Beautiful Ideas.

[Khandro]

Do you find the natural world beautiful?
Does this world embody beautiful ideas?

[jomifl]

Khandro, In science a reference is a link to a related piece of work that has some relevance. This piece of work is recoverable and contains relevant facts. Your persisent name dropping is not a reference in the above sense, it is just an attempt at intellectual bullying. Give me just one reference that proves the existence of god if you can.

[jim360]

It is the quality of the work that matters, not the status of the authors.

[woofgang]

As someone who believes in god, I wonder why other people who believe feel the need for proof or to argue with other people. You can’t “prove” belief or argue people into it so why try?
The intelligent design argument has been around for years. Personally I find it an unconvincing argument for either side.

[jomifl]

/It is the quality of the work that matters, not the status of the authors./
Quite..

[jomifl]

Woofgang, I have no problem with peoples beliefs, but when they try to justify them and delude others by using spurious facts and pseudo science then I feel they need to be held to account.

[mibn2cweus]

It's not particularly difficult to see where the notion of an intelligence guiding the creation and make up of reality comes from. The difficulty appears to be in arriving at the only logical conclusion following from observation, that the faculties of intelligence and creativity are necessarily a product of rather than the creator of that reality.

[jomifl]

It is the quality of the work that matters, not the status of the authors.

[woofgang]

jom, you could just ignore them??

[jomifl]

^something odd happened there

[jomifl]

Woofgang, Indeed I could and sometimes I do. But then so could you and then we could all switch our computers off an do something useful.

[jomifl]

Beso, my fretted instruments have 12 semitones in an octave.

[woofgang]

but you “feel they need to be held to account” whereas i do it for amusement :)

[Khandro]

jomifl; //After all he wasn't a cleric was he?// No. but he gazed into the universe, in his day, deeper than anyone else, so I respect his views rather more than some people's.

I once, on AB, used a well-known quote from Plato and got the response,(no names, no pack-drill) "Why do you quote someone else, don't you have any ideas of your own?"

I said, occasionally, but they never seem to be as good as Plato's :0)

[jim360]

I'd say for me the biggest problem with your use of quotes is that they appear sometimes to be more about ending a discussion than beginning it. The implication of Einstein (or Newton, Aristotle, Bohr, Schroedinger, ...) saying such-and-such is that, well, here is what a genius thinks, so it's surely correct. I've no idea if this is fair or not, but it sure feels that way at times. It's an over-reliance on authority (and anyway risks misinterpreting the point of the original quote, or is overly selective) that doesn't really move anything forward very much, and can be quite frustrating to try and engage with.

Not that my exhaustive, at-the-character-limit, spread-across-two-full-answer-boxes posts are necessarily much better for engaging with (I'm sure I talk too much), but at least it's original content. That runs the risk of being wrong, of course, but it's a risk worth taking I feel.

[Khandro]

jim; How original do you think any of us are?

[jomifl]

'Some people stand on the shoulders of giants others hide behind them' was that original? probably not :-)

[beso]

jomifl //Beso, my fretted instruments have 12 semitones in an octave.//

Yes but no scale includes all the tones. Consult the definition of "scale".

[jomifl]

OK Beso, I'm with you, I'd forgotten that there are all those other scales superimposed on the chromatic scale.