Your biggest intellectual compromise for faith

[ChristineES]

Poor Pete always seems to be having his words twisted.

Christine, I don't think he was saying that you say those things, but you cannot deny that those things do spring from the faith others have.

No, and I wouldn't deny it. But these kinds of things can spring from anything, and not just faith. Most people I meet, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic, were pretty decent people. There are bad apples in every barrel; but not all the apples will be bad.

 

[lunamoth]

Just getting back to this now - I was away for the weekend...


I touched on this before: if a belief is untestable, then it might not be irrational (in that it hasn't failed any tests) but at the same time, it's not particularily rational (in that it hasn't passed any tests either).


Yes, potentially. Why wouldn't it be?


I missed that one - could you give a post number so I don't have to go through the whole thread?


Well, yes, because I think this definition of "supernatural" is itself intellectually dishonest.

It's one thing to believe that there's some invisible realm where God lives. It's another thing to claim with certainty that this realm will always be off-limits to us for even a peek.

Also, IMO, if a belief isn't testable in some way, then there'd be no reason to ever think it was true in the first place. If there really is this "barrier" between the natural and the supernatural that prevents us from seeing the supernatural at all, then why would anybody ever hypothesize the supernatural as an explanation for anything? Why would they ever think to suggest the idea at all?

If you divest the supernatural from rational inquiry, then IMO you also implicitly declare all statements about the nature of supernatural things to be utterly made-up. If we can have no knowledge of the supernatural whatsoever, then knowledge claims like "God is good", for instance, can be rejected as completely unsupported.

Also, when we add into the mix the tenets of faith of pretty well any religion at all, then we also add the idea that while this invisible realm itself may be beyond our powers of observation, it and its occupants still have observable effects in the natural, visible realm: angels, prophets with messages from gods, kami, burning bushes, dragons, tree spirits, etc., etc.


I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not claiming that the supernatural doesn't exist.

In reality, I'm doing two things:

- I'm saying that if the supernatural does exist, there's no good reason to think that it's completely off-limits for all time to human inquiry observation the way you're portraying it. At the very least, if it actually is the way you describe, then we can throw away the Christian religion (among many others) as completely false.

- I'm saying that regardless of whether such an invisible, untestable realm exists, if it actually does exist, you don't know it does.

IMO, testability and knowledge are two sides of the same coin. If we can't investigate a claim and rule out the possibility that it's false, then we can't say with certainty that the claim is true.


Only of the experience itself. Of conclusions drawn from the experience, not necessarily.


Off the top of my head:

- one of the things that science is concerned with is figuring out the origins of the universe. Assuming they continue investigating this, we could conceivably reach a point where we actually figure it out. Maybe we find that, for whatever reason, the universe never actually "came into being"; this would exclude the possibility that it was deliberately made to come into being... IOW that it was created. By definition, a thing that is not created has no creator.

- alternately, science could conceivably find that the universe did come into being, and then figure out the actual causes. This lists of causes would either include God or not.

- as for the idea of eternal judgement, this creates several sub-claims. First, that there is something about a person that can be properly called "the person" that survives the death of the body - the existence of a soul is a prerequisite for souls to be judged. Second, that there is some sort of invisible realm (or realms) where Heaven and Hell lie, and that some sort of tranference (of what, I have no idea) as souls leave the Earthly realm and go to these other invisible realms; conceptually, this hypothesis isn't that different from the hypotheses behind the germ theory of disease or radiation, before the mechanisms for each were discovered - both of those proved to be testable.


By itself, it probably couldn't be. IMO, some sort of hallucination probably could never be ruled out.

However, such an experience might be externally testable: a prophet could come up with prophecies that actually come to pass, for instance. If the experience has some sort of bearing on the natural world, then we could probably figure out some way to test it. If it has no bearing on the natural world at all, then I'd personally be inclined to dismiss it as irrelevant.


No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that all subjective knowledge is a unique slice of objective knowledge. If I think that my opinion is based on a piece of objective knowledge that was available to me but not to someone else - IOW that the other person doesn't have all the relevant facts - why should I throw away my opinion and replace it with that other person's?


You realize you just flipped the words around, right?

