(November 12, 2020 at 11:13 am)MilesAbbott81 Wrote:(November 12, 2020 at 10:41 am)HappySkeptic Wrote: How would you test your hypothesis? Would you scientifically measure the sin of a group of people and correlate it to the rate of their children getting cancer? Would you find that adultery causes natural disasters?
How silly you are to suggest that I would ever need to, or should ever feel an obligation, to test these things in a lab.
And this is why you fail to be rational. Every claim about God should be divided into two categories -- testable and non-testable.
The non-testable ones are matters of pure belief, faith or theology. They can have no affect on the real world, because anything non-random that affects the world can be tested.
The testable ones are really important to test. Claims that God heals, or punishes, or does things for believers are absolutely testable. No, the God itself isn't testable, but the claim that "if I pray for healing, it will happen more often than if I don't pray" is a testable claim. The claim that God in any way actively makes changes to the world that disobey laws, can be tested statistically.
Now, if you are saying that God designed the laws of the universe to play out to punish people for moral failing, then I would still say this is testable. Yes, stupidity has its own punishment, but moral failing is often rewarded by the laws of the universe unless people intervene. Morals are not given by a god, they are part of being societal creatures. They change according to society. Where they have continuity, it is because of our common humanity, not because of gods.