Once again, I challenge you: ** Prove your assertion that religion has NEVER successfully predicted anything.** At the very least, explain the methodology through which you arrived at your conclusion.
Why do you keep dodging the question? Could it be because you merely pulled this (ahem) “fact” out of thin air?
Remember, you didn’t merely claim that religion has never made enough successful predictions. Nor did you claim that religion has never accurately predicted anything to the best of your knowledge. Rather, you claim that it has never, ever, ever predicted anything successfully, which is an extraordinarily strong claim to make. Did you arrive at your conclusion methodically, or did you merely assert it to be true?
The burden of proof rests on your shoulders. You made the claim. The responsibility does not rest on others to refute it. Rather, the onus is upon you to provide substantiation.
And the fact that you continually dodge this question is quite telling indeed.
glee, there is a systematic way by which we can resolve this dispute.
Your assertion is that religion has never made a single successful prediction. Well then,
Please list all the predictions that the various world religions have made throughout the centuries.
Please demonstrate that not a single one of these predictions has come through.
If you cannot, how can you possibly claim to have done the research necessary to support your assertion? Saying, “Well, I don’t know of any successful predictions” is not good enough.
Remember, I have not made any claims so far about whether any successful predictions have occurred. (I could, but that would be subject matter for another thread.) What I am trying to see is whether you have done the necessary research to substantiate your unusually strong (and broad!) claim. So far, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.
Thunder, I believe your question to be ridiculous. As I understand it, it is not some who makes a claim that needs to prove his claim. It is he who claims something extra.
You believe a book called the bible exists. (As far as I can tell)
glee believes that the bible exists
a straightforward reading of the book shows it contains prediction about things that happened later in the same book. It also claimed that certain things will happen in the future. glee (as far as I can tell) believes that such things will not occur. It seems like you believe they will. That is one extra thing to believe in. It is up to you to prove, if you claim the bible to be true.
Now, that is just my understanding of the debate, and I may be wrong.
And that someone is glee. He’s the one who claimed that religion has a ZERO PERCENT(!!!) success rate in making predictions. That is an extreme claim by any standard. It is most certainly “something extra.”
Did I claim that the Bible is true? I have said no such thing in this discussoin. If you want to discuss the veracity of the Biblical Scriptures, we can certainly do that in another thread. However, I have made no such assertions in this particular discussion.
Again, I have said NOTHING about whether religion has been successful in making predictions. Rather, I have challenged glee to support his extreme claim that religion has had absolutely no successes in this regard. Is that so difficult to understand?
I take it that you agree with glee’s claim. If so, then please describe the investigative technique through which you arrived at his conclusion. Where is your list of all the predictions made in the name of religion? And how did you determine that none of these predictions came true?
Now, I realize this is getting of the subject, but I will go along with this foolish discussion. I do not believe that religous prohecies have come true. Something in your words makes me believe that you believe in at least one. I would be gratified if you could tell me which one. For now however, I will give you a little of what you are asking for. I don’t not have the two hours it would take to disprove every prophacy in every religion, :), so I will mention a few.
Gen.2:17
“But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Gen.5:5
“And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.”
Deut.
7:14 Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.
I also believe that the Jehovah’s Witlesses have predicted definate dates for the end of the world. These dates have passed, and the world hasn’t ended.
In addition, Aztec pagans believe the world will end in 2012. I can post here again in the thirteenth day of 2013, if you would like. If the mods of that time do not mind me resurecting such an old thread, that is.
There was once a traveller who made a glorious journey into far and beautiful lands. Upon returning to his village he tried to describe his experiences, but words failed him. So instead he drew a map, that his fellow villagers might take the journey themselves.
They proceeded to study the map, declaring themselves experts.
Here at SDMB you debate geographical details, topography and terrain. But it’s the same problem.
Not that such debates aren’t worthwhile; they are. But the point of (good, non-political) religious texts is to help the reader have their own spiritual experiences, not to limit God through description.
No offense, Scott_plaid, but you didn’t answer my question.
All you did was cite some prophecies which supposedly did not come true (that is, you haven’t demonstrated that they were false). Even if that were the case, it still would not show that religion has never made a single successful prophecy, as glee claims.
So once again, how would you go about supporting glee’s claim? Would you say that his claim is the result of thorough research, or is it pretty much a preconceived conclusion?
