The interior and sides of the Parthenon were damaged by an explosion in a relatively recent war. The east and west facades where most of the golden ratios can be seen are original, not subject to destruction and renovation.

What an expertly written reply. I have long been fascinated with the intricacies of the Parthenon’s design and the subtle deviations from strict geometry to enhance the perceived experience – slight tilt and spacing of the corner columns, the critical repetitive use of the golden ratio – all at a time when ancient Greeks were both fascinated and inspired by their own mathematical discoveries being replicated in nature. There is no question the Parthenon was both a geometric and design experience for humans to feel. Clearly, I see.

As a point of clarity, pareidolia is “the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music. Pareidolia can be considered a subcategory of apophenia.”

Apophenia, by contrast, is the tendency to mistakenly perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Apophenia has come to imply a human propensity to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.”

More generally though, pattern recognition and analysis is a crucial and fundamental and crucial skill in humans, and other animals as well. We could not survive without it, and it is an important aspect of all advances in scientific research. So while there is risk in attributing patterns to information where they do not exist, there is also risk in ignoring patterns in information that do exist.

Rather than to just “feel” a certain way, I would challenge you to actually do some research and provide evidence for the statement you’ve just made to dismiss the evidence as pareidolia.

Go pick a random sample of ancient or modern constructions and find two or more measurements which have the golden ratio of 1.618 to 1. You’ll need to pick a random sample of 30 buildings to make the results statistically significant. You’ll need to require that the golden ratios identified be accurate to within a pixel or two on high resolution images, or within perhaps +/- 0.1% on stated dimensions. You’ll need two measurements that have true significance, say height versus width or major dividing lines, and not something ridiculous such as “from the bottom of the door handle at the entry to the top right corner of the window frame on the third floor.”

I think you’ll find it much more difficult than you think it is to support your statement. It’s so easy to be very dismissive and just say that something doesn’t exist or is purely coincidental, without actually doing any research and analysis. That’s what debunkers usually do, and that’s why their results and conclusions are normally wrong.

And I’ve not just presented one or two examples, but many. If you find that a dozen key significant measurements in anything that are accurate to four decimal places, and that correspond to a common geometric relationship like the golden ratio, the more reasonable and scientific interpretation of the evidence is that there was something that led to this to happen rather than it all being just a big coincidence. It frankly becomes almost statistically impossible for coincidence to be the cause.

Your feeling that this is pareidolia also ignores the historical context, which is critical to any analysis. The Greeks of this era had a fascination and reverence for mathematics and geometry. Plato even associated the known “elements” (earth, air, fire, water and the universe) with the five platonic solids of geometry (cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron), two of which have geometries grounded in the golden ratio. As the Parthenon was being contemplated, Polykleitos in about 450 BC wrote “The Canon,” a treatise on aesthetic theories of the mathematical bases of artistic perfection. The Parthenon was to be the temple of all temples, so what would lead anyone to think that they ignored mathematics and geometry in its design and left it up to coincidence?

Leonardo da Vinci said this: “There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.”