Science and religion

[Mister Agenda]

H'shem tests peoples hearts to see who is selfish and wants self and who wants to know God.

Yet, God offeres eternal paradise if you pick God and eternal damnation if you don't. This carrot-and-stick arrangement puts the lie to the idea that God wants people unmotivated by self-interest; a God who advertises heaven and hell is clearly using self-interest as a selling-point.

If H'shem revealed God's nature, then you would be able to believe in H'Shem just to receive a reward. H'shem wants people to love rather than to grapple for position.

It's one thing to conceal God's nature, it's another to conceal God's existence. A hiding God is indistinguishable from an absent God.

God does. H'Shem has in my life and so many others.

Krishna is in many people's lives, too.

You presuppose that science can properly handle miraculous events. What is your evidence that science is suitable for dealing with the miraculous?

If it's not, what is your basis for claiming that miracles have evidence? By definition, science applies in matters of evidence.

My confirmation bias is this: I have seen a lot of miracles. I don't care what science says. I have seen objects physically translate. I have seen people prophesy details of my life without them knowing anything about me, telling me my name, occupation, I have seen the holy spirit visible manifest, I have seen many lives transformed by God. I have felt the unction of the Holy Ghost many times.

But 'H'shem' won't let you document your miracles so all we have is your word. A Voudun practitioner could come in here and claim just as many miracles. Your unverifiable experiences may justify your belief, but they don't justify anyone else believing you. Con men can do prophesy too, all they need is someone willing to believe they don't know anything about them. Religous people of all stripes, not to mention users of hallucinogens, report ecstatic experiences. Your religion is not special in this regard.

What about your confirmation bias: You have no experience of God and you are reasoning about something you have probably spent less than 20 hours of your life thinking about.

You should stop guessing about us and start asking sincere questions. 20 hours is an awfully low estimate. Going from theist to atheist took me 15 years, starting after I had read the Bible cover-to-cover twice. That may be more than average, but given studies that show that on average, atheists know more about the world's religions than any religious group, 20 hours is really low-balling it. I would guess that most of us have at least a semester of a religion class under our belts. I took Intro, Comparative Religion, and Christian Ethics.

I have spent 8 years seeking God as the main thing that I do, a major part of that the supernatural.

I have no doubt that if I spent a few years trying to convince myself the Yazidi religion is true, I could get to a point where I believe it and think I have evidence of it and supernatural experiences that confirm it. Getting people to do the heavy lifting of convincing themselves to believe what you want them to is a con man's wet dream. 'Once you have bought a Pinto and experienced it for yourself, you'll see it really is a great deal'.

So yes, I have a confirmation bias, which is that I know the things I am talking about are true, from a non-scientific source.

Confirmation bias means that you think the things you believe are true, because humans are terrible at estimating odds and great at ignoring or forgetting counter-examples that would undermine their belief. Much of the purpose of science is to create conditions under which confirmation bias can't influence results, which it can in nearly unbelievably subtle ways. Have you heard of the experiment where the students the teacher was told were smarter got better grades even though they were randomly selected?

Do you think it is possible that there is anything in life that science doesn't have the best possible approach to? You realize science is something that is substantially influenced by industrial production processes.

Given how screwed up every other way of figuring out what is really the case is, I can't imagine a better way than science to find out what's really true, because it works by eliminating what's false, so what's left is always coming closer to what is actually the case. We know people have hallucinations, we know so-called revelations conflict with each other, we know people trick each other, given all that, I would really like to hear a method superior to science for sorting it all out. Religions branch as long as there are people claiming new revelations, while science converges because it only sticks with things that work.

You realize that what influenced science is irrelevant to how well it works or whether its findings are true?