Haven’t we been over the fallacy of worshipping experiments before? Not everything in human experience can be measured by experiments.
Consider Van Gogh. I believe that observing Van Gogh’s paintings makes me happier as a person. Now I have no experiment to back this up, nor does any of the millions of other persons who believe the same. If one did an experiment one would probably find that there was no significant difference in happiness level between those who do and don’t view Van Gogh paintings. Nevertheless the belief that Van Gogh paintings cause happiness persists, and it is an entirely rational and valid belief. And the same with prayer.
Um, what? That makes no sense. Of course you can find differences between people who like Van Gogh and those who don’t. People who like $attribute of Van Gogh’s painting will like them, and people who don’t like $attribute won’t. People who have good personal memories that have to do with Van Gogh paintings will like them, and people who don’t (probably) won’t. You’re talking about ‘happiness’ and ‘preference’, human ideas that don’t have cooresponding mathematical values. If god is real, then he won’t have this problem.
Huh? What does trying to determine what personal attributes someone has have to do with determining an action causes a result? If prayer has an effect on this world that is separate from not praying, it can be measured.
there might be no statistical evidence of the effect of God in the curing of headaches on people who take aspirin, that doesn’t mean there is no difference on the person who prayed, though. The difference is real and measurable. That person’s life is changed in a significant way by his prayer (and whatever outcome came to be, positive or not). Some might consider it delusion, others placebo effect, others “opium for the masses”. To him, though, it was prayer who cured him.
As for table prayer in gratitude for the meal, there is a million things that could have gone wrong for these people, despite their best efforts to put a meal on the table. There is no need to smite the cook at the eleventh hour for effect. Again, I bet there is no statistical variation on the ability to have a meal by people who pray and those who don’t, but it makes a personal difference for those people who do.
Allow me to abuse Mr. Van Gogh here, for a minute, since he was brought up. Any skilled painter could replicate his self portrait without having to cut off his ear. Does that mean that van Gogh had no need to cut off his? Is there a study measuring the geniality of painters with one or two ears? It made a difference to him, and that is what matters.
Your post seems to indicate that you understand that any benefit that people derive from prayer is derived exclusively from their own perspective on the experience, which has not a single thing to do with whether God did anything. Yes, people derive improved personal moods from prayers to God, and from tossing salt over their shoulder, and thinking that they’ll win the lottery in one more ticket. Reality does not have an exclusive role in guiding people’s thought; that is never in doubt.
And the absence of a study, especially a silly study such as one with a sample set of one, does not mean that any effects that occurred or are occurring are unobservable.
So my statement about reactions to Van Gogh “makes no sense” and “of course” it is correct. Are all statements that make no sense obviously correct, or is this one unique? Does correctness itself make no sense? Did you give any thought to the ramifications of declaring that a statement which makes no sense is also correct?
All right, this has left me even more confused than the first part of your post. You first say that “happiness” and “preference” are “human ideas that don’t have cooresponding[sic] mathematical values.” Then you declare that the effects of prayer “can be measured”. You’ve just contradicted yourself, and I don’t agree with either half of the contradiction.
Firstly happiness is not an idea; it’s a condition of mind. All available evidence suggests that animals experience it and that babies experience and express it long before they can hold an idea in their head. In any case we’ve no ability to simply think up happiness the way we think up an idea. Sometimes it comes to us unbidden; other times we can’t have it in our head even when we want it. As for measuring happiness, it’s true that a meter stick is fairly useless for that task, but humans can rank their happiness in a decently rigorous way.
As for prayer, I can, when I pray, be aware of how God answers me just as I can be aware of how I react to a Van Gogh painting. But again a meter stick wouldn’t be particularly useful for that measurement. How on Earth would you numerically measure the results of prayer.
Belief in a literal translation of the Bible and it’s characterizations of God is a type of belief that we do have ample hard evidence to refute. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I wouldn’t expect you to. You asserted it was scientific. Evidently it isn’t.
It convinces the person who has the experience.
No, it isn’t. Even Apostle Paul in the Bible acknowledged he had much more to learn and his understanding was incomplete. Jesus told his disciples there was much more that they were not ready to bear. People do hold some beliefs as divine truth for various reasons, including tradition, or because that’s what they were told by others, or taught by their parents. Their attachment to these beliefs can be very strong. Indeed they may believe they are right when they aren’t. However, most believers would agree that they still have plenty to learn and there’s a lot they don’t understand.
Is killing someone because you want there stuff logical? Is one country invading another because they want their territory and resources logical? Is it logical to enslave another people for cheap labor if we are able to? Where is the actual evidence that it is morally wrong. Whatever we define as our moral foundation there’s no indication that non belief has any superior moral standing. IMO you’re blurring the lines. Morals aren’t built on scientific evidence.
