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In Reply to: RE: Will the sun rise tomorrow? posted by the old school on July 10, 2012 at 20:55:23
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
Follow Ups:
"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.
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