Belinda wrote:Greta wrote:
How does Starry Night evoke eternity to you? I just see a multiple perspective like Picasso. Instead of taking different angles he seems to be taking different tempos of time. The picture suggests to me a snapshot with a lens in the middle showing with fast motion imagery of stars' apparent travel due to the world's rotation, like this:
... To photograph anything you need to do a lot of the work a painter does but what the camera work lacks compared with the paint is the directness of the hand work. The intellectual implication of eternity is the same though.
Greta, perhaps living as you do in spacious Oz you don't experience night -time light pollution which afflicts much of England. However do you think that night-time light pollution is positively bad for mental health? I do.
It's a bit like comparing the results of musicians or a music sequencer (as is used in most pop these days). I like the artisanship and subjectivism myself (although I personally consider hyper realism in art to be a mere technical display unless capturing more than can be captured by a camera rather than imitating one).
We have the same light pollution issues in cities here as everywhere. I don't mind because I most enjoy daytime skies and started what I hope to be quite a long term project, capturing sky's almost endless variety from one standpoint:
https://goo.gl/photos/W7y1WfseQdqRBMwh9
Belinda wrote:At the risk of being accused of being a Christian
Please note the first photo in the above collection - an Easter-y cloud
Belinda wrote: ... and hopelessly unscientific I recommend that hymn, words by Addison, The Spacious Firmament on High and a good tune too, for expressing sheer feeling for the sky.
Similarly Psalm 19 of David The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. David was a great poet. Unfortunately the religious, including presumably the poet himself, have used the feeling of wonder of nature to prove by argument from design that God did it.However I believe that, like the pictures, the poetry also expresses a quite common feeling of eternity and how we often need a vision of it, typically in the night sky. The expressive function of religion is not usually debated by philosophers.
You are not unscientific; more a romantic whose romance is bounded by sanity, judgement and realism.
Theists should ideally be able to appreciate natural wonders as much as anyone, although "God dunnit" is one of many filters (along with "what kind of
x is that?" and "Is it dangerous?") that can inhibit deep understanding.