I recently recorded a podcast conversation (for The Substance) on one of my favorite films ever, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998). It’s an epic movie that wrestles with age-old questions of evil and sin in the world. The opening voiceover sets the tone for Malick’s rumination: “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” A war film set during WWII’s Battle of Guadalcanal, Line could easily succumb to despair and nihilism about the state of a suffering-filled world. And yet Malick takes a different posture. Amidst the bloodshed and strife, there is beauty. Scored by Hans Zimmer and shot by cinematographer John Toll, The Thin Red Line is one of the most gorgeous films ever made. Like Jim Caviezel’s main character, viewers are left in such a state of wonder at the world’s beauty (“all things shining”) that they can’t help but consider God.

Beauty is an apologetic for God. There is no naturalistic explanation for it. Yet when an artist like Malick so forcefully confronts our senses with beauty, our human hearts intuitively understand what our modern minds hesitate to believe: There is a God, and he is good. Gavin Ortlund is a Christian thinker on the forefront of the idea of beauty as a key to contemporary apologetics. Give a listen to his recent Gospelbound podcast interview where he discusses beauty as evidence of God, and why music, math, and love cannot be accounted for in an atheistic framework. If you like what you hear, pick up his new book on the topic too.