quote: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.
Transubstantiation is specifically said to be not detectable. Miracles, almost by definition, aren't detectable as miracles. Certainly, they are undetecable as being caused by God, especially according to standards you keep insisting on.
quote: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.
No you haven't - at least, not without qualifying the type of God out of existence. The only type of God you could prove does not exist by that experiment is the type of God who would be willing to be proven by such an experiment. No one I know posits such a God as existing, although many people might posit that the God who does exist is such a God.
quote: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?
One more time: No. I don't know why you would think I would agree with this.
quote:And we all agree because of the same actual evidence : To wit, we do not see any restored limbs.
I believe there's a God who has raised at least three people from the dead, and I don't see that happening, either.
quote: 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?
As I stated above, yes, I do disagree with "this."
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If someone had written account of it 200 years ago you wouldn't believe it anyway, so why ask?
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Well, look, I'll even grant you two hundred years ago, just for the sake of the argument. Do you see any today? Has, perhaps, whoever was doing that two hundred years ago stopped doing it now? That would be an interesting datum, to be sure.
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But anyway, it doesn't even have to be miraculous healings. Take the other example I did, of crosses of light manifesting over every city, sharpish at 0900 Greenwich time every morning. Does there exist a god who does that?
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Could we agree that the kind of God who routinely restores amputated limbs in order to satisfy the doubts of his detractors, does not exist?
By there very nature, miracles are things which are outside of the realm of ordinary human experience. Everytime I get a paper cut, it heals. No one considers that a miracle because it is routine. Because it happens all the time, we can study it scientifically and come to understand how the finger heals but no amount of scientific study can determine why the finger heals. We can postulate that it heals because healing is an important survival trait and so evolution has selected for it, or we can postulate that it heals because a benevolent creator thought we would be happier if our paper cuts healed. Both of which are interesting philosophical hypotheses, but they will never be science. Science is simply unable to address questions about purpose.
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quote:But anyway, it doesn't even have to be miraculous healings. Take the other example I did, of crosses of light manifesting over every city, sharpish at 0900 Greenwich time every morning. Does there exist a god who does that?
I'm not sure I understand the point of such a question. For thousands of years the existance of the earth was considered to be proof of the existance of God in virtually every human culture. Atheism was obsurd because no one had an explanation for how the earth and all creatures in it could have come into existence without the existence of one or more creator. The scientific method has allowed us to better understand how the world works and therefore to postulate ways that the earth and the existence could have come into being without the need for an intelligent creator.
If crosses of light manifested themselves over every city sharpish at 0900 GMT every morning, we would have a reproducible phenomena. If people could detect this crosses, scientist could study the physical phenomena behind the crosses and eventually people might postulate ways they could be formed besides intelligent design.
The fact that there are no reproducible phenomena that are not being studied by science and which people are not seeking to explain by natural means says more about the nature of man than it does about the nature of God.
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Yes, Rabbit, but you're kind of missing the point there. If such crosses existed, we could certainly go looking for an explanation. But since they do not, we can conclude that no supernatural cause for them exists, either. It's non-existence, not existence, that's the interesting part.
Dag, thank you. You agree, then, that the existence of that particular kind of god is a scientific question that can be settled by reference to physical evidence?
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quote:Dag, thank you. You agree, then, that the existence of that particular kind of god is a scientific question that can be settled by reference to physical evidence?
No. My reasons for thinking that the kind of God who routinely restores amputated limbs in order to satisfy the doubts of his detractors doesn't exist aren't scientific.
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Oh, now I see the objection. Well, let me instead say 'a god who always repairs every amputated limb, within 24 hours of the injury.'
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quote:Yes, Rabbit, but you're kind of missing the point there.
Perhaps that's why I started by saying that I didn't understand the point of the question.
I have to disagree with Dag's basic contention here. Suppose I postulate that there is a supernatural force which will cause the penny on my desk to come up heads everytime I flip it. This is a postulate which can be tested by the scientific method because I can design an experiment that has the potential to disprove it. If I flip the coin and it ever comes up tails, then I have effectly disproven my postulae. Of course I can never truly prove the postulate because no matter how many times the penny comes up heads, it is still possible that there is some other explanation other than a supernatural force. If however, I flipped the coin enough times and never got tails, I could promote my hypothesis that a supernatural force existed which forced my penny to land heads up everytime from a hypothesis to a theory.
That exercise is however very academic since such an experiment is only possible if I postulate the existence of a very narrowly defined supernatural force. No one who believes in God actually defines God in such a narrow way their beliefs could be easily disproven by the scientific method.
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I am starting out with extremely simple, extremely narrow definitions because, if we start with the complicated stuff, we'll not get anywhere. Same reason you do idealised cases in physics. I'll add the friction back in afterwards.
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quote:I have to disagree with Dag's basic contention here.
