Do We Really Have To Choose?

[Baydwin]

I wasn't aware of that. But regarding the other ones (multiverse and so on) are those really theories or hypotheses? I thought those were all completely speculative. Yes? No? If they are purely speculative, then I'm not so sure they're theories, but rather hypotheses. I'm not a physicist though, and they may be regarded as more concrete than I thought they had been.

I'm really not sure where hypothesis ends and theory begins with theoretical physics, by it's nature most of it only has thought experiment and mathematics to support it.
Yes, it's all speculative, as any theory concerning "before" the Big Bang must be, but it's the only non-religious one I can think of that includes some sort of intelligence.

 

[Storm]

I disagree. The tempelton foundation was more than happy to put up the money for the great prayer experiment. There's no doubt in my mind that they would have felt otherwise could they have foreseen the results. The royal family should be the healthiest people on the planet given the amount of prayers said on their behalf. The Rawandan genocide would never have happened if prayer were effective. Nothing fails like prayer, not because science can't prove or disprove it, but becuase the random element lies not in prayer itself but in the hindsight of the person who believes in it and moves the goalpost as is necessary to continue rationalizing faith in prayer. I find it such a horrible insult to 9 year old rape victims when I hear a person say "I prayed to make my tomatoes grow". Yeah, great, nice work god, we'll enjoy those juicy tomatoes tonight while Jane down the street has a forced rendez-vous with her drunk uncle. Next time do me a favour when I pray for my tomatoes and strike me with ligthening and them move on to helping Jane please.

My kneejerk reaction is to agree with everything you've said.

However, the cold, analytical side of me just isn't convinced. When the success or failure of prayer is dependent on the whim of God, there can be no proof.

 

[Magic Man]

Yeah, but that's just political camoflage, and we all know it.

That's true, but the idea of ID doesn't strike me as solely Abrahamic.

This seemed so simple when I thought of it.

Anyway, I see it as like you compared to what people say about you. I tell someone you had a fight with your wife. Maybe you did and maybe you didn't, but it has no bearing on the fact that you're married.

But in that scenario, we wouldn't be talking about whether or not I'm married. We'd be talking about what kind of person I am.

It's just that trying to address a literal interpretation of various mythologies has been done to death, and it's pointless anyway.

I brought up that example because you asked me to provide one, any one.

I don't think it is. "Prayer" is asking God to do something for you, it's by definition entirely dependent on whim. That's what makes it such a prime example of science overreaching. There are too many variables that the scientific method just can't account for.

No, there aren't. People say god answers their prayers. Observe people who pray for things and people who don't. There's no appreciable difference between the two groups getting what they want.

 

[Magic Man]

My kneejerk reaction is to agree with everything you've said.

However, the cold, analytical side of me just isn't convinced. When the success or failure of prayer is dependent on the whim of God, there can be no proof.

Yes, there can. I think you're getting caught up in the whole "we don't know anything about God" kind of thing. If you just want to say God's ineffable, then what's the point in talking about the concept in the first place? If you want to assign characteristics, we have to be consistent with those characteristics.

 

[Baydwin]

I do hate the idea of a god that answers some prayers but not others. Personally I don't believe god answers any prayers, not for intervention anyway. A lot of religious practice, from Shinto to Christianity to Hinduism, seems to be supplication and to be frank I find it quite ignoble.

 

[Storm]

But in that scenario, we wouldn't be talking about whether or not I'm married. We'd be talking about what kind of person I am.

Elaborate, please.

I brought up that example because you asked me to provide one, any one.

Well, with the caveat that I'm not sure it's a God-concept, I will cede the point that it's debunked. Thoroughly.

No, there aren't. People say god answers their prayers. Observe people who pray for things and people who don't. There's no appreciable difference between the two groups getting what they want.

"There's a difference between what we know and what we can prove."

Yes, there can. I think you're getting caught up in the whole "we don't know anything about God" kind of thing. If you just want to say God's ineffable, then what's the point in talking about the concept in the first place? If you want to assign characteristics, we have to be consistent with those characteristics.

I'm trying to be.

The prayer example is just a bad one. The concept's just got too many built-in defense mechanisms.