I don't bring this up to be a pedant; I think it's an important point: "I don't know that it was God" is not equivalent to "I know that was not God".


Personal experience itself is not transferable, but the logic that takes us to a conclusion given a particular experience is. We can't see what another person sees, but we can consider what the implications would be if we were to see what someone else did see.

In that regard, even if we can't directly evaluate whether a particular experience claim is true, we can evaluate, taking as given that the experience is true, whether it would be the proper basis for some claim or conclusion. If it doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that the person who had the experience is making, then that's it: we don't even need to evaluate whether the experience is true, because it wouldn't support the person's claim anyhow.


But which humans? There's the rub: with no way to test which religion is correct, we can't say that any of them actually have knowledge of God. They conflict in many fundamental ways and (from where I sit, anyhow) each has about as much going for it as any other, so there's no rational way to choose between them.

Thanks for following up, 9/10ths. All good points, as usual. I am out of time for this conversation now (why is it that these discussions tend to grow like mustard plants? ).

Again, thank you for the conversation!

 

[Mister Emu]

Have you looked at the facts of the study? If so, please show me where the bias occurred?

I would not say they are necessarily biased. But they are fatally flawed, as I have explained several times here.

In a sound experiment on must be able to control the variables... one must be able to have a control group, a group of people one can be sure does not have the thing being tested for. So if we are testing the efficacy of prayer, we must be able to have a group of people about which we can say, with certainty, "These people are not being prayed for". Such is impossible. Without a control any conclusions the experiment leads to are suspect, at the least.

 

[Gaura Priya]

I would have to say that culturally I feel myself as a Hare Krishna, or more properly, a Gaudiya Vaishnava, but my theological leanings are becoming more and more inclined towards Arya Samaj these days.

To explain: Hindu Dharma has been filled with alot of sectarian things that sometimes are either unnecessary or do not make sense. The stories of the Puranas are replete with incarnations (of God as half-man half-lion or as a boar, tortoise or fish), flying airplanes and floating cities, God lying in a cosmic ocean on a bed of snake heads... demigods and demons galore (all 330 million of them)...

Even the concept of an incarnation, prophet, messenger, etc. which God is completely self-sufficient. The concept of God as Ishvara in Arya Samaj, that is, the monotheistic, Vedic concept of a nameless, formless, Personal Being that never is born, never dies, was never created, never will perish, never needed messengers or prophets to rectify religion, etc. seems so intellectually satisfying and logical. In Arya Samaj, there are no pundits, priests, rabbis or imams, no prophets, no messengers, no incarnations, no far-fetched miracles or superstitions, no controlling 'popes' and no 'idols', no contrived heaven or hell, no feeling of superiority in religious faith, no angels or demons or extra-dimensional beings to care about, no added interpolations (the Puranas are considered sectarian inventions of duped religionists)... just you, God, and the Vedas (as well as the fire sacrifice, agnihotra, and daily meditation, or sandhya... the ideal practice of the original Vedic religion).

But I love being a Krishna devotee. I love the Deities of Radha-Krishna, the concept of prasadam, the focus of bhakti, or loving devotion to God, the very theology is based on chanting the Names of God as the ultimate yoga or spiritual discipline to come to God, and the colours and variegatedness... And yet I can not completely logically wrap my head around the stories in the Srimad-Bhagavatam, which is held by all Vaishnavas to be the 'Bible' of Vaishnavism.

So I kind of feel like I am in two completely different worlds in the Hindu religion, lol.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I would not say they are necessarily biased. But they are fatally flawed, as I have explained several times here.

In a sound experiment on must be able to control the variables... one must be able to have a control group, a group of people one can be sure does not have the thing being tested for. So if we are testing the efficacy of prayer, we must be able to have a group of people about which we can say, with certainty, "These people are not being prayed for". Such is impossible. Without a control any conclusions the experiment leads to are suspect, at the least.

Wait - so we couldn't, for example, test the health effects of vitamin C unless we found a control group that was completely deficient in vitamin C?

That's not correct. What's needed is a significant difference in the input variable between the two groups, not a complete absence of it in the control.

