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In Reply to: RE: Faith has much to do with it... posted by regmac on July 10, 2012 at 12:55:27
Kindly explain to us how seeing the sun rise myriads of times gives any logical reason at all for supposing it will rise tomorrow? Isn't the belief it will simply a result of a custom or habit of our minds?
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Follow Ups:
It's not just that the sun always rises, it's also all the scientific knowledge that explains WHY the sun always rises. And, yes, the sun MIGHT NOT rise some day. All of science is subject to change. Religious dogma, based on faith, is NOT subject to change.
People like Thomas Kuhn have shown that science proceeds pretty much the same way that religion operates. With few exceptions scientists do not change their views. They retire or die and are replaced by a newer generation of scientists. How is this any different than religion?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"People like Thomas Kuhn have shown that science proceeds pretty much the same way that religion operates. With few exceptions scientists do not change their views. They retire or die and are replaced by a newer generation of scientists. How is this any different than religion?"
If science proceeded the same way religion does, cars wouldn't move, or prayer would work. Since neither is the case, I think we can assume that there's a difference between them. It is certainly a difference that Kuhn himself recognized.
Even if it were true that all old fart scientists held on to outmoded theories while all young scientists jumped on the new and improved ones as they came along, it would have little bearing on science, which is so constructed as to transcend human nature. It's amazing what experiment and observation can do to separate the wheat from the chaff. Two bishops can argue until doomsday about how many angels can fit on the head a pin: two scientists can argue about it only until one of them trots out a microscope and tries putting angels on it.
The idiotic Governor of Texas actually prayed that God would end a recent drought!!! Yes, with NO result!!!
Two results.
If the drought ended - he would get votes from the religious nutters for the fact that he has the ear of God.
If it doesn't work - then he can say "I Prayed" but the answer was "No"
When you play this religion "prayer" card you can't lose. Which is why so VERY MANY religious leaders can afford top of the line stereo equipment while I have to save. They're all getting very wealthy "Selling God"
I've been tempted to start my own religion. I can come up with something better than Scientology and it's easier to make money than doing any real work.
Zimmerman, who is being tried for murder, just said in an interview that his action was "God's will". This is the kind of idiotic thinking that has led, unfortunately, to countless horrors.
That's the problem with the bible and books like it. You can read it literally - if you do you better stone gay people to death and women are less important than the family cow.
You can read it as a fable or a mythical book - but if you read it that way then you just admitted that it's a fable and a MYTH!
So you have these guys making money standing at the front saying this bit is REAL and this bit is Fable - huh? And that changes depending which decade it was read in. But you should trust the priest because "God talks to him" but no one ever sees that or can prove that that conversation happened.
A lot of dead Iraqis because Bush was told by God in a dream to bomb children - Guess God was oops wrong. Or Bush heard it wrong. No he either hears things and should be locked in a mental institution or he lied to the American people to get the votes to make a profit. Haliburton ammo sales increased and made them all richer. Who cares about some kids getting bombed and young black Americans lost their legs - Bush got his leather seats in his car and some zeroes in his bank account.
"good people do good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Mind boggling.
Why don't people notice that it doesn't work?
How do you know that prayer doesn't work? Did you ever consider that it might have to be used appropriately before it could be expected to work?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
If we accept mere possibility as our criterion of acceptance, then we end up accepting an infinite number of things, inasmuch as everything is possible. So as with any other theory, I'd have to see some positive evidence of the efficacy of prayer before I'd accept it. But I haven't seen any. The relatives of atheists and believers leave the hospital in equal numbers. A pope, who is undoubtedly the recipient of many prayers, may live a month in office, the dictator of an atheistic Communist state 50 years.
Somebody actually did a controlled study of the efficacy of prayer not long ago. Not surprisingly, they found none.
"Somebody actually did a controlled study of the efficacy of prayer not long ago. Not surprisingly, they found none."
Hector Avalos notes that the problem with this and any so-called controlled experiment regarding prayer is that there can be no such thing as a controlled experiment concerning prayer. You can never divide people into groups that received prayer and those that did not. The main reason is that there is no way to know that someone did not receive prayer. How would anyone know that some distant relative was not praying for a member of the group that has been identified as having received no prayer? How does one control for prayers said on behalf of all the sick people in the world? How does one assess the degree of faith in patients that are too sick to be interviewed or in the persons performing the prayers? It’s naïve to assume that "pure groups" were attained in the study you cite or any other. Since control groups are not possible, such purported "scientific" experiments are not possible regardless of the outcome.
