If there's no God, then why is the Creation beautiful?

Today, after opening several browser tabs of various news stories that had bubbled up to the top of the internet and weeding through them, I found myself with two left which stood in obvious opposition. One of them was a piece from Aeon Magazine about strictly observant Orthodox Jews turning atheist, but being unwilling to tell anyone out of fear of isolation from their tight-nit communities. As so many of the increasingly popular "longform" news stories these days, it drew me in with the super personal account of one man's struggle, from which it takes periodic breaks to discuss the broader scope of the phenomenon and also interject parallel accounts from others experiencing very nearly the same thing, and by the end of it these people all come together somehow  to stand in solidarity together over their common dilemma/goal/whatever - it really is a compelling storytelling method!

I could give an analysis of the whole story because it was quite stimulating, but I'll focus instead on the issue which relates to the other browser tab that I was left with. As I read through the various personal accounts, perhaps the unifying thread is that all of these people seemed to stumble over what they perceived to be an incongruence between the first few chapters of Genesis and science.

There is a certain desire in man to know exactly how everything works. Take a moment to explore that statement in your mind and realize the futility of it, given the fact that in order to understand even something as simple as the inner workings of a single strain of bacteria requires a lifelong pursuit that is itself built on the shoulders of hundreds or thousands of others who have already died after a lifelong pursuit of the same thing. Notice, however, that I was careful not to say it was futile to study such things. Indeed, after many people have devoted their lives to uncovering some particular one of God's multitudinous mysteries, some societal benefits can be achieved, like antibiotics or satellites or cell phones, and that's great!

Disclaimers about the value of science aside, let me return to my original thesis: there is a desire in man to know exactly how everything works. More properly stated, there is a desire in man to feel like he knows exactly how everything works. We inherently don't want to give up control of our lives to uncertainty or doubt, and this is just as much true in religion as it is in science: examine the institutions of either, and you will find people claiming to have all the answers.

Many of the questions posed by the Hassidim-turned-atheists in the Aeon article that caused them to abandon their belief in God were born out of this desire to know exactly how everything works. For example, the Torah says that "woman was taken out of man," which doesn't jive with evolutionary theory. Evolution also dictates that snakes were lizards who lost their legs long before modern man existed, but the bible states that snakes were lizards who lost their legs after an interaction with the first man and woman - "how can this glaring disparity be reconciled??" they rhetorically ask with a smirk.

The problem is not that the bible is wrong, but that it's purpose is not to answer these questions. You can pore and pore and pore over the biblical text and try to piece together what seems like a reasonable explanation, and people do just that! And they do this because they want to feel like they have all of the puzzle pieces in just the right place - either from their religious texts (along with their particular interpretation of that text to complete the picture) or else from scientific theories (along with their particular philosophical musings to complete the picture). I am aware that I'm making very broad generalizations here.

My point is that the bible's purpose is not to answer every scientific question that we are able to devise, otherwise God would have masterfully and thoroughly done so! There would be no need for laboring over the scriptures to judge the bible against scientific fact - or scientific "fact" against the bible, for that matter. Instead, the bible masterfully and thoroughly serves a different purpose, the purpose that God chose for it: to communicate who God is, why He made us, and His incredible ongoing plan for the salvation of mankind. That really ought to be enough! Sadly, for some people it isn't.

I hope I haven't rambled for so long that you've forgotten that I had another browser tab open, and this is the point at which I will now justify the title of this post. Atheists ask religious people what they think to be impossible questions all the time, and, because the bible was never intended to satisfactorily answer these particular questions, it makes them think that they have answers that you don't have, which makes them feel nice and secure about their carefully crafted worldview. So in turn, I ask an impossible question to those who put their trust in science to the exclusion of God: if there's no God, then why is the Creation (or, if that offends them, the "world" or "universe") perceived as beautiful by our humble sensory receptors?

The other browser tab was the following video of solar flares compiled by NASA over a period of 5 years:

There is no evolutionary reason for which our genome should have selected in such a way as to universally perceive beauty in those images - why we should find it beautiful in the absence of an evolutionary advantage is a mystery to science. Even the beauty of a woman to a man is not as universally agreed upon as the beauty of the cosmos to all people! Think about that.

Just as the bible, by the deliberate choice of God Himself, does not answer every conceivable question about the universe we live in, science, by the sheer complexity of what is studied, cannot fully account for the wonders that God has made and done since the beginning of time. Therefore, if science seems to be at odds with the word of so great a God as has been revealed in the bible, may I not simply acknowledge that there are things that the Almighty God has done which I cannot understand? Or things He has said which I have failed to comprehend? And when I find science in agreement with the word of this God, should I not glorify Him because He has intimately known from the beginning what men have only barely grasped at, despite thousands of years of searching?

Science and religion need not be at odds if we are willing to humble our limited selves before the limitless God.