Which Comes First?

[fr0d0]

Anyone at any point could sincerely believe.

I can't.

I could say I believe but I'd be lying if I did.

Me neither. Belief is never voluntary. I don't know whether we'd ever be able to survive as a species if it was. How would that even work?

If I really wanted to not believe something or to believe something, that won't have any effect on whether I do or not. Whether I do or not is not a matter of choice.

Did someone mention 'choice'? I must've missed it. How could you say you couldn't believe - that's surely akin to saying that you are 100% sure of non existence? Whoops!

[...]
Genuine prayers are answered? Ha! That's called the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Something fr0d0 should be all too well familiar with by now. Oh well.

Good post btw.

Baseless & unsupportable assertion. Repeatedly pointed out to you yet still you persist with it.

What strange logic you work with Eilonnwy. You think asking for something impractical or unrealistic is acceptable or somehow ok? And you want evidence for my position on that!?!

Aren't things that are impractical and unrealistic, the things that if anything, rationally require the most evidence, if you are to rationally believe in them?

Absolutely. Thankyou for your support.

@ E [Elionnwy]:
You deny the non scientific. I don't. Logic would suggest that science doesn't answer every question in human understanding. I've already shown why scientific tests would not show anything. You haven't countered that just repeated your statement. Maybe you don't understand how God answers.

The scientific actually has support. If God has no scientific support, that doesn't automatically has some other form of support. Unlike your God, science actually has support. I am yet to see you give God any support, you have merely went on about how the ridiculous of the idea of God makes it ridiculous to require scientific support for him...but whether that is true or not, whether he can have scientific support or not, why should you believe in him without any support? Will you ever substantiate your God claim(s)?

Maybe God exists but we don't understand how he answers.

My God claims have been exhaustively supported. That you ignorantly repeat the demand for scientific proof despite the logic presented to you is inconsequential.

You don't know how he answers, but you can know because it has been detailed for you should you care to look into it. So again you display ignorance of your subject.

[Eilonnwy]

@ E:

You deny the non scientific. I don't. Logic would suggest that science doesn't answer every question in human understanding. I've already shown why scientific tests would not show anything. You haven't countered that just repeated your statement. Maybe you don't understand how God answers.

If God answers prayers, he interacts with the world in a tangible way, which means it can be tested. Simple as that. All you do is repeat your statements that about God not applying to science, yet he can be tested. As Luke said, outline the test, or are you just blowing smoke?

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To Eilonnwy:

I read your link; quite interesting.

I just said what I said because you claimed everything you believed was from science.

Its fair enough to what evidence, so what to you counts as evidence? An example?

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Yes, well I thought we were referring to beliefs systems and not every single thing in your life. Of course I'm not gonna question someone who says their name is John and they work for Friendly's. I'd go crazy.

As far as evidence for the "big things" or "supernatural" things, evidence that meets the rigors of the scientific method with claims that are falsifiable.

---

[...]
Genuine prayers are answered? Ha! That's called the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Something fr0d0 should be all too well familiar with by now. Oh well.

Good post btw.

Baseless & unsupportable assertion. Repeatedly pointed out to you yet still you persist with it.

Not at all. My claim that your assertion is a fallacy is spot on. You can keep denying it, but that doesn't make it not true. You've essentially insulated the test of prayer from being falsifiable, which means it's fucking useless to test scientifically. You know that of course, you want to have it both ways. Claim it's true and can be tested, but refuse to tell us how, and deny it the possibility of being tested by science which just happens to be the best method for discerning what is true about the world. Go figure.

[Edwardo Piet]

Did someone mention 'choice'? I must've missed it. How could you say you couldn't believe - that's surely akin to saying that you are 100% sure of non existence? Whoops!

No I am not 100% sure, I might believe in the future, but I hope I wouldn't without evidence. And I doubt there will be evidence, but I don't rule it out absolutely. I'd be surprised, yeah, but I don't rule it out.

I thought someone had mentioned choice, and I guess they hadn't, my mistake. Apologies.

Baseless & unsupportable assertion. Repeatedly pointed out to you yet still you persist with it.

It's an opinion of mine that you have been guilty of NTS a few times on these forums.

Like now when you say that prayers are answered if they're genuine. But without a further argument, that implies that if a prayer isn't answered then it must not be genuine. In itself that is fallacious reasoning, because you can just say that any prayer that isn't answered is because it's not genuine, regardless of if it is or not.

Absolutely. Thankyou for your support.

I wasn't supporting you.

