But that's insane," Morrow protested. Uvarov hissed, "No one ever said it wasn't. We're human beings. What do you expect? - Stephen Baxter

As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact.

Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.

It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process.
Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?