I do hate the idea of a god that answers some prayers but not others. Personally I don't believe god answers any prayers, not for intervention anyway. A lot of religious practice, from Shinto to Christianity to Hinduism, seems to be supplication and to be frank I find it quite ignoble.

Same here.

 

[MSizer]

... A lot of religious practice, from Shinto to Christianity to Hinduism, seems to be supplication and to be frank I find it quite ignoble.

Oh man don't even get me started. The whole "oh we like sheep..." mentality. Ugh. The whole islamic concept of "to submit" is such a turn off to me. And then they try to tell me "but you can't understand, a muslim's love for god is greater even than for his family". That's supposed to impress me?

 

[Baydwin]

Oh man don't even get me started. The whole "oh we like sheep..." mentality. Ugh. The whole islamic concept of "to submit" is such a turn off to me. And then they try to tell me "but you can't understand, a muslim's love for god is greater even than for his family". That's supposed to impress me?

Hmmm, not really what I was talking about.
I meant the whole asking god for things like an all-year-round version of Father Christmas, "God, I wish I had bigger boobs", "God, please let it be good weather for my barbeque", "God, please let me get that promotion". That's the sort of thing that makes me think most people, probably about 70% I reckon, think of god as nothing more than their personal go-to-guy who will eventually let them into heaven for not being too evil.

 

[Storm]

OK, mball, MSizer, I'm going to try to explain this again.

By way of example, "Did God cure Mary's cancer" is not the topic. The topic is "if God did cure Mary's cancer, would science be able to tell?"

Does that help?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

My kneejerk reaction is to agree with everything you've said.

However, the cold, analytical side of me just isn't convinced. When the success or failure of prayer is dependent on the whim of God, there can be no proof.

Though I'd argue that one of the things in the "generic theism" we're assuming here are the notions that God is good and that God is capable of answering prayers. I think that the idea of a god who grants prayers for larger tomatoes but not the prayer for help for an abused child does speak to the truth of those initial assumptions about the god in question.

OK, mball, MSizer, I'm going to try to explain this again.

By way of example, "Did God cure Mary's cancer" is not the topic. The topic is "if God did cure Mary's cancer, would science be able to tell?"

That depends what you mean. You're right that science hasn't definitively concluded that no gods exist, but I don't think that science is silent on the issue of god.

Another way of asking your question would be "is science able to tell what cures people's cancer?" The answer to this is something like "yes, but not with absolute certainty."

We do have statistical tests (for instance: Student's t-test - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) that can tell us whether an effect and a hypothesized cause are linked to a significant degree. If some other cause is generally at work besides the one we assume, then this fact shows up in the results. If God were really going around healing people's cancer, then the correlation between, say, chemotherapy and cancer remission would be a lot worse than the theory would predict.

Pick any issue you want, not just cancer remission. If we can come up with a list of factors that explain the results we see to a very, very high degree in a demonstrable way, then this also excludes to a very, very high degree the possibility that some other, unknown factor (e.g. God) is at play with any significance.

This doesn't imply absolute certainty, but it does imply more certainty than if we had no information at all.

Now... this still allows the possibility that this unknown factor is at work to an insignificant degree, but IMO, an insignificant God is not the "generic theistic" God.

 

[Magic Man]

Elaborate, please.

The question here is which god we're talking about. It would be like determining which person we're talking about. If we're trying to determine whether it's me or someone else, saying that I had a fight with my wife helps describe me more to distinguish me from the other possible person.

Well, with the caveat that I'm not sure it's a God-concept, I will cede the point that it's debunked. Thoroughly.

Why is it not a god concept?

"There's a difference between what we know and what we can prove."

OK?

I'm trying to be.

The prayer example is just a bad one. The concept's just got too many built-in defense mechanisms.

That was the point of the pegasus example. Everything can have that many built-in defense mechanisms, if you want it to.

It reminds me of the episode of South Park the other night where they met a Mormon family that had just moved to town. They started to learn about Mormonism, and as South Park does so well, they told Joseph Smith's story. Every problem with Smith's story was rationalized away, but the weird part was that people still believed it. The point is that you can defend anything you want against any criticism you want. That doesn't mean the defenses are reasonable.

