooperation, (2) it stimulates reflective processing, and (3) it signals suitability as a potential mate.” Mechanism (2) is of course the Richesin-Baldwin model. Empirical evidence also supports mechanisms (1) and (3) so those, too, need to be explained. They also provide a helpful causal diagram explaining their model:

Lucht and van Schie admit some components of mechanism (1) are not as well established empirically, but some are very well established (e.g. the prosociality effects documented by Perlin and, indirectly, by Ihm et al.). Awe appears to counteract egocentrism in the same way as depression, producing more survival-enhancing behaviors through social cooperation, by impelling contemplators to hit the breaks on their ego by comparison with a world far greater than it. It is thus a “break” on more failure modes than just the dangerous implementations of curiosity, fear, or indifference.

The evidence for mechanism (3), meanwhile, is more obvious: we have an inborn reflex not merely to feel awe, but to communicate it through autonomic facial expressions and other expressive behaviors. That entails some evolutionary advantage. We would not have evolved such pathways to express awe if communicating our experience specifically of awe did not serve some adaptive function. And we know this predates humans, because that is how awe can be documented in apes. The most well-known function of expressive instincts is mate selection, though others would pertain through mechanism (1), e.g. communicating awe may have society-stabilizing or improving effects, in ways similar to laughter—not only through concomitant social bonding and trust-building, but through the prosocial physiological effects of awe documented by Bonner and Friedman.

Because most of the effects relating to mate selection also apply just as well to leader and neighbor and coworker selection. Insofar as expressing awe communicates health, sanity, humility, and wisdom, these are traits attractive not only for mate selection, but “mate” selection. Once meta-cognition evolved (which is well-documented for apes), expressing awe became not merely a correlating signal, but an empathic one: one ape observing another ape’s expression can associate it with their own emotive experiences of awe and thus attribute the same state to their social partner, producing relevant information that can improve social coherence and thus survival. Which only becomes more directly relevant in sexual mate selection (which is not, contrary to manosphere nonsense, “purely driven” by visible beauty but mental and social as well, and for obvious evolutionary-selective reasons: see Fisherian Runaway Doesn’t Work Like That and A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology).

Chirico and Gaggioli add to this by pointing to evidence that awe physiologically enhances “cognitive processing,” an obvious survival advantage when limited to events most demanding of care being taken in that processing (rather than impulsive action). Hence the evidence that awe combats depression: a self-centered and low-motivated state awash with negative rather than positive rumination and hopelessness. Awe reduces self-centering, increases motivation, and tends to increase a positive outlook and joy of being alive, exactly the opposite of depression. And since “awe prompts us to deal with uncertainty and overcome it by also finding a completely novel explanation” and “awe enables us to broaden our attention focus” thus “facilitating the creation of unprecedented connections among ideas,” it has knowledge- and wisdom-enhancing effects that benefit survival as well, which implicates mechanism (2). But as Perlin adds, “the prevailing explanation for why awe has prosocial effects is that awe reduces attention to self-oriented concerns (i.e., awe makes the self small), thereby making more attention available for other-oriented concerns,” which implicates mechanisms (1) and (3).

Contrary to McKay, none of this could be accomplished in any other way. Emotions evolved before reason, and remain selected to operate independently of reason—because, Thinking Fast and Slow, reason is a useful corrective but is slow and in its own particular ways unreliable (as well as evolutionarily new and thus poorly integrated into the brain’s emotion kit). Which indicates we are so badly designed that we still need emotional motivators to act, and need the “checks and balances” of emotional and rational reflection and development, each system checking and balancing the failure modes of the others—and yet still not perfectly. Evolution is not “intelligent” design, so its outputs in such complex domains won’t be perfectly designed, whereas these imperfections are hard to explain on theism without convoluted and implausible epicycles (see Is a Good God Logically Impossible?). But from the point of view of naturalism, the only way to get the benefits of awe mediating the failure-modes of curiosity and fear is through exactly what we observe: a stunning (thus pausing) but positive thought-motivating feeling, in reaction to things too large (physically or conceptually) to easily accommodate, precisely the kind of phenomena we need to generate in us a stunning (thus pausing) but positive thought-motivating feeling. That it feels like it does is because what it does is what it feels like to do that (see Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination).