I mean, if you were doing a study into the health effects of exercise, you wouldn't demand that your control group not move at all for the duration of the study, would you? No - instead, you acknowledge that the control group engages in some baseline level of exercise, and then increase the level of exercise for the study group so that it's above this baseline level.

IOW, this prayer study follows the same template as many, many accepted and valid studies into the health effects of all sorts of factors.

Edit: for these studies, it's not necessary for nobody at all to be praying for the control group. In fact, a "control" group that had no friends or family praying for them would probably have fewer friends or family in general, which would mean that they'd have less access to material family support as well, which could skew the results massively in a study of healing after surgery.

The important thing in these studies is that the control group and the study group are both the subject of outside prayer at the same rate. And that you control for by selecting a large enough sample size, and by ensuring that the demographics of your two groups are similar.

 

[Guitar's Cry]

When I was atheist, my biggest intellectual compromise was that I did not believe in God. It was dishonest, but I was logically removed from my own personal understanding of the world.

 

[Mister Emu]

Wait - so we couldn't, for example, test the health effects of vitamin C unless we found a control group that was completely deficient in vitamin C?

It depends on what you are testing for... if you are testing for the health benefits of x amount of vitamin C, you would need to ensure your control group did not have x amount. If you were testing the effect of adding y amount of vitamin C to a diet, you need to know your control will not being adding y amount of vitamin C to a diet.

How scientific would a study be on the health benefits of vitamin C if the experimenters had no idea on the baseline amount of vitamin C either group had?

To conduct a valid scientific experiment on the efficacy of prayer you need information that is not possible to obtain.

No - instead, you acknowledge that the control group engages in some baseline level of exercise, and then increase the level of exercise in the study group so that it's above this baseline level.

And in the case of prayer, you have no idea what the baseline is... for either group.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

It depends on what you are testing for... if you are testing for the health benefits of x amount of vitamin C, you would need to ensure your control group did not have x amount. If you were testing the effect of adding y amount of vitamin C to a diet, you need to know your control will not being adding y amount of vitamin C to a diet.

How scientific would a study be on the health benefits of vitamin C if the experimenters had no idea on the baseline amount of vitamin C either group had?

It could potentially be very scientific, within its area of applicability.

For instance, say your overall population has a certain typical diet (with an unknown nutritive value) and a certain rate of some disease, which you think may or may not be linked to vitamin C. If you give one group a vitamin C supplement every day along with their regular diet and let the other group eat normally, also eating a regular diet. Any difference in the rate of disease between the two groups can be attributed to one of two things:

- statistical error, which we can minimize by using proper methodology, and then do analyses for after the fact to determine whether the error is significant
- the actual effect of the vitamin C supplement

Same for the prayer experiment: it's not asking "what happens if a person receives no prayer at all?" It's asking "what is the effect of extra prayer beyond what a person would normally receive?"

And in the case of prayer, you have no idea what the baseline is... for either group.

And this doesn't matter. The only relevant factor is that you know the study group is receiving something that the other group is not.

The control group does not receive any of the prayers from the study's "prayer team" at all. In this regard, it exactly meets your test: the control group has none of the input (i.e. this special, specified prayer) and the subject group does get it.

Maybe this allows you to hypothesize various explanations (e.g. maybe the prayer team was made up of people who were all the "wrong" religion), but the fact still remains that the difference in outcome between the two groups is statistically insignificant.

 

[waitasec]

Oh, honestly! I never said any of those things. You are generalizing all people of faith. You are only talking of the Abraham religions which could be an insult to the faiths that have nothing to do with Abraham, including Hinduism, Paganism, Zeus, etc. Not all people who follow the Abraham religions think that way, either. But what does that have to do with non-faith have or not having assertion, anyway?

to DECLARE your god is THE ONLY god, is a ridiculous notion...
that is why all those things i generalized comes from asserting ones beliefs
that are required to do so...
religion does more harm than good, generally speaking

 

[Mister Emu]

It could potentially be very scientific, within its area of applicability.

