I recently watched Alison Krauss perform “You Will Be My Ain True Love” from the soundtrack to Cold Mountain. Her interpretation of the song was so beautiful and profound that I actually stood transfixed for a moment.
I spoke to no one about this but wondered how many others had been similarly moved. Within minutes a friend of mine in the music business approached me and said that she had experienced something strange and wonderful during Krauss’s performance.
My friend said it was almost as if Krauss had been an unknowing conduit to a higher power. Her singing was so mysterious and ethereal that it must have come from somewhere else, my friend surmised. This is not someone I normally talk to about spiritual matters, but I wasn’t surprised by what she said. It isn’t much of a stretch for most people to understand that listening to truly beautiful music can be like communicating with God.
I admit, this anecdote doesn’t say much that is new or insightful about music. Anyone who has ever listened to or played a Bach Invention (I am currently trying to learn Invention No. 6 in E Major) knows that Bach—a deeply religious man who composed cantatas for the St. Thomas Lutheran Church in Leipzig—could not have written this music alone. I am certain the Almighty Himself played a part.
I make this point often in social settings, and no one I know, including classically trained musicians, has ever been surprised (or offended) to hear it. But then, I don’t often talk to evolutionary biologists. No doubt, they wouldn’t be so ready to accept such biological heresy.
To biologists, music is nothing but an enigma wrapped in a treble clef wrapped in a 6/8 time signature. Put simply, it doesn’t fit well in their materialist box. Indeed, biologists are especially perplexed since it isn’t readily apparent how music has helped humans survive in the framework of evolution.
Charles Darwin himself was confused by music. He wrote that “man’s ability to enjoy and produce music must be ranked as the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”
Perhaps he can be excused for not paying attention to such Sunday school staples as “I will sing and make music to the Lord” (Psalm 27:6) or “I will sing with the spirit and sing with the mind” (1 Corinthians 14:15). But what about Numbers 10:9: “When you go into battle, the priests should sound the trumpets.” What better exemplifies “survival of the fittest” if not warfare and battle?
Nicholas Wade writes in a New York Times piece that evolutionary biologists are mystified that music everywhere is based on the octave, making it universal and crossing all cultural boundaries. But how can that be if it has not helped humankind—in some clear way—to survive?
Some evolutionary psychologists contend that the ability to enjoy music may have something to do with love. Dr. Geoffrey Miller thinks music may show who’s the fittest to survive. In ancient cultures people danced to music. Good dancers, as well as singers, were signaling potential mates that they had good mental and physical genes.
Dr. Miller concludes in The Origins of Music that “music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females.”
Guys attract women with music, and they’ve been doing this since ancient times? Stop the presses! Dr. Miller could have saved himself some time and expense if he’d only paid attention in his college literature class to the Song of Songs (7:6-7): “How beautiful you are and how pleasing, O love, with your delights. Your stature is like that of a palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.” (You generally learn about that one in college as catechism teachers tend to skip the racier parts.)
Dr. Sandra Trehub has studied the music tastes of infants from two to six months old. Trehub says they prefer to listen to harmonious sounds over disharmonious ones. If Trehub had talked to a couple of the infants’ moms, she would have learned much the same thing. Trehub writes in Nature Neuroscience that the “rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than products of culture.”
Is it possible that music is a gift that God gave to His people to help us relate to Him? St. Paul tells us to “Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:19-20).
But if you’re an evolutionary biologist, biblical references are, well, silly. Biologists believe everything in nature has happened by chance, even if it were, in some materialist way, miraculous. Such a leap of faith is inconceivable, considering the overwhelming odds. Perhaps only an evolutionary biologist is capable of that level of faith.
The increasingly popular concept of Intelligent Design would clear up many of these mysteries. As Benjamin Wiker points out in the April 2003 CRISIS, “In philosophy, the secularized intellect denies the existence of any truth beyond what is humanly contrived, and this denial manifests itself…in claims of omniscience and self-pitying lamentations of complete skepticism.”
How else to explain the confusion of an entire branch of science over the simple notion that “All God’s Children Got Rhythm”?