I'm saying that your beliefs are apparently so ridiculous that they can't be evidenced, and yet you seem to think this makes it more reasonable for you to believe without evidence. But my point is, that whether there can be evidence or not, how is it rational to believe without any? And if anything, beliefs that are so ridiculous that there can be no evidence for them, would be even more crazy to believe without any, and just go on ahead and believe anyway.

My God claims have been exhaustively supported. That you ignorantly repeat the demand for scientific proof despite the logic presented to you is inconsequential.

You don't know how he answers, but you can know because it has been detailed for you should you care to look into it. So again you display ignorance of your subject.

How have they been supported? Where has it been demonstrated that God is at all probable to exist? I do not demand scientific proof, I request any valid evidence whatsoever. If you can outdo science and somehow display some other evidence that is valid, be my guest. If you can demonstrate that God is probable in any way, be my guest. Why should I believe that there is any support for God if you can't?

You say it has been detailed for me if I care to look into it, but from what I've seen, I've seen no evidence. And no, this doesn't display my ignorance on the subject, it just displays that I haven't found any evidence, regardless of if there is any or not. You think I'm ignorant of the subject, I don't. I haven't seen any evidence.

EvF

[Ryft]

From the first website I found with Google ... "The scientific method is ..."

Question: If you do not follow this process, then you're not doing science?

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As far as evidence for the "big things" or "supernatural" things: evidence that meets the rigors of the scientific method with claims that are falsifiable.

Just out of curiosity, what constitutes a "big thing"?

---

Like now, when you [Frodo] say that prayers are answered if they're genuine. But without a further argument, that implies that if a prayer isn't answered then it must not be genuine. In itself that is fallacious reasoning, because you can just say that any prayer that isn't answered is because it's not genuine, regardless of whether it is or not.

First, genuine prayers are never unanswered. Period. Second, it's not a No True Scotsman fallacy, because the problem is not a logical one but an empirical one—such that even a genuine prayer can appear to go unanswered, even though it wasn't. God can answer a prayer in a way that is either not immediately obvious (e.g., what was prayed for occurs later) or perhaps not expected (e.g., the answer was no), leaving the one who prayed feeling, in that moment, as though the prayer went unanswered. Christians who treat God like Walmart and prayer like a shopping cart are frequently left disillusioned because the answer they are looking for, in both content and timing, blinds them to the answer actually given. A prayer may seem unanswered, but was it really? The problem is not a fault in logical reasoning but in empirical reasoning; i.e., there is no empirical test for evaluating whether the prayer was unanswered or only appeared to be.

And no, this doesn't display my ignorance on the subject. It just displays that I haven't found any evidence, regardless of whether there is any or not.

What evidence exactly are you looking for? If you say "any evidence at all," that may be your problem; i.e., without identifying what evidence you're looking for, how could you expect to find it?

FRODO: What are you doing?
EVIE: Looking for something.
FRODO: What, exactly?
EVIE: Anything.
FRODO: Then how will you know when you've found it?

[fr0d0]

@ E:

You deny the non scientific. I don't. Logic would suggest that science doesn't answer every question in human understanding. I've already shown why scientific tests would not show anything. You haven't countered that just repeated your statement. Maybe you don't understand how God answers.

If God answers prayers, he interacts with the world in a tangible way, which means it can be tested. Simple as that. All you do is repeat your statements that about God not applying to science, yet he can be tested. As Luke said, outline the test, or are you just blowing smoke?

You test against the known nature of God...

[...]
Genuine prayers are answered? Ha! That's called the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Something fr0d0 should be all too well familiar with by now. Oh well.

Good post btw.

Baseless & unsupportable assertion. Repeatedly pointed out to you yet still you persist with it.

Not at all. My claim that your assertion is a fallacy is spot on. You can keep denying it, but that doesn't make it not true. You've essentially insulated the test of prayer from being falsifiable, which means it's fucking useless to test scientifically. You know that of course, you want to have it both ways. Claim it's true and can be tested, but refuse to tell us how, and deny it the possibility of being tested by science which just happens to be the best method for discerning what is true about the world. Go figure.

As Arcanus has shown, your use of the fallacy is incorrect.

• Not falsifiable scientifically: as is the nature of God
• I didn't refuse to tell you

Science obviously fails absolutely in discerning the truth about God where philosophy succeeds. Yet you dismiss the philosophical method. Yeah you're going to have a hard time with this. It's self imposed torture tho'.

---

Did someone mention 'choice'? I must've missed it. How could you say you couldn't believe - that's surely akin to saying that you are 100% sure of non existence? Whoops!