You’re talking about how a belief system affects someones actions and how those actions affect others. That’s fine. I think actions and their results can be judged. The truth is that god belief results in positive and negative actions. So does a lack of God belief. So, by all means, judge the actions.
I’ve been inspired by reading any number of great books. Inspiration isn’t contained within the words on the the page but within ourselves. I might see that experience as spiritual while you would not. How do we decide who’s correct? Do we need to?
And as I have said before, it’s the person trying to convince another person that their thinking is correct, that has the burden of proof, regardless of which side of the argument they are on.
If I say I believe but have no need or desire to convince you I am right then I have no burden of proof.
As far as the default position is concerned once again I ask, the default position for whom, and according to who?
Yeah, I think I get what is being said. I’m trying to draw some lines. There are beliefs which there is hard evidence that refutes the belief, such as a literal translation of Genesis. There are beliefs that have little evidence one way or the other, or beliefs that are subjective in nature and beyond the realm of science to measure.
I do think it is important to recognize that the subjective nature of beliefs make them personal and unique, so that while we may share certain beliefs with others, we shouldn’t insist that our way is the one right way. It isn’t within the nature of spiritual beliefs that we can share the hard evidence you speak of, so, knowing that we don’t try to force our beliefs on others.
Wow, you ignored the content and just read what you wanted. Yeah, normally in a discussion you want to actually try to understand what the other person is saying before responding. Some people think it helps.
Apparently, I did not understand what you posted. You tried to compare the feeling of happiness, a widely spread if not universal basic emotion, with how you perceive response to prayer by saying that you cannot do an experiment to see why people would be made happy by a Van Gogh painting. My response was to point out that you can in fact detect what different things can make a person happy by seeing a Van Gogh painting, experimentation would be one way to do this, and they can all be explained.
The problem here is that the ‘feeling of god responding to a prayer’ is not universal, and it might not even be common. If you can give evidence that a significant portion of humanity experiences this ‘feeling’, it might bolster your claim.
The thing about happiness is that it can sort of be measured, in a certain way. Well, maybe not measured, detected I guess would be a better word. As with all emotions, the human body responds in certain physical ways, which can be detected. Adrenalin, endorphins, brain activity, etc. It might be slightly different from person to person, but it won’t vary by too much within the same person. So if we really wanted to, we should be able to tell if a person is ‘happy’.
Now, with your ‘feeling of god responding to a prayer’, which you compared to happiness, can this be done? Can it be shown that this is a unique and induced state, not created by the brain or body? Shouldn’t be too hard. Until it can be shown that is different from what the brain would produce if, say, you had false expectations and your brain provided a small change that you took to be god without any real justification, then we really shouldn’t bother with the ‘god did it’ explanation.
Wrong. If you actually care about being right, then the burden of proof is on the person making the claim something exists, even if they never speak to anyone.
For just about everything people believe, except religion, and according to everyone who’s not a gullible fool. Religion is a special case; being basically delusional, it can’t hold up to the standards that we would hold anything else to, so it’s given a pass.
That doesn’t make it ‘evidence’. Under the influence of drugs little blue elephants might convince me that I’m flying, but that’s not ‘evidence’. That’s ‘delusion’. If you have an experience, your interpretation of that experience isnt evidence for your conclusion unless you can back it up with something independent. Until then it’s just an opinion. By your definition I can choose to interpret any light I see as a UFO, and then claim I have evidence that UFOs exist.
But no believer doubts that they’re really wrong, just that they don’t know everything. They don’t doubt the basics: god, heaven, hell, etc. They just think they don’t know all there is to know about them. That’s what faith is. Unreasoning belief. Paul never meant that he might be wrong about the whole god/jesus thing, he just meant that he still had a lot to learn about it.
Wrong. Sociology can easily show that murder, war, and slavery are bad. Bad for society, bad for individuals, whatever. Bad, and therefore wrong.
Besides, judging by history, and current events, belief doesn’t have much to stand on.
So if they’re the same, why bother with god? He doesn’t seem to affect the results.
But no one is disputing that prayer might make you feel happier. So might yoga, listening to Beethoven, or looking at porn. People get their jollies from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, animism, and cargo cultism. What we’re saying is that there’s no there there.
Atheists believe in the concept of god, just not the actuality of god. We believe that prayer might well have an impact on the prayer, and maybe the prayee if he knows about it, but not on a prayee who doesn’t. We just don’t believe in any supernatural component, or anything beyond what might work for someone as convinced by its efficacy while not believing in god.
You believe in prayer - fine. Do you believe in a god behind it?