I think you misunderstand my basic contention. It is that the existence of a creator is not the proper subject of science. Not the existence of some construct created by KoM that can be scientifically studied.
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Poor analogy King of Men. The law of conservation of momentum exists and governs motion with or without friction. When you include "friction" in the analysis, it becomes too complex to use conservation of momentum to solve common problems but momentum is still conserved.
This is fundamentally different from what I have claimed. What I claimed is that the scientific method can only used to disprove a very precisely and narrowly defined God. It is not simply that it is too complicated to use the scientific method to disprove the existence of a God that is not precisely and narrowly defined, it is that the scientific method can not be applied in such a case.
For example, if I were to postulate that a supernatural force exists which has the ability to cause the penny on my desk to turn up heads everytime I flip it, no one can use the scientific method to disprove this hypothesis. It is not simply more difficult to design a scientific experiment to test this hypothesis, it can not logically be done.
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quote: It is that the existence of a creator is not the proper subject of science.
That contention I agree with whole heartedly.
If we were to follow King of Men's logic to the end he intends, we would conclude that my car was created by a random evolutionary process. No intelligent being would have positioned the oil filter so that oil would spill on the CV boot every time the filter is changed.
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Well, actually, we have good evidence that intelligent beings do, in fact, make such mistakes. And as for your supernatural force with the ability to affect coin flips, yes, I cannot disprove its existence. I can, however, investigate whether it actually uses its ability. If it never does, then its existence is as utterly irrelevant to me as the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Honestly, who could possibly care? A god with properties of the slightest interest to humans is indeed a scientific subject.
quote:Poor analogy King of Men. The law of conservation of momentum exists and governs motion with or without friction. When you include "friction" in the analysis, it becomes too complex to use conservation of momentum to solve common problems but momentum is still conserved.
Of course it is, but that's not the complexity I was referring to. I was speaking of the kind of idealisation done by Galileo, in order to discover conservation of momentum in the first place. You don't start out by investigating whether momentum is conserved in a sheet of paper in a high wind - no human could possibly keep track of all the variables, starting from scratch. You begin with a ball rolling down an inclined plane.
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Certainly there is. Among others : "An entity which, among its many properties, heals all amputated limbs within 24 hours of the original injury." Does that entity exist, or not? If not, is that a scientific statement, or not?
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You're not studying God at that point. You're studying something else.
Certainly, there's no particular reason to associate "an entity which, among its many properties, heals all amputated limbs within 24 hours of the original injury" with the Creator.
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I'm not studying your god, perhaps. Are you now claiming to define all possible gods, everywhere?
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And, by the way, I also do not see any particular need to associate the property 'makes bread and wine into flesh and blood' with a creator.
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quote:I'm not studying your god, perhaps. Are you now claiming to define all possible gods, everywhere?
Nor are you studying the existence of a Creator. I'm talking about determining the existence of a Creator.
Get me to something that allows you to scientifically determine if the Universe was created by an entity.
I'm not going to let you rework the conversation. If you want to create an entity that you can then detect scientifically, be my guest. If you want to talk about the actual subject of discussion - whether the Universe was created by a creator - let me know.
quote:And, by the way, I also do not see any particular need to associate the property 'makes bread and wine into flesh and blood' with a creator.
There's certainly no scientific need to do so. You are limited to scientific associations. I am not.
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quote:Get me to something that allows you to scientifically determine if the Universe was created by an entity.
As I have repeatedly said, I am starting with simple things, and working my way up. This is how science works. You don't set off investigating the possibility of sending a rocket to the Moon. You begin with a simple black-powder thing that goes three feet off the ground. Then you beat the skeptics over the head with that until they admit that yes, things can fly without wings. In this case, in all honesty, I do feel the skeptics are going out of their way to be obtuse. If you would please agree that the god I've suggested is a kind of god, and is scientifically investigable, we could move on.
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Dag, you have me nearly in tears of frustration, here. Are you really discussing this in good faith? You are asking me to climb Everest, and then when I start by buying a plane ticket to India, you mock me for my lack of snow gear! I'll buy that when I get to India, curse it. But can we at least agree that I have to get to India first?
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quote:And as for your supernatural force with the ability to affect coin flips, yes, I cannot disprove its existence. I can, however, investigate whether it actually uses its ability.
No, you can not investigate such a question scientifically. In any experiment in which I flip this coin n times, I will get some numbe of heads which is less than or equal to n. I can compare that number to the number I would expect to obtain if the flipping of the coin were a completely random process and obtain a probability that my distribution of heads arose from a completely random process. The probability will always be less than 100% unless the I flip the coin an infinite number of times. In short, in any experiment in which I flip a coin any finite number of times, there will always be a finite possibility that the process was not completely random. That means that we will never be able to rule out the possibility that a supernatural power caused the penny to come up heads at some point in the experiment. The scientific method can not be used to either disprove the existence of such a god or to even identify whether such a god has used the power.