For instance, say your overall population has a certain typical diet (with an unknown nutritive value) and a certain rate of some disease, which you think may or may not be linked to vitamin C. If you give one group a vitamin C supplement every day along with their regular diet and let the other group eat normally, also eating a regular diet. Any difference in the rate of disease between the two groups can be attributed to one of two things:

- statistical error, which we can minimize by using proper methodology, and then do analyses for after the fact to determine whether the error is significant
- the actual effect of the vitamin C supplement

True, this satisfies the answer at the end of the quote... as long as there is a relatively even baseline, even should you not know what it is, you could have a scientific experiment for the addition of an element to the baseline...

Of course, should you note no difference in change, it would not actually mean that vitamin C has no effect on the disease, because you do not know if the population is already receiving the vitamin necessary for vitamin C to most effectively block it. For that you would need to take a group of people and give them a vitamin C deficient diet while being exposed to the disease(which I'm quite sure would be highly unethical if you believed the rate of disease and C to be connected).

It's asking "what is the effect of extra prayer beyond what a person would normally receive?"

Indeed, as I said, it would ineffectual of testing the efficacy of prayer, perhaps I should have added the qualifier, in general. At best it is testing the efficacy of the prayer of those people who are part of the study in addition to any prayers the sick may or may not have received anyways.

Of course, I have to question the people who would partake in a study wherein they were required to not pray for certain people. "Lord, please heal all the sick people, except these soandsos, I'm part of a study and I'm not supposed to pray for them.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

True, this satisfies the answer at the end of the quote... as long as there is a relatively even baseline, even should you not know what it is, you could have a scientific experiment for the addition of an element to the baseline...

Of course, should you note no difference in change, it would not actually mean that vitamin C has no effect on the disease, because you do not know if the population is already receiving the vitamin necessary for vitamin C to most effectively block it. For that you would need to take a group of people and give them a vitamin C deficient diet while being exposed to the disease(which I'm quite sure would be highly unethical if you believed the rate of disease and C to be connected).

Right... and to a certain extent, inference of conclusions based on the results of the study depends on how we assume that prayer works. Is there such a thing as "prayer deficiency"? Is there some "level of prayer" below which is very effective, but when a person's "prayer requirement" is reached, further prayer becomes ineffective? I suppose this is one possible explanation for the results of the study, but I'd think that this would be theologically problematic for many of the big world religions.

Indeed, as I said, it would ineffectual of testing the efficacy of prayer, perhaps I should have added the qualifier, in general. At best it is testing the efficacy of the prayer of those people who are part of the study in addition to any prayers the sick may or may not have received anyways.

Right - but if you have large enough sample sizes and are careful to avoid biases in selecting your groups and subjects, you can be confident that, within a certain measurable margin of error, this effect is the same in both the test group and the control.

Of course, I have to question the people who would partake in a study wherein they were required to not pray for certain people. "Lord, please heal all the sick people, except these soandsos, I'm part of a study and I'm not supposed to pray for them.

I'm not sure that the prayer team was even told about the control group. IIRC, they were given information on the people in the study group: names, photos, and a brief description of their medical condition, and then were asked to pray special prayers specifically for the healing of those individual people. It's not that they were told not to pray for anyone else; they were just never given any information on the control group.

 

[Willamena]

The dangers of analogy.

 

[Mister Emu]

Is there some "level of prayer" below which is very effective, but when a person's "prayer requirement" is reached, further prayer becomes ineffective? I suppose this is one possible explanation for the results of the study, but I'd think that this would be theologically problematic for many of the big world religions.

Indeed... is one prayer all that is necessary and any after that superfluous? A pertinent question. Or even if we assume that the way prayer works is that more of them would equal a better chance for it happening, we must ask what is the baseline. If everyone is receiving millions of prayers, then adding those of a prayer group would be statistically insignificant.

I'm not sure that the prayer team was even told about the control group.

Then how could they ensure that the prayer team did not, in fact, pray for those who were in the control? Or are we assuming that specific prayer(Heal x's cancer) is more efficacious than general prayer(Heal all those with cancer)?

 

[jonman122]

if you get 1 group that is being prayed to, and 1 group that is given antibiotics and proper treatment, it's obvious which one will have better results. The control group and prayer group might show improvement over the next few weeks while the group subject to the proper treatment recovers within days. it's obvious which one is better, and that prayer has little to no effect whatsoever. It might affect a person psychologically, ie. they make their bodies fight harder because they believe that they are being healed by prayer. It's still nowhere near as effective as proper treatment.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Indeed... is one prayer all that is necessary and any after that superfluous? A pertinent question.

