Double-blind Prayer Efficacy Test -- Really?

[Wildswanderer]

A sentient meat machine, yes, but not a robot. (Who do you think does the programming if there is no god?)

The universe... random causation. Look up atheist determinism.

 

[KWED]

Not if she was 18 and consented, but this doesn't involve sex and it's not a man so your idea doesn't apply.

1. She wasn't 18. the consensus is 14-16.
2. Age is irrelevant. it is the imbalance of power/trust/responsibility, etc that is important to the validity of consent.
3. You obviously didn't Google "where do babies come from".

 

[Wildswanderer]

1. She wasn't 18. the consensus is 14-16.
2. Age is irrelevant. it is the imbalance of power/trust/responsibility, etc that is important to the validity of consent.
3. You obviously didn't Google "where do babies come from".

And you keep trying to pretend it's about sex. If you can't address actual christian beliefs no one has to take you seriously. You are just inventing nonsense.

 

[Sheldon]

And for the Gospels we have SEVEN authors, six of whom at least claimed eye witness to Jesus (include James, his own brother)

The gospels are anonymous, the names Mathew Mark Luke and John are fictional, they didn't appear until the 2nd century, and none of the earliest copies of the gospels were authored. There are no eye witnesses to anything Jesus purportedly said or did, it's hearsay.

 

[Sheldon]

Only I'm not a delusional person.

Anyone is capable of self delusion, and the more emotionally invested one is in a claim or belief, the more likely it is they will be biased in favour of it.

To suppose that a person is logical in every other aspect of life but delusional because they experience the spiritual is showing your extreme prejudice.

Your arguments have been show to be irrational many times, you have used known fallacies in informal logic. So your claim to be "logical in every other aspect of life" is simply not supported by the evidence of your posts.

 

[Sheldon]

All we have is the evidence of our minds, souls and senses. If they are all tricking us then this conversation is just senseless babbling anyway.

You keep making this disingenuous claim, it's a false dichotomy fallacy, we are not limited to either everything is a delusion, or everything we experience is factually reliable. It is a scale of objective evidence, and it starts at zero, when all we have is subjective anecdotal claims, that cannot be supported by any objective evidence.

 

[Sheldon]

So you read a study with something other than your perceptions? And decide if you believe it with something other than your mind?

Nope, you're still not grasping that just because our perception is not entirely reliable, doesn't make everything we perceive unreliable, that's why studies and research like the one previously described, are carefully designed to remove bias as much as is possible. If we relied solely on our perception of events, then we'd have to accept magic was real every time David Copperfield came on the telly. Not sure why this has to be explained to you over and over again?

 

[Sheldon]

Sheldon said: ↑
Scepticism is built into such studies, or they'd be rejected at peer review. The reputation of a research team or scientist who published work slanted by their own bias, would be severely tarnished, perhaps irretrievably. As unlike creationist and religious apologists, they can't just assume the conclusions they want, and bend everything to suit.

And most of the time they are still wrong..

What a spectacular stupid claim, I can only assume you're trolling? As it is inconceivable that anyone would not see, how utterly meaningless such an a sweeping unevidenced, and demonstrably untrue claim is?

 

[Sheldon]

You are just inventing nonsense.

 

[Sheldon]

Lol, I spend more time observing nature than about 90 percent of the population. And what it shows me is a creator.

No it doesn't, that's what you believe, there is no evidence of design in nature, only assumptions about complexity, and denial of objective facts like species evolution. We infer design from objective evidence, we can see the designs being made and completed, we can see the designed things at every stage of manufacture, but most importantly and in direct refutation of your claim, we know designed objects don't occur in nature.

 

[Sheldon]

That just makes me trust faith more. It's more solid ground, then man's theories.

Preposterous hyperbole, there is literally nothing one could not believe using such faith, so it is not just not more reliable than objective methods and research, it is useless for anything but confirmation bias.

 

[Sheldon]

No... and it's not one experience...it's a lifetime of confirmations.
I could say that you only think your wife likes you because of confirmation bias also. I don't see a difference.

You seem to be trying to set some sort of record for false dichotomy fallacies. However that aside, have you considered the fact that faith in one's spouse's love and fidelity is often misplaced? Faith is not a sound basis for belief, the exact opposite. It is however unrivalled in maintaining belief without any supporting objective evidence, and even in the face of contradictory facts, like species evolution for example.