As I began, one can follow this same line of inquiry for any specific kind of aesthetic cognition and you will get similar results: when we start from particulars, examine the actual specific science, avoid fallacies of reasoning, and mentally test the theories that emerge from that process (and carefully), we get very good evolutionary explanations, with good empirical evidence, often even for the most peculiar or particular aspects (and this despite the fact that 90% of All EvoPsych False), which is unlikely unless god is not involved in any of this, but only blind natural selection. Yes, one can also criticize god theories for being bad theories in their own right. McKay struggled under questioning to come up with any sensible model of why a god would actually need to do any of this—at all, much less in the specific peculiar ways we observe it has been done; and appealing to God having emotions opens a whole can of worms (see Valerie Tarico, “God’s Emotions: Why the Biblical God Is Hopelessly Human,” in The End of Christianity), while if he doesn’t need them than why should we? But we don’t need to argue that. Naturalism already works better. So even if we came up with some conveniently beautiful god theory whereby angels also push the planets in their orbits, modern gravitational theory already explains why the planets move along their orbits—and indeed, even in the most peculiar ways. And that’s why we don’t believe in “planet angels.” For the same reason we shouldn’t believe in “evolution angels” either.

Conclusion

Because theists suffer from a disorder of cognitive dissonance, they might go all Luke Skywalker on us at this point and scream “Nooooo! That can’t be! That’s impossible!” And they will activate their Apologetics Derangement Syndrome and start throwing out armchair reasons to reject these conclusions. For example, often they will resort to some form of “How dare you unweave the rainbow!” fallacy (see Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder). If I have explained “awe” as just some pragmatic information processing directive, haven’t I ruined human experience? Not even remotely. Awe still feels great, is still useful to us, and is still inherently worth pursuing for both reasons. It is itself awesome that we get to experience awe. And if we didn’t, and had the ability to install it anyway, we would, for that very reason (see The Objective Value Cascade).

By analogy, understanding the biochemistry and neurochemistry of the human orgasm has exactly no effect whatever on how good it feels, and how good it feels is why we pursue it as an experience. “But that’s just to trick you into having babies!” is irrelevant. We are smart enough now not to fall for the trick (birth control is a thing for a reason), and so we can get all the bennies kid-free. We tricked the trickster. That this is a thing is happenstance (the Wise Jellyfish People of Alpha Centauri 3 maybe are asexual reproducers and thus have no such thing as an orgasm response, but they might have evolved some other weird, cool aesthetic experience that we didn’t). But it’s still a thing. And we can build our lives around all the aesthetic experiences we evolved with, and thus make life enjoyable and thus inherently meaningful. We are simply using the resources chance gave us to make life good and worth living. How we got those resources is interesting and worth knowing, but does not limit what we can do with them now that we have them.

All the other kneejerk wails that could be emitted from Apologetics Derangement Syndrome will fall to the same analysis. And I know this because I’ve seen this consistently across a career of some thirty years now. At some point you have to realize apologetics does not work as a rational reaction to the facts of the world. It is, rather, always an attempt to avoid them. Hence whatever argument gets sputtered out at this point will always be crushed by the actual science refuting it (hence why we should check first) or by its own internal fallacies or failures of imagination (hence why we need to police our thoughts for fallacies and emotionally or ideologically rigged thought experiments). Apologetics always operates by leaving out evidence that, once put back in, collapses or even reverses the apologetic (hence Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). So don’t leave anything out. And when you think through what doing that takes, you get the four points I started all this with.

As a final illustration of this, let me take three examples from McKay’s article that now might not be any he would still stand by:

• McKay at one point argues that some trait (like any particular aesthetic cognition) “must give the organism an advantage that strongly impacts its ability to survive and reproduce compared to members of the same species who do not have the trait” (p. 225). Notice this sentence sounds right but is actually false, owing to a single word: “strongly.” In fact differential reproductive success (or DRS) will be achieved even with extremely slight impacts. Any net (emphasis on net) positive DRS results in a selection gradient. So even a fractional percent of advantage ends up cultivating the trait over time (much like any compound interest formula). The strength of the impact only correlates to the timescale of the adaptation’s spread through a population, not the mere fact of its spread. As it happens, the impact on DRS of the mechanisms I surveyed for “awe” are not small (they are as strong as for any evolved emotion). But even had they been small, that would only mean it would have taken a longer time to evolve, not that it would not evolve. Apologetics thus collapses when information is put back in that was left out (McKay’s “strong impact” requirement omits the information that “weak impact” can have the same results). In this case, we have an issue of basic science literacy (incorrect beliefs about DRS sensitivity) that better familiarity with the particulars of the science would correct.
• At another point McKay says “when I delight aesthetically in an arrangement of fruit, I do not want to eat the fruit. Insofar as I desire the fruit for its beauty, I desire to keep looking at the fruit. And it is hard to see how that distinctly aesthetic kind of desire could be adaptively advantageous. Most certainly, it does not amplify my carnal desire for nutritious food” (p. 227). Here we get that same false dichotomy, and failure to start from particulars and check the science, resulting in a badly performed thought experiment. All four in one. What exactly is the aesthetic response he is here referring to? He has just said it is not salivation (an urge to eat evoked by seeing delicious food); but that means he is talking about some other aesthetic experience. Which one? Check the science.
  