 

[Magic Man]

OK, mball, MSizer, I'm going to try to explain this again.

By way of example, "Did God cure Mary's cancer" is not the topic. The topic is "if God did cure Mary's cancer, would science be able to tell?"

Does that help?

I'm just going to go with what Penguin said.

 

[Storm]

The question here is which god we're talking about. It would be like determining which person we're talking about. If we're trying to determine whether it's me or someone else, saying that I had a fight with my wife helps describe me more to distinguish me from the other possible person.

But having a fight with your wife doesn't help with that. Knowing you're married does.

Why is it not a god concept?

Because it still strikes me as mythology (what God DID) rather than theology (what God IS).

Another example: my name is Megan. This morning I stubbed my toe. The former pertains to my identity, the latter does not.

To bring it back to God, "the Creator" is a God concept. ID is an idea of the metheod the Creator used. How, not who. We could stamp out ID entirely (please oh please), and that would have no effect on the concept of the Creator.

OK?

My reason for saying that was that I was getting the feeling people were trying to convince me that prayer doesn't work. I don't believe it does*, but I also don't believe it was proven.

*I feel the need to clarify that I'm speaking of prayer in the sense of asking for something.

That was the point of the pegasus example. Everything can have that many built-in defense mechanisms, if you want it to.

But the pegasus example also illustrates the dishonesty of such tactics. I'm not being dishonest, I'm not trying to justify belief, I just see a flaw in the experiment.

It reminds me of the episode of South Park the other night where they met a Mormon family that had just moved to town. They started to learn about Mormonism, and as South Park does so well, they told Joseph Smith's story. Every problem with Smith's story was rationalized away, but the weird part was that people still believed it. The point is that you can defend anything you want against any criticism you want. That doesn't mean the defenses are reasonable.

What's unreasonable about acknowledging that prayer's success is dependent on God's whim? (Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that there is a God.)

I'm just going to go with what Penguin said.

Still mulling that over. My thoughts atm are that it's a great rebuttal to the prayer argument, but it doesn't really answer the OP. I'm wondering if it was intended to. Penguin, can you clarify?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Still mulling that over. My thoughts atm are that it's a great rebuttal to the prayer argument, but it doesn't really answer the OP. I'm wondering if it was intended to. Penguin, can you clarify?

Yes, it was intended as a response to the OP. My point was that while science doesn't normally operate with iron-clad, perfect certainty, to whatever extent that we can identify one cause, we exclude all other causes to the same extent.

If we're, say, 90% sure that a particular person's cancer was cured by a combination of chemotherapy and radiation, then we also 90% exclude the possibility that it was cured by other means, such as the placebo effect, antibiotics, diet, "pyramid power", the magnetic fields in the patient's room, some unknown virus that feeds on tumours, or the direct hand of God.

At the population level, we can do statistical tests to come up with confidence intervals. If we find a correlation and a causal mechanism, we might be able to say with 95% or 99% confidence that effect X is caused by cause A... IOW, that 95% or 99% of the behaviour of effect X can be entirely explained by cause A.

I realize that this still leaves a small 4% or 1% gap for other causes, and God could presumably be shoved into it. However, I think at that point, the criteria that we assume for God come into play. I don't know about your theology, but I don't think that many theists I know would say that the God they believe in is afraid of having statistically significant effects on the world or hides from the people who look for him like a divine Polkaroo.

 

[Storm]

Yes, it was intended as a response to the OP. My point was that while science doesn't normally operate with iron-clad, perfect certainty, to whatever extent that we can identify one cause, we exclude all other causes to the same extent. [snip]

OK, I don't really think it answers the OP, because it was speaking much more broadly. Conversation drifted into specific examples like curing Mary's cancer, but the OP was about our general understanding of the natural world.

Take evolution. There's nothing in it that implies theistic evolution is wrong.

There is, to my knowledge, not a single scientific theory that can't be interpreted as the mechanism God used.

IOW, the conflict between Science & Religion is not genuine, but an elevation of the conflict between specific interpretations of the fields.

 

[Zadok]

Can anyone think of a single scientific theory that excludes God?

