No, it’s not opinion. You have not presented a testable hypothesis, let alone a theory. By the definitions that are commonly used you have discussed personal revelation. That’s fine by itself, I don’t think anyone here is against you witnessing about that. This forum is specifically for that sort of thing. But the fact is that there’s no way to reliably and repeatedly test what you have presented without relying on personal revelation.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Describe a test that a neutral 3rd party can observe and verify to see if your claims are true and we’ll take it from there.
I agree. It’s not a “Theory” in the scientific sense of the word.
It doesn’t work that way, unless that third party can somehow jump inside your body and mind and monitor your thoughts, correlating each little itch with them.
Then you can appreciate that from an external point of view, if you told us that your dog is telepathically speaking to you and only you, we’d be understandably skeptical, right?
But in your case, what makes us even more skeptical is that you have a dog only you can see.
Right. But there’s a price to pay in order to gain knowledge. You can’t expect to obtain an understanding of, say, advanced physics without a teacher and a textbook, can you? Not to mention being teachable and willing to admit that you don’t know everything.
Many great ideas have initially been ridiculed and rejected by the world, just because they were hard to prove. Example: Columbus believed the world is round, but until he proved it, conventional wisdom wouldn’t accept that.
Seeing the “invisible dog” requires faith and an open mind. Since seeing this particular dog isn’t essential for salvation, that makes proving it a whole lot harder, although worthwhile IMHO.
Is that right about Columbus? I thought any half-educated person knew the earth was round by then. Columbus’s innovation was thinking (incorrectly) that the earth was much smaller than the Greeks had calculated it to be, so he believed he’d have enough provisions to sail to India. Can a better historian back me up on this?
And if the price to gain knowledge is that we have to take every absurd idea seriously, then that knowledge comes at far too great of a price.
That’s correct. It’s a popular myth that Columbus’s dispute with the experts regarded whether the Earth was round or not. All educated people knew that; and sailors knew it especially well, since they could observe that the tops of distant objects were visible much sooner than the lower parts.
Columbus cherry-picked the data to calculate a much smaller distance to Asia than was commonly believed. The experts told him he was full of shit. They were right, and he was wrong. But Columbus was the luckiest crackpot in history, discovering something he wasn’t even looking for.
They were provable in principle, however. Your idea can’t even be tested, let alone proven.
I disagree. The signals can be both tested and proven, but it’s not the kind of proof you folks would accept. It’s to be found in our hearts. Faith precedes the miracle, so if you’re unwilling to exercise faith in God, you can never know.
Suppose we leave atheists out of this for a change. Do many people of faith buy into your hypothesis? There are more than a few right here on this message board. Perhaps they would be willing to chime in?..
Man, this is some Grade A crazy right here. Not as sensational as the hollow Earth guy we had a while back, but still pretty far down the rabbit hole of delusion.
I agree.
IF the OP is to be taken at face value (and that’s a big ‘If’ just based on how ridiculous this whole idea is) , then none of these attempts by other Dopers to engage him in rational, logical thinking are going to make one bit of difference. I mean, just read the first quoted part above again and his subsequent posts and ask yourself, “Is this someone who is capable of reason? Objectivity?” Clearly not. And no matter how carefully anyone crafts an argument refuting this ludicrous ‘body signal’ fantasy, the OP will just blow it off by invoking the magic of god and his personal experience with these special, spiritual itches.
You could very easily design a test that records the real-world accuracy of your subjective prognosticative itches, without any need for the experimenter to read your mind.
For example, you could be presented with a panel of three people who will tell you anecdotes about their childhood, except one story of each set is an outright lie. You use your itches to decide who is lying and we compare your hit rate to a control, and to the value we could expect you to achieve by pure luck.
Any number of similar experiments could be designed that would demonstrate whether there is any reality to your claim, or not, but I already know what you will say in response (and I worked it out without any itches).
Ah yes, last refuge of the psuedoscience and the frauds. If proof cannot be observed and verified by a third party, then it is (by definition) not proof. The claim that a person must believe something before it can be demonstrated, or that an observer’s lack of belief causes the trial to fail, is a tremendous red flag. This is the same excuse used by cold readers when the subject refuses to give them the feedback they need to make the con work. It’s the same excuse used when facilitated communication fails under test conditions. And it makes Snark Hunter’s claims no different than any other unsupported claim of religious experience… “It’s true to me, and that’s all that matters.”
So while I finish laughing that this, I do have one last question: You claim that ISIS members who commit atrocities are not / cannot be listening to a deity. My question is, how do you know this to be true? If the process you describe consists entirely of personal revelation that no third party can witness or empirically observe, then how do you know that ISIS members are not listening to a message of their own? If your claims are true, then it is entirely possible that an ISIS member could be receiving messages from a deity telling them to do any number of reprehensible things, and (being loyal worshippers) they obey the commands they are given. Since you cannot observe their body signals or the revelation that God communicates to them in their hearts (the same way we cannot objectively assess the revelation God gives you) then how do you know that they are not listening to God? Is it that their perception of God contradicts your assumption of what God should be?
