(February 3, 2015 at 8:47 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote: Those are good points, but I disagree with the above quote. Assuming Drich is right, then everybody can experience God through the A/S/K method. It is not different than a scientist who publishes experimental results that anybody can replicate.But as you point out, he presents a moving target. A scientist who presents a particular hypothesis should provide the manner in which he reached it, so that others may test it. If others test it and come up with different results and his reaction is to continually add steps or tell them that their results prove the hypothesis regardless, the obvious implication is that his hypothesis is nonsense.
What's more, the A/S/K method doesn't exist in a vacuum; it's part of the Bible, and from that book one can infer the likelihood of success of any sincere attempt at reaching god via any particular method. When every result is 'evidence' that it works, the obvious implication is that the method is nonsense. If you were trying to find out why the drapes were ruined while you were gone and your children offered up an explanation using that approach, you'd immediately become suspicious. If we have to change the rules for god to make sense, then he doesn't make sense.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould