quote:Perhaps, Horatio* honey, but my God isn't one of them.
Why not? Is your God capricious and random? If so, why do you worship Him, since that makes it just as likely that He'll smite you?
How does not able to be controlled equal "capricious and random"? Do you do everything anybody asks of you. Do you do some things and have good reasons for not doing others. Even if they say please? Does the fact that you don't grant all of your children's wishes mean that you are just as likely to smite them?
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As I said, not proof of anything. It isn't really relevant to what I am saying. But you seemed to want to see some sort of study, so...
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KOM I think I mentioned earlier something along the lines of "Prayer does not change the will of God in anyway, rather it secures blessings he is already willing to give us but are contingient on our asking" If you go look at the gist of the Lords prayer as written in the Bible its merely a list of fundamental things any individual would desire from God, but still needs to be requested.
From that point of view you would need to somehow find a group of people where somehow you knew it was God's will that all of them be healed from various maladies and then see which ones were healed after praying. Of course thats impossible.
I suppose you could work out some formula to compensate for a complete lack of knowledge as to God's will concerning your test subjects but again could you fully account for it? I dont think you could.
Then there is the problem of who prays? If a person is in a coma they can't pray for themselves so others pray for them. A person who is in a car accident and is angry at god will certainly not pray, and you may need somebody to pray that somehow their heart is softened (people who pray are not just concerned with healing of the physical variety). And lets say in order for that humbling process to happen the accident victim has to lose a loved one. Well now we have prayer killing another human being.
From my own perspective as a Christian, being healed is a relatively minor thing to ask for. That makes it easy to accomplish but also not often neccesary. Life for a Christian is so transitory. Its more important that a person spend their time wisely rather than asking for an extension from God.
As for limbs being restored. Getting a limb back is even less important than being saved from cancer. It is also worthy of note that we have even less knowledge about all that has happened in the human race than we do about all possible chemical combinations (I think its something like 3%) I find it quite possible that somebody had a limb restored and we simply do not know about it in any historical context.
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quote:Originally posted by narrativium: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Important safety tip, thanks.
Tell him about the twinky...
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On subject, I remember reading a book saying that one of the subtleties about Jesus as God was that the miracles attributed to Him, directly, are all examples of thing that happen naturally-- Water turns to Wine, people are healed of disease, a fig tree dies, wheat and fish multiply etc. The author specifically pointed out that Jesus refused to turn stones into bread, though He did boast that God could raise up Sons of Abraham from the rocks. Since He didn't actually do it, though, I don't know where that fits in.
In the case of Lazarus, that prefigures His own, and, with hope, our own ressurections.
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quote:Does the fact that you don't grant all of your children's wishes mean that you are just as likely to smite them?
Do you believe that God grants any prayers? If so, prayer should have a measurable statistical effect.
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quote:Do you believe that God grants any prayers? If so, prayer should have a measurable statistical effect.
But that doesn't mean that we would know when and what to measure or that we could represent it with some mathematical formula. In any case, I think that the margin for error would render any result meaningless.
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Why? How would we measure that? How do we know if our prayers only clarify our own thoughts or if God speaks to us? How do we know if when we do good in the world and the prayers of other people are answered whether that is the Holy Spirit or just our wanting to do good. And what is the difference? How would we know if someone praying to get well is effected by God or by her own faith.
I know that my life is better when I pray how do I measure how much of that is God?
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quote:From that point of view you would need to somehow find a group of people where somehow you knew it was God's will that all of them be healed from various maladies and then see which ones were healed after praying. Of course thats impossible.
No, BlackBlade. All I have to do is assume that there exist some people whose healing is the will of your god, but whose healing must also be requested. Look : If the prayer makes a change at all, then that change is measurable. If it doesn't - why, that is a very interesting datum in itself.
quote:But that doesn't mean that we would know when and what to measure or that we could represent it with some mathematical formula. In any case, I think that the margin for error would render any result meaningless.
Do you have a specific objection to the method I outlined? If not, you seem to be just saying "Well, that can't possibly work, la-la-la."
quote:How would we know if someone praying to get well is effected by God or by her own faith?
I think I did mentioned that the placebo effect has been very well quantified.
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quote:All I have to do is assume that there exist some people whose healing is the will of your god, but whose healing must also be requested.
1. What determines an answered prayer? Does the person have to be completely healed, healed enough to prove a point, enough to enable the person to accomplish God's will for him, or just enough to for the person to gain some profound understanding of himself?
2. How do you differentiate between correlation and causation? Was the person healed because of God, because of some unique natural ability, or did God cause the unique natural ability?
3. How do you know that you're studying the right people?
4. What if God's reasons can't be fit into a mathematical model? For example, let's say that for some reason God only answers one prayer each month. Well, how do you know that you didn't pick the wrong month to conduct the study?
My objection is that there are so many possible areas for error that any result is going to contain an unkown amount if inaccuracy. So, no, I am not simply plugging my ears and shouting "la-la-la." I just don't see how your test could produce useful results, unless I missed a better detailed test somewhere earlier in this thread. (I checked and didn't see much of a better one, but I'll check again)
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All right, these are detailed objections, fair enough. The response is pretty much the same for all of them, though :
Right now, any statistically significant difference in healing rates will do. For this preliminary study, I am sticking to things that are easy to put numbers to; again, recall that I am not trying to prove or disprove any existences, but merely to put some bounds on what does exist.
Let me expand a little on this. Consider unicorns; imagine for a moment that we do not know whether or not unicorns exist. Well, the first thing to do is look around, rather exhaustively : All over America, say. Do you see any unicorns? Nope. Now this does not prove anything one way or the other about their existence. But it does prove that there are no unicorns with the quality of being
a) In America at this time. b) Detectable by visual examination.
There might be invisible unicorns, certainly. There might be unicorns in Europe. There might have been unicorns a thousand years ago. None of that is relevant : Our study has established that unicorns do not have the properties of existing today in visible form.
Now let us consider prayer. Suppose I have the entire population of America pray for rain in Sahara, but the Sahara continues dry. This does not prove the non-existence of gods; but it does prove the non-existence of gods who are
a) Willing to be swayed by the population of America. b) Capable of affecting the weather in Sahara.
Nothing more, nothing less. Likewise, if I find that prayers do not affect the survival rates of cancer, then I know that there are no gods who answer such prayers in the positive. Again, do not read too much into this. The point is not the existence but the qualities of gods. After all, we all agree that there are no gods who manifest themselves daily by creating a cross-shaped light in the skies over each city. We can see that there are no such gods.
Likewise, I trust we all agree that there do not exist gods who restore lost limbs; there do not exist gods who protect children from being abused; and there do not exist gods who intervene to stop wars. The existence of gods who intervene in human minds is still disputed; it is a much more difficult measurement; but it is possible in principle to measure it.
My study, then, cannot prove the existence of gods in general. But it can say something about the qualities of any gods who do exist. In particular, we can learn whether prayer has a measurable effect on cancer survival rates. If not, then we have learned something about any gods who do exist. The reasons for not healing cancer victims are completely irrelevant; they may even be good reasons; the point is, cancer victims are not, in fact, healed. (Or they are, as the case might be.) I think this is valuable knowledge.
Once again. If your god exists, then he is not interfering on a large scale with what is happening in Darfur. I am not making a moral judgement; there can certainly be good reasons for such non-interference; I am merely observing the fact. My study is not different in principle from this observation of fact; it just studies a rather subtler form of intervention.
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quote: Now let us consider prayer. Suppose I have the entire population of America pray for rain in Sahara, but the Sahara continues dry. This does not prove the non-existence of gods; but it does prove the non-existence of gods who are
a) Willing to be swayed by the population of America. b) Capable of affecting the weather in Sahara.
or C) willing to be swayed by the population on that particular occasion.
or D) willing to play along with your little experiment.
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Yes, you are correct, but I also feel you are missing the point. These are perfectly respectable qualities to establish the gods as not having. You all seem to think that 'the gods do not participate in experiments' is a negative results; it's not, it is very useful information. In any case, I can get around that in the way I've outlined before : Just measure the effect of pre-existing prayers, not requested by the experimenter.
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Is there any evidence at all that God (or gods) answer prayers?
I pray for rain, and it rains. Meanwhile 1000 people have prayed that it not rain. Does God answer prayers?
What criteria would one use to determine if, in fact, prayers are answered? Or is it all to be anecdotal, like The Weekly World News (tm) reporting another sighting of Bat Boy in the dark, hidden jungles of Guatemala?
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They say that prayers can move mountains. But God put that mountain there for a reason. Who are we to ask that it be moved? Who are we to expect God to move it?
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KoM darling, you are just not imagining a big enough God. Not your fault, we aren't really set up to imagine infinity. If you want to understand me, stop thinking about Zeus or even the descriptions of Jehovah. Keep reminding yourself that God is infinite. You can't measure infinity.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Yes, you are correct, but I also feel you are missing the point. These are perfectly respectable qualities to establish the gods as not having. You all seem to think that 'the gods do not participate in experiments' is a negative results; it's not, it is very useful information. In any case, I can get around that in the way I've outlined before : Just measure the effect of pre-existing prayers, not requested by the experimenter.
Because an infinite and omniscient God couldn't figure that out?
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quote:Well, no one would ask "What's the use of a father who won't give me everything I ask for?" Actually, a child might ask that, but most of us understand that everything a child asks for is not good for them, even if they don't understand why; and that if we as the parents love them we won't just give them everything they want.
I'll ask another question; I'll paraphrase:
"What good is a father who won't give me anything I ask for?"
What if, after an exhaustive study of "pre-existing" (or otherwise sincere) prayer vs. their effect on the natural world, it is determined that 1) no miracles have occured (alleged "miracle cures" having no real basis in fact), and 2) what small benefits that have been observed, that supposedly correlate with prayer, are actually no more common than random statistical distribution?
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Yes, you are correct, but I also feel you are missing the point. These are perfectly respectable qualities to establish the gods as not having. You all seem to think that 'the gods do not participate in experiments' is a negative results; it's not, it is very useful information. In any case, I can get around that in the way I've outlined before : Just measure the effect of pre-existing prayers, not requested by the experimenter.
Because an infinite and omniscient God couldn't figure that out?
Certainly, and is then faced with the choice of not answering perfectly sincere prayers due to the actions of a third party - oops, a mere human just influenced the actions of a god - or else answering them as before, and revealing itself in the process.
And kmbboots, you have yet to specify how the size of the god is relevant. Either it has physical effects, or it doesn't. Whether or not it's capable of stopping a supernova in progress is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it actually does resotre lost limbs : We know that it does not.
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I may not be able to measure "infinity," but I can measure 1, and 2, and 3, and 3,654,294,238,234, etc.
So far, except for the definition of God having created "everything" (except, of course, himself), the things we can measure about God are a null set. That's quite a far cry from "infinite."
But I may be wrong. Please list the things that we may measure about God.
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Actually, we can measure a lot of things about any hypothetical gods. For example, we can measure their number of chopped-off limbs restored : Zero. Number of miraculous, city- or nation-wide manifestations : Zero. Number of evil American presidents struck down by divine lightning : Zero. And so on.
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Or is faced with an infinite number of chices that we don't know about. Or God has physical effects that we can't even imagine. Or God is all physical effects.
The "size" is relevant because it is (are you listening?) infinite. Not just really big; really big wouldn't be any different that smallish. I'm not talking about Superman.
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Or, it's all pretend, and the reason we cannot measure anything at all about "God" is that there really is nothing there to measure.
And you're missing the point about "infinite." Unless you are positing a God that exists everywhere...except for right here.
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quote:Or is faced with an infinite number of chices that we don't know about. Or God has physical effects that we can't even imagine. Or God is all physical effects.
How is a god that is 'all physical effects' different from a god that doesn't actually exist at all? And please, I am not interested in physical effects we can't even imagine; that's just completely irrelevant to human life, so who cares? I want to know what the effects are right here on earth. Either they are measurable or they aren't. If they're measurable, that's one thing. If they're not - then we've proved that any gods do not have measurable physical effects.
You are trying to bite off way more than you can chew; you have to crawl before you can fly. Consider closely : Does your god manifest physically as a cross of burning light above each city in the world? Yes or no.
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One could argue that "immeasureable" has long been part of the definition of "God" to most theists.
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KoM, First of all, good job on your post (5:52). I thought it was very respectful and insightful.
Now, in regards to...
quote:a) Willing to be swayed by the population of America. b) Capable of affecting the weather in Sahara.
I think there is another option that is being missed. Suppose that God does answer the request for rain, but in a manner that we don't readily perceive. For instance, He could cause certain weather patterns to change, which would have an effect on the rainfall at a much later time, perhaps, after our study has already been completed. Thus, any causal relationship would not necessarily be ascertained.
It's possible that we just don't understand how God answers prayers because the answer is never as direct as we think it should be.