Sure, but in the larger context, if the question is "does prayer have effects the way that some specific religious group claims it does?" then such an arrangement might also constitute a "no".

Or even if we assume that the way prayer works is that more of them would equal a better chance for it happening, we must ask what is the baseline. If everyone is receiving millions of prayers, then adding those of a prayer group would be statistically insignificant.

Maybe; maybe not. But still, this is a question of interpretation of the results. If the explanation is that the prayer team had insignificant effect because their relative contribution to the total "prayer pool" was negligible, okay (though we have no evidence for or against this idea at this point), but the fact that the prayer team had insignificant effect is still part of this.

Conceptually, after enough experiments, we could plot a "prayer effect curve", with "number of prayers" (or "prayer rate") across the x-axis and "healing effect" (or some other measure) up the y-axis. This experiment shows that for the two values of "prayer rate" (say x0, the baseline rate and x1, the "enhanced" rate of the test group), the slope of the secant between these two points on the curve is zero within the error of the experiment. I agree that much more work needs to be done before we can say we "know" the shape of the curve, however, this experiment alone contradicts the idea that the "prayer effect curve" has positive slope at all points.

Then how could they ensure that the prayer team did not, in fact, pray for those who were in the control? Or are we assuming that specific prayer(Heal x's cancer) is more efficacious than general prayer(Heal all those with cancer)?

I believe that some sort of safeguard was in place to ensure that nobody in the prayer team knew any of the subjects personally, but I don't know the details.

No - it doesn't assume that specific prayer is more efficacious than general prayer. What it does assume is that general prayer (as well as specific prayer by people outside the prayer team, like family and friends) affects both groups equally. As long as this is the case, the specific prayer of the prayer team is the only input variable that's different between the two groups, so it's the only possible causal factor for any difference in outcome between the two groups: any factor that's common to both can't cause a difference between the two.

BTW - I believe that in the most famous study like this, the subjects had all undergone similar heart surgeries, and the experimental measures were number of post-surgery complications and time until a particular point in recovery.

 

[tarasan]

I was a Christian as a teen. Like many Christians, I started ro have questions about my faith, both in concept and experience. Like everyone who holds a belief, I also did not want to stop believing. As a result, I started doing some of the most intense and ultimately silly mental gymnastics of my life to resolve my questions.

I believe this happens here on RF as well. In a few recent threads, people were arguing the omniscience/free will problem and went so far as to say that maybe there's no such thing as time.

My question to the forum, both to current and former theists is "what is the biggest intellectual compromise you have made or are currently making to keep believing your faith?"

wow that was very presumptious I dont believe that thiests ever have to, any comprimaise ive seen has only been due to a lack of education rather than the fact that there is no answer.

 

[Beaudreaux]

wow that was very presumptious I dont believe that thiests ever have to, any comprimaise ive seen has only been due to a lack of education rather than the fact that there is no answer.

No problem brother. If you haven't made one, you haven't made one.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

My question to the forum, both to current and former theists is "what is the biggest intellectual compromise you have made or are currently making to keep believing your faith?"

Reading your posts?:yes::shout:help:

 

[ChristineES]

to DECLARE your god is THE ONLY god, is a ridiculous notion...
that is why all those things i generalized comes from asserting ones beliefs
that are required to do so...
religion does more harm than good, generally speaking

But when did I declare that MY GOD was The Only God? I don't recall ever saying that- here are anywhere else. Even when I first became a follower of Jesus (almost 27 years ago), I wondered if all Gods were the same one. My beliefs have gotten my into trouble with other Christians.
Are you assuming that because I am a Christian that I have identical beliefs to everyone else? No one fits into neat little boxes. And there are other Christians who believe the same as I do- I have met them and spoken to them. Even Billy Graham had asserted a few years ago that he no longer was convinced that other faiths were wrong (made some Christians angry).

 

[Beaudreaux]

Reading your posts?:yes::shout:help:

Hey, if my posts cause you to question your beliefs then I'm a happy man.