Addendum: I agree that the Aztec and Jehovah’s Witness prophecies did not come true. You haven’t demonstrated that the aforementioned Genesis propechies did not, though… and even if you did, that still wouldn’t prove glee’s assertion.
As an aside, I’ll thank you not to refer to the JW’s as “Jehovah’s Witlesses.” I think most people would agree that such cheap shots do not belong in well-reasoned matters of great debate.
Jesus didn’t say the kingdom of Heaven is a big shiney city in the sky where you go to live after you die. HE said the kingdom of heaven is within you,
None are completely correct. Some aren’t even on the quest for spiritual truth, but most represent mans struggle for spirtual knowledge. The ones that get the most press and stress a reward in the next life for towing the line in this one are missing a big portion of what Jesus and Buddha taught. Journey of 1000 miles and all that.
Not being a scientist I may be wrong here but don’t scientists prove their theories by operating under the premise that it IS true, and then preforming expiriments to
prove it? Gandhi called his autobiography Expiriments in Truth.
You don’t challenge Solar energy to prove it’s existance. You come to that conclusion by observation and experience and by by believeing something you don’t understand yet is actually real.
Your decades of research is impressive. It doesn’t take long in studying world religions to see how they are filled with superstition and myth. Hasn’t science had its share of misconceptions and accepted “facts” later proved incorrect? My question is what was the premise you set out to prove? That religions can’t prove God exists? Given. Maybe it was “God does not exist.” In which case you might embrace all the evidence that supported your theory and discard as inconclusive, any evidence to the contrary. My suggestion is you start your journey on the premise that God is. Even if you’re not convinced. Jesus called this the desire to have faith. Then seek evidence to convince only yourself of that premise.
If we’re talking about evidence that can be shown to the world at large then we have to get each person to preform that same expiriment, for as Jesus said , the Kingdom of heaven is within. Thats not too realistic is it?
The search for scientific truth goes on with much more to discover. So does the search for spiritual truth. In the meantime what we’ve proven so far is that,
If God is, then God is immeasureable.
Hey!! Didn’t religion predict that ages ago? How bout that.
Gen.2:17
“But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Gen.5:5
“And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.”
Deut.
7:14 Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.
They conflict. They are prediction of the future. In the first one god told Adam that he would die the day he ate that produce. Instead he lived to be 930. That’s slightly older than my Granddad.
He also told the Jews that there would be no barren women among them. I have been to Tov Pizza, a kosher pizza place in Baltimore, and I overheard a conversation about a women who could not have kids. She was Jewish, and yet she **was ** barren.
Oh, and asking some to prove that all prophecies are false is like proving that my granddad isn’t 900 years old.
Re: JW’s. I will refrain from purposely leaving misspellings that I realize can be insulting.
Oh good grief. This is very close to proving an existential negative (different in that the number of predictions made by religions is not infinite, so theoretically looking at every one is possible.) Just as it is silly to ask an atheist to disprove god (and few if any make the claim that we can) it is absurd to request that someone list all prophecies, when you can disprove the assertion by listing one that has come true.
Now ones in the Bible have come true - but in the same sense that the witches prophecies in Macbeth came true. We also can’t count prophecies that come true because the actor deliberately fulfilled it, like Jesus entering Jerusalem on an ass. (Assuming that actually happened, of course.)
Since we have a long list of prophecies that have not come true, we can provisionally accept glee’s assertion until you provide evidence against.
You know that Newton was correct about his physics, right? Einstein’s work did not invalidate Newton’s, but merely contextualized it. Newton’s stuff still works at speeds slower than light. Different religions are just different ways of looking at the same thing. You also know that religions aren’t God. I mean, if a scientist gets something wrong or acts like a jackass, you don’t throw out science. Nor do you throw out all of science just because there are several competing Grand Unified Field theories.
The existence of God can be proved analytically, but the proof will not satisfy you if you have already concluded that God does not exist. But on the matter of prediction, you know that that sort of prediction is what science does. And it works for science. But that doesn’t mean that everything else has to make the same sorts of predictions in order to be valid for what it is. Music doesn’t make any predictions. Sure, you can study music in a scientific way, but whatever predictions are made are scientific, not musical. It just doesn’t make rational sense to make scientific demands of religion. It’s very, um, unscientific to do so.
What’s the big deal about proving an existential negative? I can easily prove, for example, that there exists no rational solution for the square root of two.