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But again, an effect indistinguishable from natural causes is really not much of an effect, is it? Such a god is a rather un-necessary hypothesis. Anyway, you could always use the west half of the Sahara for a control, and pray for rain only in the eastern half. I defy any natural weather pattern to manage that.
EDIT : And, once more, the bit about 'not understanding how god answers prayers' is really quite irrelevant. That wasn't the question. The question was, 'does there exist a god who answers prayers in this particular way?'
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quote:But again, an effect indistinguishable from natural causes is really not much of an effect, is it? Such a god is a rather un-necessary hypothesis
Well, if God were to alter weather patterns, perhaps like a large scale flood, I think that would definitely be an effect. The fact that we can't distinguish it from other natural effects isn't relevant. But then, that's why I don't think a test for a Divine "effect" is going to be too useful. I wouldn't say it's an unnecessary hypothesis, just an unprovable one.
To ask God to answer a prayer and then require Him to answer it in the way that we see fit, isn't that kind of expecting a lot? But yes, I suppose that would answer the question of "does there exist a god who answers prayers in this particular way?" But then, I don't really see how the answer to that question is useful either.
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Because, if such were true, then that would be an extremely useful thing to know, don't you think? Imagine if you could just pray away cancers! Anyway, the point I'm making is two-fold :
1. Some kinds of gods can indeed have their existence or non-existence scientifically investigated. I think I have shown this rather exhaustively.
2. The kind of god that this is not true of, is of no possible interest. This is opinion, not provable. But really, do you care whether or not there is an invisible, intangible dragon, breathing heatless flames, in my garage?
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quote:Because, if such were true, then that would be an extremely useful thing to know, don't you think? Imagine if you could just pray away cancers!
Yes, it would be important to know, but there are ways to answer a prayer that do not necessarily involve simply erasing the cancer. Unfortunately, your test cannot address that, which is why I don't think the test is very useful.
quote: 1. Some kinds of gods can indeed have their existence or non-existence scientifically investigated. I think I have shown this rather exhaustively.
I agree.
quote: 2. The kind of god that this is not true of, is of no possible interest. This is opinion, not provable. But really, do you care whether or not there is an invisible, intangible dragon, breathing heatless flames, in my garage?
Here I disagree that it is of no interest. Take, for example, the thread about free will. Do we have free will? Well maybe, it's not really provable or measurable. But that doesn't mean the concept or belief in it isn't important.
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I don't think so, actually. If we don't have free will, what would we do about it? I don't see how a concept is important if you would act the same whether it was true or false.
As for the ways of answering prayers that do not involve removing the cancer : Well, either they are real and measurable, or they aren't. I don't object to interventions of the form 'makes the victim at peace with his death'; this is certainly something you could evaluate, psychologists do that sort of thing all the time. Anything that has an effect on humans can be measured in principle; it may be subtle enough that our current tools can't catch it, sure, but if it's there we can find it eventually.
It did occur to me as I was bicycling home that a god who did not intervene physically, but did provide an afterlife, might be of some interest even if we couldn't detect it. But then, as with free will, the truth or falsity of this wouldn't affect anybody's actions; for how could you know that you were following the correct god, unless you had some kind of physical intervention for proof? And anyway, the afterlife must have some kind of physical manifestation; at some point, we could find the place where the dead go, which would be a splendid proof.
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quote: But then, that's why I don't think a test for a Divine "effect" is going to be too useful.
I think it's ENORMOUSLY useful. For example, you might expect the following:
If God grants ANY prayers as asked, those who follow the right God and pray in the right ways should be expected to be statistically: 1) Healthier 2) Wealthier 3) Happier 4) Wiser (i.e. more correct)
If God does in fact grant wisdom and advice, we can expect that His followers, on average, make better investment decisions, divorce less, suffer fewer accidents, are less discriminated-against, etc.
Now, God could of course DELIBERATELY skew these results. Perhaps when He grants a prayer to cure a believer's cancer, He ALSO deliberately cures a non-believer's cancer to keep the rates equivalent. Perhaps He deliberately refuses to answer certain TYPES of prayers, either because He thinks a degree of suffering is good for His chosen or because He doesn't want anyone to think that He can be "controlled."
But in that case, He CAN be controlled; His actions are actually just as predictable in that event, but are harder to measure.
