Art sculpts science ... and faith?

I find myself recently both helping to set up a Christians in Science group and to facilitate Christians working in the Arts who are in the University. I find myself, not unnaturally, considering matters that relate the two areas of endeavour. So, this article grabs interest, Can art shape scientific thought? : RSA blogs, in it the author says something intriguing:

What really fascinates me, though, is the idea that collaboration between artists and scientists might move to the level where it actually affects working practice. Scientific breakthroughs radically overhauling art are everywhere (the effect of photographic film on painting is a good example), but this relationship is largely seen as a one-way street. Imagine, instead, a scientific breakthrough that happened because of art.

And it seems to me that the science-to-art traffic has been at a more subtle level latterly: the discovery and popularisation of fractals  and chaos and complexity seemed to inspire art  which reflected those discoveries; organic, random and unpredictable forms became prominent.

But it's right that it'd be great if things could go the other way. However, I think that there is already a way in which the art-to-science dynamic occurs: it's a bit conceptual, but it is aesthetic. I'm talking about the elegance of the mathematics of sub-atomic particles which has inspired the discovery of particles that had been unknown but predicted by the symmetry of the equations. It seems to me that this aesthetic sense has been something of an art-to-science thing.

The author mentions the issue of religion, though somewhat unsatisfactorily. I have written and spoken  elsewhere of how it seems to me that Adam naming the animals helps me, at least, to see a certain commonality between the enterprises of art and science. Both involve 'naming' in the broader sense of conceptualising in order to give expression. In one case for purposes of technical understanding and application, in the other case for purposes of affective understanding and aesthetic appreciation. Both involve perceiving similarities and differences and representing them; in one case in theories and formulae and in the other through aesthetic media (for want of a better term).


The article mentions Kuhn's insight about paradigm shifts, and this is indeed relevant. To put it in terms of 'naming', a paradigm shift involves re-viewing things with a different set of similarities and differences picked out. The trick of an art-to-science influence would be, I suspect, in the presentation of information in such a way as to make plain the metaphoric bases of the thinking and to enable meta-thinking, or at least for new connections and re-constellations of data. For that, we need artists who can grasp something of the science and scientists who are able to mentor the artists so inclined.


I wonder whether this is the way being opened up by Information is Beautiful?