God as a non-empirical being

[Hatshepsut]

This is religion's bread and butter: unfalsifiable claims...Religion has never made a single testable claim that has been proved correct. For example, prayer fails like a motherfucker if you put it under scientific conditions. It only "works" when people are free to interpret the results however they want and confirmation bias takes care of the rest.

While I agree with your general thesis of obscurantism as linchpin of religion, your other two assertions are rather sweeping. Never  a single testable claim? I would need only a single counterexample to shoot that down though I'll refrain. But if debating, we don't want to go out on a limb with words like "never" unless we're absolutely sure.

Prayer is clearly ineffective when it comes to things like curing cancer. Yet in fact a number of studies have shown that it can improve measurable health outcomes and may not be a simple matter of confirmation bias. I leave the literature search on this to you while noting that any effects found for prayer are modest and need not of course derive from intervention by a supernatural being. It could be something as simple as that the patients in a study's "praying" group did a better job of following the doctor's instructions.

[Neo-Scholastic]

He or she sounds like me: arrogant pompous ass. :-) What he/she may be getting at is that God isn't just a thing among other things. Sensible objects exist in time & space, are subject to various types of cause, have potentials, etc. In contrast to this, any god worthy of the name would be the cause of space, time and material, be in full actuality, serve as the foundation of cause.

[robvalue]

I think you're talking about the placebo effect Hatsch? I don't deny that prayer can do this, as can anything else. But this is not the claims made by religion. Or if it is, I don't dispute that particular one. I doubt many church leaders would admit that prayer is no more than a placebo. It certainly does not do the ridiculous things they often claim it does.

When I said testable claims, I meant non-trivial ones, I should have been clear, you're right. No one would dispute things like prayer having a placebo effect. I'm talking about religious stuff doing things above and beyond what is well understood.

If you think prayer has been shown to do something other than placebo, then I'd be interested to hear about that. As far as I'm aware, no proper study has demonstrated this.

[Hatshepsut]

I think you're talking about the placebo effect Hatsch?...When I said testable claims, I meant non-trivial ones, I should have been clear, you're right...

I'm just a stickler for detail, that's all. And annoyed my once-impeccable spelling is going out the window as I get older. And, perhaps curious as to why the placebo effect is real. I could save money on prescriptions by having sugar pills substituted for some of them...  

Although I would offer that Ire should direct more toward faith-healing frauds and parents who withhold proper medical care from their kids than toward prayer and meditation per se.

[robvalue]

You're right, I should have qualified it with "to the best of my knoweldge, religion hasn't made a non-trivial testable claim that has been verified." I didn't phrase it very well.

If there is one I'm not aware of, I'd be very willing to learn about it. Of course I'm talking about proper scientific test conditions.

The placebo effect is indeed very odd!

[Neo-Scholastic]

Maybe you can explain how the placebo effect works, because its not material when you subsitute an effective drug with one that isn't and yet it still works.

[robvalue]

It's not material? I don't understand.

I don't know how the placebo effect works. I just know that it works. Are you going to say God is the placebo effect? That's a real small gap for God Is that the best he can do? He used to raze cities to the ground. Now he makes you feel slightly better after taking a sugar pill.

[Mudhammam]

Maybe you can explain how the placebo effect works, because its not material when you subsitute an effective drug with one that isn't and yet it still works.

How can you be so sure? If thought processes correlate to the physical structure of the brain at any given moment, and your brain is so configured that you feel optimism while at the same time this causes your body to produce the chemicals needed to heal itself without drugs, how is that "not material"?

[Longhorn]

OP, be sure to keep that 'argument' in mind when this person next tells you how they've 'experienced' god.

[robvalue]

It grinds my gears when people say that science can only do "so much". Sure, that is very true. It's because science is honest about its limitations.

That doesn't mean that you are free to just make up whatever crap you want when science "fails" by using your emotions and drugs and stuff. Well you can, but don't expect me to take you seriously.

These "other ways of knowing things" are utter bollocks in my opinion. Either you have some sort of method that you can demonstrate, or you expect us to rely completely on your personal experiences which we know are very unreliable.

Sorry, I'm a bitchy sceptic this morning

Yes, numbers and emotions "exist" as physical configurations of the brain. The brain can be scanned. We can gather evidence of people's emotions. Any sort of method is still scientific-esque and is acceptable today.