If you can, please explain why you think it does.

In essence, science, both in theory and practice, does not require a belief or understanding in G-d; nor does such exclude any belief or divine understanding. However, science does dispel many notions that are maintained concerning G-d. For example many Christians believe that the universe was created by a G-d that did such work about 6000 years ago. There is no compelling scientific evidence to support such a notion.

Much of the problem between science and religion is that religionist try to prove scientific principles based on pre-conceived religious notions. Pre-conceived notions are counter to the scientific method. Therefore, any religious based efforts to pretend science is laughable and ridiculous.

Usually unexplored is the possibility that we can learn truth about G-d through scientific endeavors

Zadok

 

[Storm]

In essence, science, both in theory and practice, does not require a belief or understanding in G-d; nor does such exclude any belief or divine understanding. However, science does dispel many notions that are maintained concerning G-d. For example many Christians believe that the universe was created by a G-d that did such work about 6000 years ago. There is no compelling scientific evidence to support such a notion.

I know it's a long thread, but before I respond to this, kindly review the last couple of pages and tell me where you stand on the mythology/ theology problem.

Much of the problem between science and religion is that religionist try to prove scientific principles based on pre-conceived religious notions. Pre-conceived notions are counter to the scientific method. Therefore, any religious based efforts to pretend science is laughable and ridiculous.

Agreed.

Usually unexplored is the possibility that we can learn truth about G-d through scientific endeavors

This is a firm (and thrilling!) belief of mine.

 

[Magic Man]

But having a fight with your wife doesn't help with that. Knowing you're married does.

Yes, it does. Saying I'm married helps determine who I am, but then saying I had a fight with my wife makes it even clearer.

Because it still strikes me as mythology (what God DID) rather than theology (what God IS).

I'm sorry, I don't understand why you're making the distinction. What God did is part of what God is.

Another example: my name is Megan. This morning I stubbed my toe. The former pertains to my identity, the latter does not.

Yes, it does. There are many people named Megan out there. Saying you stubbed your toe helps narrow it down to just you or just you and a few others.

To bring it back to God, "the Creator" is a God concept. ID is an idea of the metheod the Creator used. How, not who. We could stamp out ID entirely (please oh please), and that would have no effect on the concept of the Creator.

That's true, but then we're just talking about deism, not theism.

My reason for saying that was that I was getting the feeling people were trying to convince me that prayer doesn't work. I don't believe it does*, but I also don't believe it was proven.

*I feel the need to clarify that I'm speaking of prayer in the sense of asking for something.

OK, well, I'm not sure how you can deny it's been proven.

But the pegasus example also illustrates the dishonesty of such tactics. I'm not being dishonest, I'm not trying to justify belief, I just see a flaw in the experiment.

No, it shows the ability to rationalize anything. If the person really believes the pegasus is there, it's not really being dishonest. There's no flaw in the experiment. That's the point. If people's claims about god and prayer were true, then the experiments would not have the results they do.

What's unreasonable about acknowledging that prayer's success is dependent on God's whim? (Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that there is a God.)

Well, you have to determine what God's whim would be. When talking about prayer, we're talking about the classic all-good God. Determining his whim is very easy.

 

[Magic Man]

OK, I don't really think it answers the OP, because it was speaking much more broadly. Conversation drifted into specific examples like curing Mary's cancer, but the OP was about our general understanding of the natural world.

Take evolution. There's nothing in it that implies theistic evolution is wrong.

See, I don't really buy theistic evolution. At that point, you're blurring the line between theism and deism to a degree that makes it hard to tell the difference.

There is, to my knowledge, not a single scientific theory that can't be interpreted as the mechanism God used.

But again, it depends on which god. If you mean a deistic god, then I agree. That's why I don't have much problem with deism.

 

[Storm]

See, I don't really buy theistic evolution. At that point, you're blurring the line between theism and deism to a degree that makes it hard to tell the difference.

Not necessarily, I don't think. Theistic evolution varies wildly on how much God "tweaks."

But again, it depends on which god. If you mean a deistic god, then I agree. That's why I don't have much problem with deism

No, because I agreed to the theological element of intervention. I just don't want to get bogged down by any particular mythology.