I’ve never said I don’t believe in spirituality, just not in any spirits. If you equate the experience of reading the Bible with that of another inspirational book, I’m right there with you. Great authors have the ability to inspire, and there’s no disputing that. There is just no supernatural man behind the curtain.
We could have an interesting discussion about where inspiration comes from - I can see arguments for both sides. Immaterial to this one, though.
Yup. I’d say all beliefs are subjective. Some may not even map to reality, such as a taste preference or a love preference. But if the belief is a statement about reality, then we can measure if the belief is true - or show that the belief is nonsensical.
Three examples.
I believe I love vanilla ice cream. Purely personal, and beyond dispute.
I believe vanilla ice cream is the best flavor. Unless there is an implied, “for me” this is something that can’t even be measured, since there is no metric. Children say this kind of thing, but get over it. Children and sports fans, who don’t.
I believe Tokyo is the capital of Japan. That’s something that can be checked.
Many of the statements of belief in this thread are 1 or 2 masquerading as 3, or people who hear a refutation of a belief of type 3 taking it as an attack on their class 1 or 2 beliefs.
I know this is starting to feel like a pile-on. But remember–suffering builds character!
Anyhow, it seems like the subjectivity of religious belief is its primary weakness. Think of it this way: what makes scientific and other empirical beliefs so well-founded is their intersubjective nature. If a doctor looks through a microscope and sees that a cell is cancerous, in principle anyone with similar training can look through that microscope and see the same thing. This intersubjective verifiability is what makes these beliefs well-grounded.
But evidence that in principle cannot be verified by others doesn’t really count as evidence at all. This is why if someone hears voices in her head, and noone else can hear them, that person has good reason to think they aren’t real. (Not that I am comparing religious belief to mental illness.) Similarly, if you have an internal religious experience, but there is no publically observable external cause, then there is no reason to think that the experience is good evidence for the existence of God. It might be caused by God–but you don’t have a good reason for thinking that it is. You don’t even have a good reason for personal belief, I don’t think.
At first glance I thought, “what nonsense” but then it sunk in. The spiritual journey is about seeking the truth and making a commitment to continue to do so. That means being willing to let go of our personal illusions when life’s experiences and new information brings us to that point. So, yes, the burden of proof exists but that is also for the individual, if they care about being right. We all function every day within our own personal illusions and most of us can continue to function fine within society without having all the answers. The question of whether my consciousness survives after my physical body dies will be answered in due time. I don’t feel any pressing burden to know the answer. If my belief system works for me and I feel I am going forward and still discovering new things then I am gradually meeting my own burden of proof. Let me add that an important component of caring about being right is understanding the difference between “what I believe right now” and “what I know is true” We need to be honest about what we don’t know. Thats where god belief falls for me.
Fortunately we are gradually changing that and believers are part of that change. I agree with Sam Harris and others that say beliefs should be challenged. Belief systems translate into actions and actions effect the lives of others. We have every right to challenge those belief systems that effect us regardless of their labels. And,if we do care about being right standing up for our beliefs will result in a self examination of those beliefs. That’s an important part of self discovery.
Dealing with the objective evidence is only one component of exploring the belief systems that effect our lives. If we want to improve our communication and make it effective we need to try and understand the subjective and emotional nature of belief systems. A much bigger job indeed.
In another thread we were discussing the Bible and inspiration and another poster made the observation that considering the varied nature of what is in the Bible and people’s reaction to it we might conclude that whatever inspiration we get from it springs from within the individual and not because of the inspired mystical nature of the book itself. I felt like Archimedes. He had articulated what had been bouncing around in my head.
IMHO the only word of God is our own inner connection and cannot be contained in any book. We can find it in different books by various authors both religious or secular. Sometimes I consider certain movies to be our modern day parables. We might feel it in observing nature, or in a conversation with someone.
Of course it might be just extra happy neurons firing when that natural high occurs, but as you say, that’s another thread.
I have no problem with people holding certain books more valuable to them than others. I do think people believing that the Bible or any other book is literally the word of God is a damaging belief. There is plenty of hard objective evidence to dispel that belief and I’m all for spreading that news.
Take a person who is influenced, in any way, by what they perceive is a beautiful painting. Does that prove that the painting is beautiful? Does that prove beauty?. Just the same, people are influenced by a God-created world. It doesn’t prove that the world was created by God, and it doesn’t prove there is a God. But the experience is real. It happened and it had an effect.
Now if you want to argue that everything subjective doesn’t really exist, that’s fine. I am nowhere near being able to fight that fight. To me, though, they do.
If you equate the experience of reading the Bible with that of another inspirational book, I’m right there with you. Great authors have the ability to inspire, and there’s no disputing that. There is just no supernatural man behind the curtain.