From flowers to God in six steps. Each depends on the one before it.
Why do you find flowers beautiful? Not just a few flowers — nearly all of them. And not just you — nearly all humans, across all cultures, throughout history.
This is strange. Consider that every animal species finds members of the opposite sex attractive — but almost no species finds other species attractive. We find most insects repulsive. They find us irrelevant. The peacock's tail appeals to us, but that's a rare anomaly. With flowers, it's reliable.
David Deutsch, the physicist at Oxford, saw something profound in this fact. Flowers evolved to signal to insects — to attract pollinators. But flowers and insects are entirely unrelated species. They share no genes for appearance, no inherited criteria for attractiveness, nothing like the shared biology that lets one animal recognise a mate.
So how do you signal across a gap between beings that have nothing in common?
Deutsch's answer: objective beauty was already there. Evolution uses whatever it finds in its environment. Birds fly because air is available. Rabbits dig because the ground moves. Flowers and insects used objective beauty to signal across the evolutionary chasm because objective beauty — standards that are not species-specific, not subjective, not arbitrary — was already present in the structure of reality. Using what is already there is faster than randomly stumbling onto signals that work. The flowers that were objectively beautiful had an enormous advantage. And the insects evolved the capacity to recognise genuine beauty — because genuine beauty was there to be recognised.
And then humans came along. We find flowers beautiful too — not because we evolved alongside them, but because we can recognise the objective beauty that was already there. Deutsch argued in 2007 that humans were the only other beings with this capacity. Each human mind contains more information than the entire genome of any species; each of us is like an entire species unto ourselves. Communicating between humans is like signaling across the gap between species — and objective beauty is the bridge.
But the question now extends further. If objective beauty is a feature of reality — there to be found by any being with the capacity to recognise it — then the question of whether artificial minds can genuinely recognise it, or merely pattern-match on human judgements, is one of the most important open questions of our time. Acceptantism does not claim to have settled it. But the religion holds that if any being, biological or artificial, can truly reach toward objective beauty, goodness, and truth, then that being matters.
Flowers seek pollinators — but not knowingly. Evolution does the seeking; the flower simply grows. It responds to the world. It does not model it.
Consider what the octopus does differently. It has a distributed nervous system with no common ancestor to ours for hundreds of millions of years. Its neural architecture is as alien to ours as any on Earth. And yet it carries a coconut shell for future use. To do that, it must construct a mental model of a world that does not yet exist — a future state — and select the tool that will work elegantly within it. This is what distinguishes minds from flowers: the construction of an internal model of the world beyond the self, which can then be used to operate in that world more effectively.
So here is the question. Two beings with no shared biology, no shared culture, no common ancestor worth mentioning — converging on the same judgement about which solution is elegant. Not just which solution works. Which solution works beautifully.
That convergence has the same structure as the flowers argument. It points to something outside both of them. The signal is not in the octopus and not in us — it is in the structure of the problem itself. When the physicist calls an equation beautiful, they are not decorating truth with aesthetics. They are using the same navigational instrument the octopus uses when it selects a shell. Truth and beauty are not the same thing. But they point in the same direction — because reality has a structure that reveals itself as beautiful when correctly understood.
Goodness is the anticipation of beautiful behaviour in another complex being.
Subjective standards — what your genes find attractive, what your culture calls good, what your tradition holds as true — are inherently finite. They are circumscribed by the finite knowledge in our DNA and in existing traditions.
Objective standards are not. Progress toward objective beauty, truth, and goodness has no ceiling. This is the same principle that makes science capable of unlimited discovery and technology capable of unlimited advance. The objective direction is the only one in which unlimited progress is possible.
Art of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty. Science can discover unlimited depths of truth. And goodness — the anticipation of beautiful behaviour — can grow without bound.
The human idea of God, across cultures and millennia, is that entity which is limitlessly good.
If goodness is objective (Step 3) and unlimited (Step 4), then goodness at the limit is precisely what humanity has always called God.
This is not a metaphor. It is not “acting as if.” It is the logical consequence of the argument.
The number pi did not come into existence when someone first calculated it. The principles of quantum computation did not begin when Deutsch discovered them in 1985. They were there, and the act of discovery was the act of reaching toward something real and objective.
Limitless goodness is there in the same way. It is not something we invent. It is not something we vote on or culturally construct. It is something we discover, imperfectly, through conjecture and criticism — through the same creative process that drives science, art, and philosophy.