A beiger shade of pale

Joe Carter at First Things passes on a story about the “average color” of the universe, according to astronomers. You’ll quickly note that it’s about the same shade as the walls of a doctor’s waiting room. The joke is that this must be “God’s favorite color.”

It reminds me of an old Reader’s Digest story about a pastor who shows friends around his new parsonage. “Why are all the walls beige?” one of them asks.

“Because that’s the only color a committee can agree on.”

Is beige God’s favorite color? I doubt it very much.

In the first place, how do we know this universe is the only one there is? Perhaps there’s a bouquet, a rainbow of universes, running the full spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Perhaps we live in one of the dull ones.

My experience with God is that He Himself is anything but dull, and he doesn’t make decisions by committee. Like Aslan, He’s not a tame Lion. He has a taste for extremes, and the average beige of our universe represents a mean between the extreme joys and the extreme horrors of existence.

I have to imagine that His favorite color (like mine) is red. Because when He looks on the red of His Son’s blood, He is pleased and forgives our sins.

5 thoughts on “A beiger shade of pale”

  1. God doesn’t have a favorite color, because having favorite attributes like colors is silly. If you asked God why he loved you, he would give you an answer so long and diverse you couldn’t remember it. That’s because he doesn’t do favorites. He enjoys all of his exceedingly excellent creation.

  2. The idea that the average of all colors used is the artists favorite color is silly. Suppose we took one of your books, mashed all the words together and, by averaging the letters, presumed to find your favorite word?

    Anyway …

    Your entire claim is based on the presupposition that beige is dull. By what objective standard do you judge dullness? Earth tones happen to be my favorite colors. They are very pleasant and soothing. Bright colors are annoying. Therefore, based on my preferences, I have objectively determined that beige is most likely a variation of God’s favorite color.

    He likes dark greens and navy blue as well, but only for accessorizing.

  3. I think I should have stated my opinions more personably. My primarily idea on the universe question is that the idea of the Universe encompasses everything, so there isn’t an everything somewhere else. It’s all the universe. There is no multiverse.

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