What Do You See When the Sun Sets?

On a windy evening, at the highest part of the city, I sat watching the sunset with my friend. Sunsets in Madrid somehow never disappoint.

“Look at that, man,” my friend said. “You can’t tell me that’s the result of an accident.” We’d had this conversation before, and I suspect we’ll have it again.

“Not even an accident; that would imply some purpose in the first place. Just a completely random sequence of events.”

He laughed. “Things like that, things that are so perfect cannot be random.” I thought I heard him speak a cliche about god’s paintbrush, although I suspect I was only building in my head a straw-man to argue against.

“What do you mean by perfect?” I asked. “Perfect for who, for what?”

“You can just look at it and know it’s beautiful.”

Previously, this “Is beauty objective?” question had arisen between us in regard to food. We had travelled together and therefore had needed to reach a compromise on where to eat. He had argued for basing our decisions on Google and Yelp ratings; I usually argued for choosing some place we passed that looked good at the time we were hungry. He believed, generally, that the more you paid for food, the better it would be. I believed our enjoyment of the food would be based on the expectations we had for it.

I thought for a minute about how to respond. “The human body is perfect, too, right?” In our earlier conversation, we had agreed on this. “All these bones, connected at just the right angle, to allow us to move all these muscles, that exist at just the right density. All the blood vessels that are just the right width to allow blood to be delivered at just the right speed and in just the right quantity to…wherever it needs to go.”

“Of course.”

“But, ok,” I continued, “that’s only because we already know the purpose. We already know that the goal of the human body is to walk, to run, to lift things, to breathe. Our bodies are only perfect with those goals in mind.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, your argument about the earth, and about intelligent design and all that, it comes from a place of knowing the purpose. Yes, the planet is a certain distance from the sun, which is just the right distance to make it warm but not too warm. That’s just for us, though.”

“Um, yeah…” my friend said, evidently happy to let me stutter and stammer my way into a loss.

“Alright, take that cigarette lighter there,” I said, seizing on a life raft someone had dropped in the middle of the concrete path that led to the little reflecting pool.

“You and I, we look at that lighter and immediately, even if we’re not conscious of it, all these thoughts come to mind. We know what it does: It makes fire. We know how it works: You push down and spin a little wheel. We know why it’s useful: because fire is hard to contain. We know what it’s made of: metal, plastic, and butane. We know what it’s for: to light cigarettes or candles. And we know that, for that purpose, it’s absolutely perfect.”

My friend looked at me in anticipation.

“The so-called perfection of that lighter depends on us knowing all of that. When a dog out for a walk steps over it, or when an ant scurrying about comes across it and has to walk around, it means nothing to them; it’s no different from this pebble here,” I said, picking one up. “They have no need or use for fire, so a lighter is just another object on the ground. You see what I’m saying?”

He waited for me to continue. “Only after you’ve learned from or been told by others what ‘beauty’ is—swirling primary colors, contrasting darks and brights—is the sunset beautiful. Once you know that humans do best in temperatures between 40 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and once you establish that as a good thing, then sure, the sun is the perfect distance from the earth. But if you didn’t hold those preconceptions, there would be nothing special about the earth’s distance from the sun, nor that amazing sky.”

And it was amazing. To me, anyway.

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