Experiences of Beauty in Art as Signs of Transcendence: Claims in Need of Confirmation

Christian philosophers, theologians, and artists regularly claim that experiences of beauty in art can function (i) as a road to God and (ii) as an encounter with God. These claims are well motivated by various Biblical texts and sophisticated theistic accounts of aesthetic perception. What is often lacking, however, is empirical support for key premises in arguments supporting these common claims. As a result, the connection between beauty, art, and God remains tentative and subject to defeat by empirically grounded naturalistic accounts of aesthetic perception. In this essay, we will identify the key empirical premises supporting these common claims and suggest the application of the emerging field, experimental theological aesthetics, for empirically testing such premises. If successful, the resultant experimentally based approach to philosophical and theological aesthetics suggests new ways of advancing long-standing debates typically carried out along theoretical or a priori lines with little or no appeal to empirical concerns.