--------
Frankly, the arguments on behalf of an "infinite" and thus "unpredictable" God strike me as both ignorant and frightfully passive. If God exists, of course His effects can be detected; if they can't be detected, what possible argument can be made for His existence?
As KoM points out, the only possible merit of such a God might lie in an afterlife, but of course that's so hypothetical as to be wishful thinking.
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quote:Well, if God were to alter weather patterns, perhaps like a large scale flood, I think that would definitely be an effect
But God did create a flood, and recently, too. It killed over 250,000 people.
I think about 245,000 of those people were praying, "Oh, God, please don't let me die." And the other 5,000 were infants.
What are we to make of that "measurable" God?
A quick, and serious question about something else you said in a later post: What do you mean by "free will"? Please define. Really, I'm serious.
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quote:If God grants ANY prayers as asked, those who follow the right God and pray in the right ways should be expected to be statistically: 1) Healthier 2) Wealthier 3) Happier 4) Wiser (i.e. more correct)
See, and I don't think God would usually grant any prayers requesting these types of things, or at least in the way that we might view them. It reminds me of what Stephen prayed for as he was being stoned to death. "And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge"
Either way, I'm not saying it's not useful to know such a thing, just that any test that has thus far been suggested is going to be rather useless because either side will have plenty of room to argue the results because of the overwhelming degree of complexity and margin for error.
quote:Well, either they are real and measurable, or they aren't.
Yes, they may be measurable, but is it clear what or whom to attribute that to? Unexplainable things happen all the time. Sometimes it is explained away as a mere coincidence or fluke, sometimes a whole new theory is created for the one unexplainable exception. Sometimes it is attributed to prayer or God. How can you tell what the source or cause actually was? Until you can definitively know the source, any test is going to have at least that much room for error.
quote:If God exists, of course His effects can be detected
No. Lacking the knowledge, science, and technology to detect something does not mean that it cannot exist. It just makes it less likely to believe.
quote:I think about 245,000 of those people were praying, "Oh, God, please don't let me die." And the other 5,000 were infants.
What are we to make of that "measurable" God?
Hmm, you took my quote out of context and completely missed my point, but I'll humor you with a response. Maybe God took their souls to a higher plane of existence, thus granting their wish that they (their souls) did not die. Maybe the people that did survive were given just the right provision at just the right time to ensure their survival.
(Their was a thread on free will. That's why I referred to "the thread on free will")
quote:His actions are actually just as predictable in that event, but are harder to measure.
Actually, I think I would probably agree with this statement. But I think the term "controlled" carries different connotations.
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The last thread on free will that I attended never got anywhere (typical of all these religious threads), but in large part due to the fact that no one can really explain what they mean by "free will."
And regarding the exchange:
quote:
quote:If God exists, of course His effects can be detected {TD}
No. Lacking the knowledge, science, and technology to detect something does not mean that it cannot exist. It just makes it less likely to believe
If a thing exists, then it can be detected. If it does not exist, then it cannot be detected. TD never said (as it would be incorrect to do so) that "If a thing cannot be detected, then it does not exist."
G2G, my son is kicking me off my computer...
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Boothby, if the statement "If a thing exists, then it can be detected" is true, then the statement "If a thing cannot be detected, then it does not exist" must also be true.
To see why, look at the statements in their generic form:
A: If X then Y. B: If not Y then not X.
If statement A is true, then every time X occurs, Y occurs.
Therefore, if Y has not occurred, then X has not occurred (because we know that had X occurred, Y would have).
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quote:Frankly, the arguments on behalf of an "infinite" and thus "unpredictable" God strike me as both ignorant and frightfully passive. If God exists, of course His effects can be detected; if they can't be detected, what possible argument can be made for His existence?
As KoM points out, the only possible merit of such a God might lie in an afterlife, but of course that's so hypothetical as to be wishful thinking.
I think I finally figured out what my problem is with the whole idea. "His effects" is almost impossible to define meaningfully.
Most members of the traditional monotheist religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) believe that everything that exists is a result of God. Some believe that the mere existence of the Universe requires the constant maintenance of the will of God. This is a clear scenario where God has merit outside of an afterlife.
In addition, since KoM has already excluded from consideration specific testimony of events wherein God had a direct effect, KoM is demanding a particular form of detection - one that is repeatable and that yields the ability to make predictions.
There is no particular reason that a measurable statistical difference should appear amongst any particular category of believers in God or non-believers in God unless we have evidence that the starting point between the two groups is constant. There's no basis fo making that assumption.