Well, yeah, there could be a monk in Tibet who is praying for the entire world. Good thing for us that monk doesn't die, because without his prayers the world will end.
It seems to me that Mr. Avalos is trying much too hard. If he wants to show that prayer is efficacious, he'll have to conduct a controlled experiment that shows that it is, because merely pointing to shortcomings in an experiment is not, in science, sufficient to credit a theory.
“It seems to me that Mr. Avalos is trying much too hard. If he wants to show that prayer is efficacious, he'll have to conduct a controlled experiment that shows that it is, because merely pointing to shortcomings in an experiment is not, in science, sufficient to credit a theory.”
You have misunderstood. Mr. Avalos is taking the *skeptical* side of the debate as to the healing power of prayer. Nevertheless, his criticism that any such study can never control for which group gets prayer and therefore renders said study flawed (a priori), strikes me as sound.
Audiophiles can't even agree on a valid methodology for blind testing gear, and you expect believers and unbelievers to reach agreeable terms for a controlled test -- or for a third party to provide a solution -- as to the efficacy (or not) of prayer?! I've got a bridge to Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. ~:)
First there is only one god according to each religion.
A Christian prays and will get some things and not get them - but so too will a Muslim.
Muslims are convinced 100% that they are 100% right and they're God grants them their wishes through prayer. Indeed, so convinced are they that they pray many times a day.
Christians believe the same - and the other 100+ religions believe the same.
Put yourself in the non-believers shoes and looking at all of these religions for the first time and you read the EXACT same stories.
My friend was nearing death and the doctors said he was done for - then we prayed to God and a week later he was cured - WOW - that means our God heard the prayer and saved him. Blah blah blah - every religion has these exact same stories. So that either means all the Gods are up there or that their body happened to be misdiagnosed by the doctor and wasn't as severe as thought, or was something entirely different with the same symptoms.
Then there is the old "I was dieing and I saw a white light" routine which has been proven biologically to be an oxygen based lacking in the brain at the optic nerve that creates that light - it's a shared experience because it is biological/medically proven. Further the lack of oxygen to the brain creates hallucinations.
Prayer is a matter of placaebo. In many instances belief can overcome. For instance doctors have used sugar pills and told patients that they were powerful drugs that would take pain away. The belief in the doctor and the belief in the pills made their pain go away - no for everyone but it was illustration that "belief" in something could actually reduce pain.
I don't see why belief in prayer could not do exactly the same thing. So in fact I can see that "belief" in prayer could be beneficial for certain people.
I prayed to God to not make me an Atheist. For some reason He said no.
But then, all studies are flawed. Who's to say that a freak wind or an unknown phenomenon didn't influence Galileo's experiment on the leaning tower of Pisa?
Fortunately, as Einstein said, God is subtle, but He is never malicious. When we have adhered to scientific method, it has so far led us in the right direction, overall. This despite many famous scientific errors, and even the occasional malicious hoax like Piltsdown Man.
I don't think most believers have a genuine desire for objective testing, whether it be of the efficacy of prayer, or of audio. This is true of both sides, in the case of audio: the guys at Hydrogen Audio seem to me as biased as the most hard-core subjectivist. But I don't get the sense that the same thing is true in the case of religion. Believers want to believe, and so they do. All you have to do is look at the fact that religious beliefs differ widely from place to place to see that they're mostly fiction, accepted as truth. Unlike many atheists, I don't actually believe that religion is without benefit, or truth. It's just that religious truths are moral truths (as understood by a given society) that are represented symbolically, in the language of the subconcious, rather than literal ones. Religion is a tool for the social control of behavior, and it has been a crucially important and successful one.
"Religious dogma, based on faith, is NOT subject to change."
Now that is an illusion. Who is your authority for that assertion?
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
just listen to the tea party fools who claim that the bible (really, just the JEWISH old testament) is 100% accurate and it's truths are unchanging. WHERE have you been living for the last 30 + years?
Well, I have a passing interest in the history of religions, and certainly do not take fundamentalism as the paradigm for religion.