  Visual delight at the mere arrangement of fruit most likely implicates Ramachandran-style effects, not hunger-based ones. McKay is thus reacting to visual properties shared by all arrangements of colors and contrasts (involving fruit or not) that motivate training the visual system to detect and identify objects. So here again, better familiarity with the particulars of the science would have forestalled the error. But so would a better attendance to fallacious reasoning and careless thought experimenting: is it really a sound experiment if you are ignoring all other possible aesthetic modes of experience in this case than the one “tested out”? Why did McKay stop his search for the correct mode at a single false result? That’s a failure. And it comes from not thinking through how to run thought experiments correctly. (Note there are more modes than I even just mentioned, including inborn and learned, e.g. attraction to fruit arrangements might be evoking positively-associated memories, especially from one’s childhood or other cherished life period, and not inborn triggers at all. Much, but not all, of our individual reactions to interior design fits this mode, e.g. by either recreating or contrasting past experience.)
• And finally (and this is a slip he did disavow), McKay argued that “we often make (sound) abductive inferences without forming probability judgements” (p. 239). But this is logically impossible. Hence an attendance to logic-testing would have caught this before it went to print (and, failing that, if philosophy had more competent peer review, it would have been caught and corrected there). You always have some probability judgment in mind when you engage any inference (I demonstrate this throughout Proving History), even if it is low, or has a wide margin of error (it’s fuzzy), or is confidence-indifferent (accepting equal chances of being right or wrong). Indeed a statement like “H is a discernibly better explanation of E” than ~H logically entails that H is more probable than ~H (that is literally what you are saying when you say that, which means you know something about the probabilities of H and ~H, even if it is not precise).
  
  That we can accept an inference abductively even when its probability is low is simply what makes the inference abductive in the first place—as opposed to inductive, which specifically searches the information space for the highest probability explanation, not just any probable one, or the one “most probable on immediate information,” the usual application of “abductive” reasoning and the reason abductive reasoning is less reliable than inductive reasoning. This is all an analytical fact. And philosophers are supposed to be especially good at discerning analytical facts (some philosophers insist it is the only skill philosophy can distinctively boast of excelling in at all: see Is Philosophy Stupid?).

In the end, philosophers need to be far more engaged with the actual relevant sciences in their fact-gathering and theory-testing stages, which would also train them to pay more attention to particulars first and only build abstractions from those established particulars. And they need to be far better at catching out fallacies of reasoning. And they need to be much better at running thought experiments correctly—something they could also learn from science, as I think (ironically) scientists get better training in this, precisely because they (and thus also their peer reviewers) are already well trained in how real experiments can go wrong (both in their design and implementation), and thus more readily detect those same flaws in mental experiments than philosophers do.

Which means a cost of philosophers not pursuing a robust science education is that they become worse philosophers. Although scientists can be pretty bad philosophers in other respects for exactly the converse reason: not familiarizing themselves with the philosophical subjects they decide to weigh in on (hence my discussion of this problem in Is Philosophy Stupid?). But that is just another instance of scientists talking outside their own field (e.g. physicists can be pretty awful biologists and vice versa). Within their own fields, scientists are more often by training and results the best philosophers there can be. Because science is just philosophy with better data. It also has far better epistemic standards than philosophy, and makes a better effort to enforce them (just compare how the rising peer review crisis is being handled by science in contrast with philosophy: example, example, example, examples). So while scientists do need better training in philosophy if they intend to drive outside their lane, philosophers always need better training in the sciences. Because they have no other lane. If science is just philosophy with better data, philosophy is just science with worse data. And that is probably the most important lesson every philosopher needs to learn.