The question here isn't "Can God's effects be detected?" The question is, "Is the existence of God the proper subject matter of science?"
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I disagree. The question is pretty basic and it's not what you are making it out to be.
There is a claim made that God answers prayers. Since many of these prayers and in fact many of the testimonies given as to God answering prayers are centered on observable, material effects, the hypothesis "Does God answer prayers concerning material matters by affecting those things?" is available for scientific testing. Any time a claim is made that changes in the materially observable world are made on a semi-consistent basis because of some reason, that claim can (assuming that we're talking on a managable scale) be tested.
This can be confounded by the fact that God is theoretically non-deterministic and could, for some reason, choose whether or not to answer the prayers under study while still answering other ones. However, that doesn't invalidate a potential finding of no statistical difference, but rather gives a possible alternative explanation. In which case, we've still learned something.
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Minor error, Squicky: there's nothing that can be tested that shows who/what is causing the answering of prayers. The only thing that can be tested is if prayers are associated with benefits.
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quote:I disagree. The question is pretty basic and it's not what you are making it out to be.
The claim I originally asked for an experiment about is not "God answers prayers." The question I posed which started this line of discussion is "if you think the existence of a Creator is valid subject matter for science, I'll pose the same question being used to browbeat IDers: propose an experiment about it."
The question is as I made it out to be here, although I made it a little more specific the second time around. If the existence of God cannot be investigated by experience, then it is not the proper subject of science.
I know because this is the original question because I am the one who posed it. KoM has insisted on my presence in this thread repeatedly, and I am returning at his request. But I'm not going to follow every twisting path of discourse which has moved the question being discussed from the question which I originally posed.
Whether God answers prayers is not the subject of science any more than whether God exists, for the reason cited by fugu, but the ongoing discussion about experiments to determine whether God answers prayers is quite separated from the topic for which I originally requested an experiment.
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I was approaching it from a falsifying standpoint, but yes, it would be at best difficult and most likely impossible to ascertain how the prayers actually worked in the positive case.
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I'd like to amend mine: theoretically, something could be tested regarding who or what answers prayers, but that its God doing it (as generally postulated) does not fall into that category. I mean, there could be a person who goes around and tries to answer prayers where possible, and that would be very testable. But what's being asked for is specifically a test of benefits that are otherwise unconnected from the physical/scientific world, and that cannot have a cause scientifically tested for.
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But even so, you can still test the prayer->material effect relationship while treating the actual causal chain as a black box. Showing a positive would suggest that there is something in that black box, while showing a negative would suggest either nothing in the box or suggest something about the qualities of whatever was in the box.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: I think I finally figured out what my problem is with the whole idea. "His effects" is almost impossible to define meaningfully.
And yet, you believe, (if you follow Catholic doctrine, as I assume you do) in a whole panoply of quite well-defined effects : Transubstantiation, afterlives, and miracles, to mention jsut three. The last, at least, is certainly detectable.
quote:In addition, since KoM has already excluded from consideration specific testimony of events wherein God had a direct effect, KoM is demanding a particular form of detection - one that is repeatable and that yields the ability to make predictions.
Well, you did say 'suggest an experiment'. There is in any case a large amount of testimony to the effect that the most whole-hearted, desperate prayer has not been answered as Christians say it will be.
quote:There is no particular reason that a measurable statistical difference should appear amongst any particular category of believers in God or non-believers in God unless we have evidence that the starting point between the two groups is constant. There's no basis fo making that assumption.
Well, Dag, I think I did mention the confounding effects. Scientists measure this all the time.
quote: The question here isn't "Can God's effects be detected?" The question is, "Is the existence of God the proper subject matter of science?"
Right, and I proposed an experiment to detect a particular kind of god. You have yet to show that this kind of god is either uninteresting, or not claimed to exist by anyone.
One more time : There are some kinds of gods that we can see do not exist. There are no gods who restore amputated limbs. We all agree to this, right? And we all agree because of the same actual evidence : To wit, we do not see any restored limbs. So the existence of this kind of god is a scientific question, and we all agree on the answer, because it is a vary easy one to find evidence for. Do you disagree with this, Dag?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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So, what do we mean when we say that something "exists?" What criteria can we use to prove the existence of a physical thing? What criteria are sufficient to prove the existence of a concept or a thought?
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Intelligent Design 
