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It is often said that science is beautiful or that mathematics is beautiful, or that scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers are not merely like artists, but fundamentally artists themselves. In abbreviating reality via abstraction, science and philosophy end up producing sensuously beautiful, satisfying—even seemingly spiritual—models and representations of reality with the appeal of sacred geometry or music. All of which leads to our frequently mistaking science for art, even if art is the intensification of reality by sensuous means, and science the abbreviation of reality via abstraction. It is why perhaps we tend to associate chess with art. While the intentions of art and science are much the same, their means are quite different, even if they sometimes manage to resemble one another in outward aspect. It is ironic in that science must deny the sensuous as well as the irrational in order to achieve the theoretical clarity for which it strives. Yet since scientific representation tends to have the “look” of art, archetype, and religious symbol, it lends itself to idolatry by capturing the imaginations of those hungry—indeed starved—for divine transcendence in a disenchanted historical epoch.



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