(December 19, 2008 at 5:08 am)puglover Wrote: I am critical of both the research methods [...] I don't believe they did tests with a large enough sample size.
I agree, a sample of 40 people is meaningless.
a 30ms difference is rather small and cannot be interpreted:
I think the average human reflex while driving a car is 1 second ( and 2 seconds when you're drunk) but it can be 0.8 seconds or 1.2 seconds for some people which means a 200 ms difference.
Moreover,the research methods doesn't tell if the 40 people were good at maths or had a good 3D view (I guess people who are good at geometry would have better results for this experiment), we don't even know what they were learning at university. And we don't know how many times they did the experiment before saying "the average difference is..." nor if they did it on a short period (one day) or on a longer one (Because the human results can change with your mood, your health, your environment.
By the way were all the calvinist students hardcore calvinists or not ?
Whatever the conclusions, the experiment can't prove anything I guess.
So just like you puglover I want more details about that test before concluding anything.
About the hypothetical lack of creativity of atheists, I think it's just the theists that have an overwhelming creativity: they manage to create and believe their own fantasy world .