But of course, fundamentalism is a relatively new phenomenon--in Christianity, anyway.
But let's face it, all religions have histories, and have changed over time.
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
The Catholic church, like all fundamentalist religions that I know of, claims that it is infallible in many crucial beliefs and rituals. IMO, there is no more reason to believe in any religion as there is a reason to believe in the tooth fairy or the flying spaghetti monster. And, NO, an atheist's view that there is no god, is NOT based on faith. Like all beliefs, it's based on experience, and is subject to change given new experience. As Bill Maher, an atheist, puts it: I don't believe in Jesus Christ, but if he came down and started performing miracles, then I would say: "look, there is Jesus, and he is performing miracles. WOW! I was clearly wrong, and I now believe." If religions did not try to impose their "infallible" views on the rest of us, I would not care what nonsense they believed in. Unfortunately, the history of man is filled with many disasters that religions have caused.
Religions are dragged forward by secular society. Take gay rights which is occurring now. Religions basically are being PUSHED to do the right thing as they were pushed to give women the vote and African Americans equality. They are pushed by non religious (largely Atheists or those who consider themselves non-religious) to follow a more tolerant path.
I just met an Anglican priest on the ferry the other day - not only was she a she but she is a Lesbian and not just a Lesbian but a married Lesbian.
So the Anglican church seems to have re-evaluated some things. Then again why not - it's about money collecting so if you open up to the gays that's a whopping 5-10% of the world population you can market your church to.
Guys like Dawkins couldn't care less what people believe in. The problem he had and others is when people are killing people in the name of their God when there is no evidence. The thinking is that if you stop their "wrong" and "un-proven" belief system then maybe they won't fly plane's into building in the hope that they will get 72 virgins for doing so.
If those guys were not so totally convinced by getting 72 virgins and being in God's good books and they were taught to believe in stuff that could be proved then those towers would still be there and the religious nutter retaliation that followed would not have followed and the entire war would not have started and tens of thousands of people would be alive and arguably the financial state of the US and the rest of the world would be FAR better and people would still have their homes.
All because people are believing in something that has absolute no basis to be believed in any way shape or form - not remotely.
It's like the cable debate but people argue to the death that spending $2,000 on a cable is stupid when evidence illustrates it sounds no different than $5 cables - but so what - the worst that someone spending the $2k cables on will do to the world is umm "help the economy."
Believing you get 72 virgins in death or that God has a plan for you (so if you kill 50 people - it's not my fault it was God's plan for me to kill 50 people) is just slightly more important than the guy who spent $2k on cables (and at least he is happy in his belief and hasn't killed anyone).
Ultimately the problem with all religions is that they demand supreme acceptance of their "truth" and then discount everyone else's religion as being WRONG.
So one guy with zero proof will rip the other guy with zero proof. And no on this forum they're trying to rip science which is the only thing that actually has any evidence whatsoever.
As a non believer I am asked to not believe Scientology because it's Craaaazy - I am asked not to believe in Mormonism because it's Caraaazy
But I am asked to believe in Christianity because it's
"The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree."
Yes that's not caraaaazy? I am supposed to throw all science under the bus and believe the above? Yeah ok.
Infallibility implies a certain unchangeability in doctrine, and in many cases, this has been very difficult to prove historically.
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
"Kindly explain to us how seeing the sun rise myriads of times gives any logical reason at all for supposing it will rise tomorrow?"
It doesn't. (That's Hume's point.) One more time: Hume’s position is that no finite number of observations, no matter how large, can be used to derive an (unrestricted general conclusion that is logically defensible).
"Isn't the belief it will simply a result of a custom or habit of our minds?"
Precisely. Just as I highlighted with the example of the little girl and her uncle observing a ball bounce. Actually, Hume's famous example involves billiard balls.
How could an infinite number of observations of the sun rising prove that it would rise tomorrow? How "can [they] be used to derive an (unrestricted general conclusion that is logically defensible)?"
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Many think that Kant answered Hume's objections. I tend to side with Hume and his generally skeptical views. However, even Hume admitted that, IN PRACTICE (you know, in the actual decisions we make in daily life), we DO act as if cause and effect was a law of nature. Yes, scientific laws are only good until they are disproven. Religious belief remains "true" even if disproven!!!
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