Fall Colors: For Beauty or for Mere Survival?
Evolutionary thinking assumes that
beauty must pay its way, that splendor
is tolerated only if it serves survival.
The Mystery of Colors and Meaning
by John D. Wise
Each year, Autumn overwhelms me. It is my favorite season, though “why?” offers no easy answer. It calmly renews our acquaintance like an old friend, bringing both abundance and melancholic repose — the glad exhaustion of harvest, the sweetness of time and fecundity fulfilled. The air clarifies and sharpens, smelling of ripened fields and hearth smoke; amidst the frenzied squirrels and the raucous birdsong, the world seems … to wait. Its beauty is not that of youth or beginning, but of fruition, of fulfillment, of rest. Trees ignite; the world draws one last deep breath before the hush descends.
Autumn for me is ‘here, now … always’—the still point from which Nature’s dance radiates.[1]
In the breezy chill I walk hand in hand with my Jenny beneath the changing canopy, feeling that peculiar happiness—the kind that comes when delight and sorrow mix in a potent draught that only Autumn bequeaths.
Autumn is fulfillment.
All work, struggle, worry, the endless activity of the year, finds completion alongside this brief riot of color: the world ripened toward rest. Having done their monotonic labor through the long summer, the leaves suddenly blaze into glorious polyphony just before drifting breezily to their rest. In church we sing: “Come ye thankful people, come, raise the song of Harvest Home! All is safely gathered in.”
Thanksgiving looms across the fading daylight, and even the silence feels full.
There is something here that words touch but cannot contain—that moment when beauty and nostalgic melancholy meet and become one. Every autumn reminds me that the richest things in life are not the ones we can measure, but the ones that move us beyond measure.
The Poverty of Scientific Language
The BBC recently ran an article titled “The Mystery of Why Leaves Change Colour in the Autumn,” November 1, 2025. True to form, it spoke the language of science: chlorophylls breaking down, anthocyanins forming, wavelengths shifting under cooler light. It was all accurate, all informative—and yet somehow insufficient.
C.S. Lewis once warned that the more precise our language becomes, the less real experience it can contain. “There is,” he wrote, “a special region of experiences which can be communicated by Scientific language, namely its common measurable features—but most experience cannot. To be incommunicable by Scientific language is, so far as I can judge, the normal state of experience.”[2]
Science is a marvelous servant but a poor companion. Its precision is power, but also poverty: a self-imposed blindness to what cannot be quantified. Science can measure wavelength but not vision—the crystalline sparkle of an Autumn morning. It can weigh pigments but not beauty. The very act of quantifying the world narrows it. Like reason itself, science holds to truth only when it knows its limits and limits its knowledge-claims. It loses sight the moment it mistakes measurement as the measure of all things.
Abstract of fall colors by Jenny Wise.
The Story We Bring to the Data
And so we turn, as we must, to the stories we tell about what we see. We live inside a drama—the living world, the interplay of time and season—and science writes its own narrative about that drama. The BBC article, like most in its genre, sought an evolutionary explanation of the “mystery,” invoking the E-word five times: perhaps red leaves warn insects; perhaps the pigments protect the tree as it retrieves nutrients before winter. Every explanation presumes that there must be an evolutionary explanation—an adaptive reason for the color.
But what if the colors are not primarily adaptive? What if they are beauty that functions?
Evolutionary thinking assumes that beauty must pay its way, that splendor is tolerated only if it serves survival. A teleological view begins elsewhere: that beauty itself belongs to the design—not accidental, not adaptive, but intrinsically expressive of order and the value woven into the world. The one story says, “This is useful.”
The other says, “It is very good.”
Design, I would argue, is the “natural” reading of the world. It meets us without effort; we simply see it. The evolutionary reading, by contrast, is forced—a hyper-rational insistence that the obvious script must be rewritten. It is partly the legacy of an age that mistook reason for revelation, that inverted light and darkness and called the inversion Enlightenment. But even as purpose is denied, science cannot help speaking the language of purpose. Evolution subtracts the Designer only by pretending it does not need the very Telos whose grammar it still uses.
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Seeing the Whole
Science is the language of the part; wisdom seeks the language of the Whole. The mechanistic eye sees processes—light, pigment, temperature. The human soul sees meaning—completion, renewal, grace. Neither cancels the other, but only one can fill the heart and fully satisfy the demands of Reason.
So let the biologists analyze the chemistry; they will do it well, and we are grateful for their analysis. But let the poets, and the worshipers, and the children walking home through the falling leaves, remember that the story they bring to the data may reveal more truth than the data alone can ever tell.
Add that to science, and we have a science worthy of the name.
Perhaps the mystery of autumn is not that the leaves change, but that we can, and sometimes do—learning, at last, the beauty of boundaries and the wisdom of letting go.
And worshiping the Creator.
Footnotes
[1] The language here is drawn from my favorite 20th C. long-form poem, T S Eliot’s Four Quartets.
[2] “The Language of Religion,” in Christian Reflections, Eerdman’s: Grand Rapids, 1967.
See Illustra Media’s film “Why the Leaves Fall” released this month.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.