No I am not 100% sure, I might believe in the future, but I hope I wouldn't without evidence. And I doubt there will be evidence, but I don't rule it out absolutely. I'd be surprised, yeah, but I don't rule it out.

I thought someone had mentioned choice, and I guess they hadn't, my mistake. Apologies.

Thankyou. You said you would never believe and now you retract that.

Baseless & unsupportable assertion. Repeatedly pointed out to you yet still you persist with it.

It's an opinion of mine that you have been guilty of NTS a few times on these forums.

Like now when you say that prayers are answered if they're genuine. But without a further argument, that implies that if a prayer isn't answered then it must not be genuine. In itself that is fallacious reasoning, because you can just say that any prayer that isn't answered is because it's not genuine, regardless of if it is or not.

You have blind faith that I have committed the NTS fallacy despite it being pointed out to you how it doesn't without successful rebuttal from yourself. Fair enough.

We haven't finished discussing prayer and you jump in with a closing statement before waiting for the answer to that.

Absolutely. Thankyou for your support.

I wasn't supporting you.

I'm saying that your beliefs are apparently so ridiculous that they can't be evidenced, and yet you seem to think this makes it more reasonable for you to believe without evidence. But my point is, that whether there can be evidence or not, how is it rational to believe without any? And if anything, beliefs that are so ridiculous that there can be no evidence for them, would be even more crazy to believe without any, and just go on ahead and believe anyway.

You're talking about evidence with me which isn't permitted in open forum.

The evidence in question is Eilonnwy's to support her understanding of prayer against the biblical understanding which she is apparently criticising. So your tirade against unsupported evidence can't be against me as my evidence is supported. Eilonnwy's on the other hand is yet unsupported.

My God claims have been exhaustively supported. That you ignorantly repeat the demand for scientific proof despite the logic presented to you is inconsequential.

You don't know how he answers, but you can know because it has been detailed for you should you care to look into it. So again you display ignorance of your subject.

How have they been supported? Where has it been demonstrated that God is at all probable to exist? I do not demand scientific proof, I request any valid evidence whatsoever. If you can outdo science and somehow display some other evidence that is valid, be my guest. If you can demonstrate that God is probable in any way, be my guest. Why should I believe that there is any support for God if you can't?

You say it has been detailed for me if I care to look into it, but from what I've seen, I've seen no evidence. And no, this doesn't display my ignorance on the subject, it just displays that I haven't found any evidence, regardless of if there is any or not. You think I'm ignorant of the subject, I don't. I haven't seen any evidence.

You need to get back into your cage to discuss this with me Evie.

[Rhizomorph13]

If you do not follow this process, then you're not doing science?

Arcanus,

Correct, well mostly correct, I would say that if you do not follow those steps than you are not doing science. There are some minor exceptions.

The part about changing only one variable doesn't always hold true and there are meta studies that do not involve doing any testing but amount to just compiling previous results but those steps are pretty much how science gets done. The reason I feel that the single variable step is a bit restrictive is because of my experiences at Intel. I work in a lab and we study the physical properties of things relating to Printed Board Assemblies (PBA's) and quite often will perform tests that modify several variables at one time along many different "legs" each leg having samples that are treated the same i.e. shocked the same way or vibrated for the same amount of time. This falls in line with one of Intel's core values, "Risk Taking" which allows our engineers to use intuition to try to arrive at results quicker. We are only working with PBA's though so if we fuck up and do somthing wrong it would not have any serious effects other than missing a shipping deadline. Also, since we are competitive organization we do not communicate our data outside of Intel.

Rhizo

[solarwave]

Solarwave,

From the first website I found with Google: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fa...thod.shtml

The scientific method is a way to ask and answer scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments.

The steps of the scientific method are to:
1. Ask a Question
2. Do Background Research
3. Construct a Hypothesis
4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
6. Communicate Your Results

It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. A "fair test" occurs when you change only one factor (variable) and keep all other conditions the same.

This is much more involved than faith.

Rhizo

I'm not going to try to make out faith is just like science but let me show how faith could work along those line. Please dont kill me for putting faith in the form of science lol.

1) Is there a God
2) Research on God
3) If there is a God then He will answer genuine pray in some way and will be faithful
4) Pray and put your faith in God and see what happens
5) I did God do as I thought
6) Tell people

Of course you can object that you have prayed and nothing happen, but there you go.

[fr0d0]

You missed out the steps in formulating what Christian faith is in the first place solarwind.. formulated, tested, critically reviewed, refuted and counter refuted, agreed to be consistent, accepted.

