# Resolved for Debate:  Some things exist which do not exhibit empirical signs

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-debate-some-things-exist-which-do-not-exhibit-empirical-signs/385648>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [December 26, 2006, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-debate-some-things-exist-which-do-not-exhibit-empirical-signs/385648 "2006-12-26T18:58:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2006, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-debate-some-things-exist-which-do-not-exhibit-empirical-signs/385648/61 "2006-12-29T14:35:23Z")

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[QUOTE=Voyager]  
Even indirect evidence, in the sense that evidence for the Big Bang is indirect.  
[/quote]

Prayer, again. No direct evidence of specifically what’s going on there. (Heck, we can’t even pinpoint how hypnosis works!). But outcomes. The outcomes aren’t necessarily ephemeral. I would not incorporate “prayer” as an explanation of phenomena if there were no phenomena to explain.

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> Religions certainly agree that the mass of people can be wrong - but not the base tenets of the religion itself

My religion has no base tenets. Aside from the paradoxical base tenet about fallibility and uncertainty. Well, OK, perhaps an implicit sense that there is meaning and sense to be made of it all in the first place, that there is a “there there”. But any enterprise has the implicit mission-statement sense that those who participate in it do so under the assumption that doing so is not meaningless, yes?

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> I don’t know what Papal infallibility has to do with continual testing and correction

Me neither. Who invoked him?

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> Now, the Dalai Lama seems to believe that Buddhism should change if science shows it to be wrong, but I don’t know many other religions who have that view of reality.

I am not responsible for religions in general, many other religions, or any other religions. Most of them are taxidermy: the process of becoming and existing as institutions has long since killed off the live curiosity-and-inquiry core, the original “wanting answers” thing, and they stick the stuffed and mounted corpse of some ancient book of answers or visionary prophet-leader up front and say “Behold”.

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**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [December 30, 2006, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-for-debate-some-things-exist-which-do-not-exhibit-empirical-signs/385648/62 "2006-12-30T02:51:59Z")

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Something odd about this thread. You can’t get to the last page unless you change the posts-per-page (pp=) part of the URL to something other than the default of 20. Otherwise you click the button to go to page 4 and it reloads page 3 instead.

Posting this to see if a second post added to page 4 fixes the problem…

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