 

[Sheldon]

KWED said: ↑
An omnipotent god and a young, impressionable virgin is a perfect example of the power imbalance that makes such "consent" meaningless. Any court in the land would convict him.

What an absurd conclusion. You have an obvious bias against religion, and can't be objective.

Why is his hypothetical conclusion absurd? Only you seem to have offered nothing but hand waving. Are you saying a teenage girl is mentally and emotionally mature enough, to give informed consent, and to an omniscient and omnipotent deity? If so that's a little worrying.

 

[Sheldon]

That's not what I said, so quit pretending and deflecting.
I suppose you have someway to experience reality that doesn't rely on your senses? You know the ones that can't be solely trusted?

This isn't sinking in is it? Lets try an analogy, You see someone eating mushrooms, they are still alive weeks later, you see some wild mushrooms and perceive they are the same, do you:

1. Entire trust your perception?
2. Rigorously check the mushrooms against objective evidence to be sure they're the same?


See 1 is likely to get you killed, but 2 will help confirm your perception is correct.

 

[Sheldon]

Why would reason be reliable in a world created by blind causation?

Why wouldn't it? The efficacy of reason can tested and quantified. When you're ill don't you go to a qualified Dr?

 

[Sheldon]

We can't know reason is even reasonable in a godless universe

Of course we can, that's just a preposterous begging the question fallacy.

 

[Sheldon]

Look around you. Man longs for a perfect, peaceful existence but always fails to obtain it. Either the longing should not exist, or perfection is possible only when we reach paradise.

Wow, another false dichotomy fallacy, and humans quite clearly don't always long for a peaceful existence, so that is demonstrably untrue, many people crave excitement and risk, humans wage wars, they take preposterous risks because they enjoy it. The non-sequitur at the end of your post is just hilarious.

 

[Sheldon]

You already know why. You are just avoiding the logical conclusion... Pretty funny for someone who claims to be all about logic.

I don't think logic means what you think it means, and given

EXACTLY! And prayer is also better than doing nothing

There is no objective evidence for this, and again the objective evidence we do have demonstrated it had no discernible effect. I'd like at least to say it does no harm, but we have ample evidence that belief in the efficacy of prayer has had disastrous consequences where people in desperate need of medical aid are denied it by those favouring prayer and faith, with fatal consequences.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

" Very recently Sam Harris, one of the so-called ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse‘, released a book on free will, arguing that it is nothing more than an illusion. If materialism is true, that is undoubtedly correct.3 In such a reductionist paradigm, since man is an amalgam of material systems, and since material systems are bound by the laws of cause and effect, man is merely a determined machine. We may perceive that we are freely making our choices, but this is nothing more than a perception. Logically, every decision would be nothing more than the result of the antecedent state of the universe."

And if this is the case, then that is how it is and has always been, however surprising or counterintuitive that might seem to you. I am at peace with that possibility - that everything I think and do is determined. I don't know that to be the case, but if it is, OK. It's always produced a good enough experience to be glad of it and want more. Why would that change if I discovered that I was not the author of my will, but a passive observer of ideas generated in neural circuits and reported it to the consciousness who thought the ideas arose in consciousness uncaused or caused by the observer in the theater of conscious content.

You can't see you are contradicting yourself in the same paragraph.

Correct. And neither can you.

It sure does...it makes the idea of a purely material universe absolutely absurd.

That's the unenlightened view. Try to transcend that. As I just indicated to you above, with discipline, one can learn to see the universe as it presents itself rather than how he wishes it to be. Transcendence is rising above the unenlightened masses stuck in magical thinking. Children find it very easy to hold such beliefs. A benefit of aging into adulthood is transcending at least some of that. You might recognize this: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." It's ironic when one considers where that comes from.

There is nothing absurd about a purely naturalistic universe to a mature mind, which is why so many of the people posting to you can accept the possibility and even likelihood that the the world is naturalistic. As you can see from the opinions of the critical thinkers present, once one transcends faith, faith seems absurd, not a naturalistic universe.

I don't live in that universe, in case you have forgotten. I live in the universe of free will and Transcendence. My actions actually matter and effect the world as opposed to being only the farts of the universe.

