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The God Particle Hidden in Art and Music

The God Particle Hidden in Art and Music

Last updated on: July 31, 2026 at 10:07 pm by Gil Rosado

The God Particle Hidden in Art and Music 2026-07-31T22:07:07-04:00 Gil Rosado

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In Search of The God Particle

As a composer, writer and creator of visual poems, I frequently straddle the fence between the sounds and structures of music, language and visual images. I spent many years cultivating my education and understanding of the arts and eventually realized that the arts must really be thought of as interdisciplinary. Art is an open canvas that encompasses the entire creative world, a domain of skills and techniques.

However, one thing is foundational to all the arts. They “live” off of our inherent, and perhaps “God-imbedded” desire to achieve something hidden within ourselves and the world around us.

Art in Balance and The God Particle

The important point of having art is that it reflects our need for it. Art in one form or another has been with us since the dawn of civilization. But why exactly do we need art? Is there something built into our DNA perhaps that makes us want to make and consume art? Is this part of our own “God Particle” perhaps?

The Greek Philosopher’s Thoughts on Art

So, this goes into a more philosophical argument. Why do we need to depict images and tell stories with art at all? While there is no conclusive answer for this despite arguments on art, aesthetics and morality going back to the time of the ancient Greeks, perhaps the most critical thing and yet the least discussed aspect of art is that it feeds our inherent need to resolve our internal conflicts. The Greeks had it partially right in that we all need and crave balance in our world of perception. But they never fully explored why men and women seek balance other than as a “natural” complimentary, concrete depiction of inherent morality.

While a full examination of Greek philosophy is obviously far beyond the scope of this article, it is important to point out that “balance” in its most fundamental sense, presumes that there are elements in tension that require resolution. And that’s the true “God particle”. Oh, it’s not the one scientists are researching at CERN. But “balance” and more specifically, “the balancing of nature” offers a very strong inductive argument for the existence of God.

You’ve perhaps heard this argument in one of its many forms.

Intelligence Is Order from Chaos

This one has been paraphrased numerous times, usually when theologians or like-minded others use an inductive reasoning argument which fundamentally posits that only a God could create and/or maintain order or balance in the universe and our known world. Balance and order, thus, are the argument for God. The assumption here is that the unnatural or un-Godly state of the universe and its nature would be one with perpetual random, unordered Chaos.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

A more recent psychological theory that speaks to our inherent desire to “balance” our internal nature is Leon Festinger’s “Cognitive Dissonance Theory,” which fundamentally states that all human behavior is not appetite-driven but rather we seek to achieve balance and consistency within ourselves and our environment.

How Does Art Help Us Achieve Balance?

In all the arts, there is one constant factor. Every element is moving between states of unrest and rest, between states of tension and repose, between war and peace, between tension and balance. This is what interests us the most. We call these states Dissonance and Consonance.

Consonance vs Dissonance within Visual Art

Most people don’t realize that every image we see is actually in motion. Every photograph, every sketch or even every observation of any inanimate object is every bit as much in motion as any video is. Apart from the fact that our visual perception is based on our ability to see moving waves of light and colors coming into our retinas and processed through our brains, what we are actually seeing is scan of movement of lines and colors formed via contrasts in symmetry vs asymmetry.

Every drawing, painting, still image and sculpture is constructed using variations of simple shapes, repetition and smoothing therein. This pertains both to monochrome and colored images. Lines are always moving from one end of the image to the other, whether or not the image is frozen in time on a canvas or active, as in a moving video image.

Because of this visual motion phenomenon, artists create the dissonance via wide contrasts in transitions between lines and colors, light vs shadow and via the distortion of shapes. The more distorted the images, the greater the state of unbalance. However, artists cleverly control these distorted contrasts and achieve visual consonance by reducing or recapitulating the contrasts to align with their intended visual message or “story”.

Consonance vs Dissonance within Creative Writing

Any fiction writer or poet knows that we have great control over tensions and their resolutions via archetypical story arcs whereby we sequence the scenes within our stories over multiple stages of conflicts and the variations between their resolutions. The conflicts are obviously the dissonant elements but the typical interest for our readers lies in again, the natural proclivity of achieving a balanced outcome.

However, the limitation of secular writing, at least, is that it can only achieve cognitive effects in the reader, as opposed to direct experience through the visual and aural senses.

Consonance vs Dissonance within Music

Plato once wrote that music’s importance relied on the fact that it promoted harmony and virtue within the world. Over two thousand years later, German philosopher Arthur Schoepenaur once wrote that music is a universal language, making it superior to the other arts because of its fundamental principles that inhabit and speak to our innate being. While neither Plato nor Schopenhauer were actual musicians (and Schopenhauer was actually an atheist), their ability to recognize the strength of music’s “will” towards our natural state offers more support for the argument that music is the most analogous and “natural” art form most closely linked to properties within our human experience.

Music is constantly in a moving state and as such, its capacity to “move” listeners like you and I to between states of unrest and repose are even easier to achieve. Tonal music, which is the origin of the majority of the music in our world, is structured perpetually between states of tense and/or discordant harmonies and states of repose known as cadences.

Plainly put, there exist certain pitches or notes in music that sound discordant and even the everyday listener can detect when something in music doesn’t quite sound correct. To use a more extreme example, why do we sometimes listen to singers and can instantly detect when they just sound “wrong” or “out of tune”?

Anytime we listen to singers or instrumentalists, we are listening to a combination of notes sounded at the same time and notes sounded in varying time sequences. The reason we hear notes as “correct” in one case but “incorrect” in another is because notes have a “push-pull” relationship between themselves.

Music Naturally Moves Towards Balance

And this is the most fundamental principle or the “Holy Grail” of music and its theory.

Before I continue, I should note that we didn’t create music via music theory. In fact, the relationship is just the opposite. Music theory is a body of principles developed to explain why music functions as it does.

In traditional Western tonal music theory, music and notes are classified as a scientific-like series of note intervals and repeating consonant note patterns commonly known as scales. When three or more notes are sounded together, this is referred to as a chord. During any musical performance, when non-consonant notes are sounded within a scale, chord, or sequence, we, as listeners, require resolution. Essentially, they pull us directly from states of tension and dissonance and almost magically have a strong push to resolve into a cadence. Music is the only art that has “natural” or arguably even “God-like” properties that compel us from tension towards balance and resolution of conflict.

Hence, there is no greater testament to the existence of God than to have created within us the natural drive to balance our conflicts and to have given us the gift of the arts as a means to help us understand the innermost aspects of our being.

Work Cited

Cognitive Dissonance Theory, https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-031-51650-4_264-1.

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About Gil Rosado

Gil Rosado, is a Writer, Musician, Composer & Polymath. His works include Visual Poems as well as traditional poems, philosophy, screenplays, stage plays, essays and fiction. Much of his eclectic works are informed and inspired by esoteric and overt religious themes. His Patheos.com articles are largely driven by his Christian beliefs and his knowledge of theology, philosophy and global religions. His book "The Names We Wear" is now available exclusively on Amazon.com You can read more about the author here.

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