[Rhizomorph13]

I'm not going to try to make out faith is just like science but let me show how faith could work along those line. Please dont kill me for putting faith in the form of science lol.

1) Is there a God
2) Research on God
3) If there is a God then He will answer genuine pray in some way and will be faithful
4) Pray and put your faith in God and see what happens
5) I did God do as I thought
6) Tell people

Of course you can object that you have prayed and nothing happen, but there you go.

Solarwave,

Nice, except all the results must be verifyable under peer review and your definitions need to be solid. "See what happens" needs to have a metric involved; for example you could use penny flips and pray for heads. If heads comes up more often than tails, in a statistically significant way, then you can publish your results and win a templeton award, maybe. It has been done before and there are even some studies on patients but the results were very slightly negatively correlated with prayer. I can't quote the study sorry, but I am sure if you google "scientific prayer test" you could find some interesting tests. Include Templeton to be more specific.

Rhizo

[Edwardo Piet]

First, genuine prayers are never unanswered. Period. Second, it's not a No True Scotsman fallacy, because the problem is not a logical one but an empirical one—such that even a genuine prayer can appear to go unanswered, even though it wasn't. God can answer a prayer in a way that is either not immediately obvious (e.g., what was prayed for occurs later) or perhaps not expected (e.g., the answer was no), leaving the one who prayed feeling, in that moment, as though the prayer went unanswered. Christians who treat God like Walmart and prayer like a shopping cart are frequently left disillusioned because the answer they are looking for, in both content and timing, blinds them to the answer actually given. A prayer may seem unanswered, but was it really? The problem is not a fault in logical reasoning but in empirical reasoning; i.e., there is no empirical test for evaluating whether the prayer was unanswered or only appeared to be.

I understand that genuine prayers don't go unanswered. My problem was then that going by that alone, if a prayer isn't answered you can just say it's because it's not genuine. Which is NTS...

...But I understand now that you're not actually committing NTS, because you have now made it clear that you're not saying that a prayer isn't genuine if it doesn't appear to be answered. It isn't simply said to be genuine but if you seemingly get no response then it "wasn't genuine". Because it could be answered even if it doesn't appear to be.

So what I'm wondering is, how do you ever have any idea at all, if your prayers are ever "answered" - do you ever?

And no, this doesn't display my ignorance on the subject. It just displays that I haven't found any evidence, regardless of whether there is any or not.

What evidence exactly are you looking for? If you say "any evidence at all," that may be your problem; i.e., without identifying what evidence you're looking for, how could you expect to find it?

I'm not looking for evidence. That would be, from my point of view, as futile as searching for Celestial Teapots. But how can I know that no evidence could possibly come to reveal that a celestial teapot exists? Even if it is completely invisible and intangible and undetectable by any telescope and science at all? I can't know. And I can't know there can never be evidence for God at all.

I'm just interested in why theists (and deists) believe, and I am interested in questioning them on it, and questioning them on what they think is evidence for their God(s).

I accept I could be wrong, but no, I don't expect to be.

FRODO: What are you doing?
EVIE: Looking for something.
FRODO: What, exactly?
EVIE: Anything.
FRODO: Then how will you know when you've found it?

Actually, from my perspective, it's more like:

FR0D0: What are you doing?
EVIE: Questioning as to why some people (and so many people for that matter), such as yourself, believe things that from my perspective (as far as I can tell...) - there is no evidence for whatsoever.
FR0D0: What, like God?
EVIE: Yes, or anything else of that nature from my perspective:Anything lacking in evidence, and especially when it comes to the supernatural, paranormal, unfalsifiable, etc - especially when it's any extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence basically.
FR0D0: Well what kind of evidence do you expect for God?
EVIE: As with any of these (at least seemingly) unfalsifiable things - I do not know what evidence there can be, or even if there can be any at all. I just sure as hell know that without evidence, I'm not going to believe in either case. I'm not actually expecting there to be any in any way. As I said: What I'm interested in is questioning why people such as yourself, believe things that from my perspective, there is no evidence for. I'm questioning you, because you actually believe in these things, and I myself can't find any reason whatsoever to believe in them.

fr0d0 seems to think that because there can be 'no evidence', then that means that's somehow a reason to believe without it for 'another reason' of some sort...or 'reasoning' as he has said. But then other times he has said that there can be evidence, just not empirical evidence. So I don't know what to believe when he speaks about evidence sometime. That's why we created our debate...If I'm going to mention "Evidence" to him here, outside our debate, I'm certainly not going to mention "Faith" along with it - and vice-versa.

EvF