You live in the same universe as everybody else. Somehow, your faith makes you think otherwise. Your actions don't matter more because of your beliefs. You don't have more or less free will than I do. The difference between us is that I understand that free will may be illusion, and accept that. Why wouldn't I? I don't have emotional reactions to such ideas after wonderment. Thinking all through a few decades ago caused a sense of disorientation at first just as studying quantum physics did. These ideas undermine ones metaphysics, which is like having a carpet pulled out from under one. But the mature mind learns to assimilate such ideas once he has examined them, and they cease to seem disorienting. The instinct to reject them out of hand can be transcended.

What's transcendent about your worldview? It's the easy one. It's the one accessible to children. Theism is easy.

Atheism isn't for the unexamined life. It's easier to believe in a god than not because being an atheist means that there is no devil to blame, no expectation of reuniting with deceased loved ones, no personal protection from the cosmos, only one life to live, personal responsibility for one's choices, marginalization in a theistic society, and no easy explanations for our existence. Once one has made this transition, religion has nothing to offer him and seem pointless.

You assumed you have the freedom to discover truth in a world where that's impossible.

I don't know what you are claiming (without argument, as usual) is impossible, but I routinely discover demonstrably correct ideas that allow me to anticipate outcomes. So do you.

I don't even recognize that religion because you just invented it. That's not Christianity.

It is Christianity, and the reason that you don't recognize it is because you have a stake in not seeing those things. I don't, and so I am free to go where my judgment takes me rather than what faith has instructed me to assume or "conclude." Neither love nor justice are to me what they are in the Christian scriptures for reasons given. Believers seldom see the warts of their religion just as many parents can't see the flaws in their children for the same reason: a faith-based confirmation bias. Believers seldom see internal contradiction in their scriptures, or moral or intellectual errors on the part of its deity, or the errors in science and history contained therein, but unbelievers have no difficulty identifying such things, which is why so many believers work assiduously to try to disqualify those opinions. I like the tests in [52] and [61]

I have a growing list of their attempts to disqualify skeptics' opinions, with over 60 entries. Here are a few from the end of the list, all from people that didn't like what they read, couldn't rebut it, so decided instead to try to disqualify the opinion. I don't recall you being guilty of that, but you might find the list interesting anyway:

[40] Your lack of belief in God coupled with your lack of experience with God means you are not qualified to comment on God.

[43] Don't bother quoting Scripture to me, atheist. You don't even know what you're doing.

[45] He believes he is qualified on the basis that he has been inside a church and picked up a bible.

[48] Like I say there are no errors in the bible only skeptics that can't read and comprehend.

[52] You want to convince me you have knowledge of the Bible. 1) Provide 5 examples of slave liberation in the Old Testament. 2) King Saul was merciful to the merciless and subsequently merciless to the merciful. Explain.

[55] You are a heretic with little if any understanding of Scripture. If you did study the Bible it was in a Laurel and Hardy College in Tijuana

[57] You're a Biblical ignoramus.

[58] You need Jehovah’s approval to understand His word.

[61] Its cute you cherry picked from a cherry picked verse because you dont know anything else. Very cute. Can you explain what "yakaffara bissilahi" mean in Quranic arabic?

[65] The words are the proof, even by themselves, but you need a certain spiritual susceptibility to them.

[68] You lack the basic knowledge needed for a debate​

 

[Polymath257]

I just did.

Here it is again for an Orthodox source:

" Very recently Sam Harris, one of the so-called ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse‘, released a book on free will, arguing that it is nothing more than an illusion. If materialism is true, that is undoubtedly correct.3 In such a reductionist paradigm, since man is an amalgam of material systems, and since material systems are bound by the laws of cause and effect, man is merely a determined machine. We may perceive that we are freely making our choices, but this is nothing more than a perception. Logically, every decision would be nothing more than the result of the antecedent state of the universe."

Three very important questions in this regard:

1. What does it mean to 'make a choice'?

2. What determines personal identity?

3. What does it mean when we say 'we make a choice'?

I would say that if properly analyzed, it is quite possible for 'me' to 'make a choice' in a deterministic system. And yes, the result would be determined by the antecedent state of the universe, but so would my desires and goals. So I can 'make a choice' based on my 'desires and goals' and 'choose' between different possibilities.