ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to two sides of the many-sided topic. In the first, aesthetic experience is seen as playing an evidential role for theistic religion. In the second, the most significant overlap between aesthetic and religious is seen as lying in certain analogies between value-ideals internal to the concept of deity and value-ideals in the aesthetic domain. The aesthetic and religious domains impinge on one another in a sinking variety of ways. Indignation is to be expected from art critics who believe themselves to have quite distinctive, self-contained aesthetic criteria for their appraisals of works of art. Critics of aesthetic re-workings of religion may fasten, with some justification, upon the nature of evil and the problems and challenges it has perennially set for theism. Probably the most historically significant of all the analogies and overlaps between religious and aesthetic concerns is the relating of artistic creator to divine creator.
