(December 11, 2012 at 7:24 am)Stimbo Wrote: This prayer superpower as described is so astonishingly unreliable, though. There's no way for the petitioner to know whether their prayer is going to work, or whether that's the time their god is going to give the thumbs down. As a tool, it's so unreliable as to be totally useless. Imagine a piece of life-saving equipment which might occasionally work, but most of the time just comes up tilt. Or even works fifty percent of the time, indistinguihable from chance. There's not a hospital on the planet - hopefully - that would allow it within a hundred miles.
I agree with the thrust of your argument, I think, but it's a bit odd coming from an atheist. I mean, if someone told you that your life-saving equipment couldn't ever work because the theory necessary for it to function properly is in error, wouldn't you disagree? Isn't the fact that the device functions at all proof that it can work?
Of course, this all depends on what you think it means for prayer to "work". If someone prays to God for rain, say, and then it rains--but it turns out that there is no such being as God, and that it had just so happened to rain...I wouldn't describe that as a prayer that "worked".
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
