Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association

Volume 94, 2020

The Good, the True, the Beautiful: Through and of the Ages

Alexander Pruss
Pages 205-213

The Cosmos as a Work of Art
A Skeptical Theist Approach That Isn’t Too Skeptical

I shall defend Augustine’s holistic aesthetic response to the problem of evil by considering the variety of ways in which our vision of the cosmos is limited and how this is similar to the kinds of limitations on viewing a work of art that would make negative criticism unreasonable. At the same time, I identify an interesting asymmetry: we may be justified in making positive, but not negative, judgments about the creator’s skill on the basis of a mere partial perception.