No, despite what you seemed to have assumed, if I was present by scientific proof of good, then, I would change my mind. Oh, and science makes claims about the world. Religion makes claims about the world. Music doesn’t. There is no comparison. Oh, and science doesn’t predict anything. It says that since the last google (a very big numbers) of times that we dropped a book, it fell, so we can act on the assumption that it will next time and not float upwards
Gandhi was a lawyer, wasn’t he? In any case, you are incorrect. An experiment must be set up to be able to disprove a hypothesis. In fact, the hypothesis cannot be proven, it can only get more evidence (and not get disproven) and make correct predictions. Any idiot can set up an experiment to prove something. A classic example is the Michelson-Morley experiment. The experiment was set up to determine if the speed of light was different depending on the flow of the ether, but was set up so this could be disproven - and it was, of course.
If you hypothesize solar energy, and do an experiment to see if it is real, you don’t turn off your collector at night. You need to keep it on at night, and measure the power output against the appearance of the sun. If you start getting power in the middle of the night, the hypothesis that the power comes from the sun would be disproven or at least shaken.
And why not? Well, religions can’t but God can. Read Exodus. If we had several independent sources from the time that verified that story, perhaps from Egypt, from the tribes the Israelites met, and archeological findings in the Sinai, God, while not proven, would be a good hypothesis, or even a theory. No evidence at all that it happened is good evidence in this case that it didn’t - not finding one piece of petrified poop from 100,000 or more people is evidence of absence. Many god stories involve interaction with humans ans some interventions of the deity. Interestingly, no evidence that any of these ever happened.
Want to buy a bridge? Start on the assumption that I own the rights to it, and try to find evidence that I do. Don’t go looking for any that I don’t. Or, assume that all those claims in the spam you get are true. Why not be as skeptical about the claims of a religion as you are about the claims of the guy selling that Rolex for $10 on the street corner?
Many of us started with a god belief, being indoctrinated in our culture. But the more I read, the less likely it seemed. How many times are your assumptions going to get dashed before you stop accepting them? Again, be like a scientist. Say, what would the world be like if my assumptions are true, and what would it be like if they aren’t, open your eyes, look at the world, and see what is closer to reality. This doesn’t mean you have to be an atheist. The world under deism looks the same as the world under atheism, so take your pick. Evolution with God loading the dice looks the same as evolution without god. If you want to believe that God set the initial conditions of the solar system such that the asteroid would wipe out the dinosaurs, be my guest. As for me, I’ll assume no god unless I see evidence to the contrary.
God, maybe, but not the impact of God on the real world. We can’t measure the one who made the flood, but we can measure the results of it. If we cannot find a trace of any of the measurable things god did, isn’t it time to give up on him? Or should I have believed in my daughter’s invisible friend Augie?
I see your point now. Well first of all, not all translations render Genesis 2:17 as you describe, so that’s not a definite contradiction.
And even if it were, that would only demonstrate that a particular prophecy from a particular religious prediction did not occur. It would say absolutely nothing about other prophecies, or about religion in general.
Not at all. There is good reason to believe that your grandfather isn’t 900 years old. It is not so clear that there have been absolutely no religious prophecies that have come true.
Besides, if this is truly an unreasonable challenge, then why don’t you say that to your pal glee? After all, he’s the one who claimed that there have been no religious predictions that have come true. Are you saying that he can’t possibly have determined that to be so?
You can’t have it both ways. One cannot staunchly defend glee’s grandiose claim, while simultaneously saying “But I have no way of testing all the predictions made in the name of religion! Don’t be unreasonable!”
Existential in the sense of physical existence. Yes, proving a negative is possible, proving that no physical thing exists (and here we assume the prophecy has been written down) is not. Or, more accurately, is not practical to disprove in this case.
I’ve done plenty of proofs by contradiction in my day.
Oh, and since you’re here, could you explain falsifiability to cosmosdan, please? He is under the assumption that good scientists try to prove things to be true.
Again, bring it up with glee. He’s the one who made that claim. Are you saying that the accuracy of his claim cannot be demonstrated?
Remember, citing some examples of unfulfilled predictions doesn’t cut it – not if he claims that religion has NEVER successfully predicted anything. There are a great many religions, after all. Remember the adage about broad brushes?
Which particular passage are you describing? To the best of my knowledge, there are no Scriptural statements which say that there will never be any barren whatsoever women among the Jews.