Science and religion

[jstrodel]

Your assumption is that God wants to prove God's self to you, when the Bible says H'Shem wants to test your heart.


Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For EVERYONE who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened
Mt 7:76

If you seek on God's terms, you will find a lot of miracles. If you make up a standard to disprove God, you will get that.

[Silver]

If you seek on God's terms, you will find a lot of miracles.

Replace God with something else that does not exist, and one can easily understand the futility in the argument you have presented. Of course, if an individual is going to expect to find personal proof of a deity's existence, he will find it despite the fact that the deity does not exist. That can be proven due to the fact there is no way for the individual to empirically prove to another person that the deity does exist.

[jstrodel]

If you seek something that doesn't exist, you won't find miracles.

[Ryantology]

You presuppose that science can properly handle miraculous events.

I do not presuppose miracles.

What is your evidence that science is suitable for dealing with the miraculous?

Where is your evidence that it is not?

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

My confirmation bias is your ad hominem? Is it that I do not seek to confirm biases I once had of God? Does your career of confirming your biases have anything to do with me?

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.

That source is your own wishful thinking.

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.

There are some things that science really does not cover. As you've demonstrated so well, one of those areas is literary fiction.

[Tonus]

There is no science anywhere not one journal not one paper no experiment nothing anywhere that you can point to anywhere that disproves the existence of miracles.

There is no science anywhere not one journal not one paper no experiment nothing anywhere that you can point to anywhere that disproves the existence of the tooth fairy.

God doesn't seem like H'Shem is not there to me. I see miracles regularly. I know that they exist and it seems absolutely ridiculous to me for anyone to suggest that something I experience on a regular basis does not exist simply because they aren't spiritual enough to experience it.

This is where the discussion on spirituality inevitably leads. The believer in miracles is unable to produce evidence for them, but that just proves that everyone else is lacking in the ability to experience them. The inability to "prove" the non-existence of something that we cannot observe or detect is somehow considered reason to accept that it could be true, even though in pretty much every other area of our lives, we would consider that notion preposterous.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Science does not disprove Christianity. There is no scientific evidence anywhere that even remotely comes close to challenging any of the central tenets of Christian doctrine. Some science challenges a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Science began as a mostly Christian enterprise, now it is partially secular. Many, many scientists believe in God. Many of the greatest scientists in history have believed in God.
All of the major universities started as Christian universities and still are Christian to a large degree. 55% of scientists believe in God.

http://biologos.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chr...in_science

@jstrodel
The amount of scientists believing in God is a bit irrelevant. This is an apeal to a majority/authority argument, but i'm sure you've realized that. If 65% of americans didn't believe you existed, would that make it more likely? Of course not! Secondly, the "central tenents" of Christianity that cannot be disproven are no different than the central tenents of any other religion that are unfalsifiable. Christianity is no more true than mormanism. If I told you I have an invisisble leprechaun in my pocket that only I can see. In what way would you begin to apply the scientific method to my claim? There is no reproducible data with this claim. It is simply a claim. There are thousands of claims around the world that are no different. They are all unfalsifiable hypotheses. It doesn't make them plausible, probable and it especially doesn't make them true. They are claims not grounded in any sort of evidence or reproducible data. There is no reason to welcome science into the challenge of disproving your "central tenents" as they are ever changing and adapting to what feels right to the believer. No matter how much you may think it makes sense, without data or measurable results, all you have as an opinion.

[The Grand Nudger]

Your assumption is that God wants to prove God's self to you, when the Bible says H'Shem wants to test your heart.

My hearts working just fine, pumping blood through my veins. No heavenly test would be required to determine whether or not it was effective, or functional.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For EVERYONE who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened
Mt 7:76

"You could believe if you would only believe!"

If you seek on God's terms, you will find a lot of miracles. If you make up a standard to disprove God, you will get that.

If someone can ever figure out what a gods terms might be this statement might have some impact, but since no one has been able to manage that, it's an empty statement. The impact that the statement might have in that case is blunted by it's affirmation of confirmation bias, unfortunately.

If you make up a god, you'll find it.

[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?

[pocaracas]

'Once you have bought a Pinto and experienced it for yourself, you'll see it really is a great deal'.

Was that a Ford Pinto ?

[Mister Agenda]

Why yes, of course. It would be very unfair of you to dismiss all those rumors that it's unsafe until you've given it a fair chance by buying one and spending a year or two driving it. You don't want to miss out on the greatest car in the world because you wouldn't try it for yourself, would you?

Or does that line of reasoning only work for things that are so ethereal there's no way of proving them true or false?