As I said before, your analogy between simplification in the field of physics and what you are trying to do here does not work. What you are trying to do here is build a straw man. I'm sorry, but your arguments simply do not apply.
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Um, Rabbit, you don't seem to be actually reading my words, there. I did say, 'I cannot disprove its existence'. But I can put an upper bound on how often the ability is used. And if it mimics a random distribution, then honestly, who cares whether it exists or not? Such an entity would affect my life as much as the gravity elves who, or might not, mimic the bending of space-time in every posisble way.
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quote:Get me to something that allows you to scientifically determine if the Universe was created by an entity.
As I have repeatedly said, I am starting with simple things, and working my way up.
Perhaps it would help if I were to rephrase the debate.
KOM has claimed that it is possible to imagine a god whose existence could be disproved by scientific investigation.
DAG has claimed, that KOMs argument is irrelevant to whether the scientific method can be used to investigate the existence of a Creator.
I have argued that although KOMs postulate is correct, it is not a sufficiently general result to have any bearing on the argument at hand.
If I may make an analogy, suppose DAG had argued for the existence of two integers whose ratio was the number pi. KOM has then asked DAG to agree that 6 divided by 2 is not pi. DAG has then insisted that this rational can not possibly be relevant in disproving his original postulate.
KOM, it is not sufficient to claim that you are trying to build from the specific to the general. You need to show us how this specific detail has any relevance to the general.
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If I may continue your analogy, the six-over-two bit would be to see whether it is possible to agree on a procedure for testing whether a given rational is pi. In mathematics this would be trivial, but this is a rather more emotional subject. So far I do not see anyone agreeing that we can indeed test whether n / m = pi for specific n and m.
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No KOM, You said you could investigate whether such a God ever used this power by the scientific method. I claim you can not. The scientific method demands that you be able to design an experiment which could disprove the hypothesis.
Suppose I were to hypothesize that everytime I flip a coin, the outcome is determined by the coin flipping god. Show me how you could investigate that hypothesis scientifically.
The fact that you can find an equation which can accurately predicts what happens when I flip the coin many times has no relevance to why those things happened. You cannot rule out the possibility that the coin flipping God chooses to follow statistical equations. Unless you create an artificially narrow definition of God, such as "There is a coin flipping God which will cause the flipped coin to fall in the specific pattern X." It is impossible to use the scientific method to determine whether such a god exists or acts.
What you seem to be saying is that if by using the scientific method, you can develop an equation which accurately describes the behavior of the Universe, then it is irrelevant to you whether that behavior is caused by a Creator God or by random processes.
What I am saying is that whether the Universe can be completely described by scientific investigation and whether the Universe has a purpose which was chosen by an intelligent God are entirely different questions. Both questions are important but the second question is outside the realm of science. Science can seek to understand what happens, it can never determine whether what happens has value, meaning or purpose.
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quote:If however, I flipped the coin enough times and never got tails, I could promote my hypothesis that a supernatural force existed which forced my penny to land heads up everytime from a hypothesis to a theory.
A better example: you could demonstrate the effectiveness of prayer at affecting the laws of probability by praying for the coin to turn up heads and flipping ten thousand -- or a hundred thousand -- times.
Because -- and I know you know enough statistics to concede this -- a result outside the expected deviation would be considered statistically significant. If the result was NOT outside the expected deviation, it would NOT be considered statistically significant, and our conclusion would be "the effect of prayer is statistically insignificant."
Do you agree?
Can we agree that if any religion in the world correctly believes that God answers prayers for His faithful, we should be able to see some statistical deviation among that group of faithful unless God specifically seeks to conceal that data? If not, why not?
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You are quite right, I do not care whether random chance really exists, or is just mimicked very cleverly. I do think you'll find me saying this from the very start, even though it's been rather overshadowed by the definitions issue on this page. A difference that makes no difference, is no difference; if your creator is not distinguishable from chance, then its existence is a point of airy philosophy, signifying nothing. And the same applies to purpose, value, and meaning : If I do not know, and cannot even in principle find out, what these values are, then as far as I'm concerned they might as well not exist.
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quote:Because -- and I know you know enough statistics to concede this -- a result outside the expected deviation would be considered statistically significant. If the result was NOT outside the expected deviation, it would NOT be considered statistically significant, and our conclusion would be "the effect of prayer is statistically insignificant."
Do you agree?
No I would, conclude that effect of prayer within that experiment was statistically insignificant, which does not imply that the effect of prayer in some other context would be insignificant.
One could, and in fact many have, postulated that God would not respond to prayers involving coin flipping as part of an experiment to prove the validity of prayer yet would respond to prayers uttered under other circumstances. It is this kind of postulate which makes investigating God scientifically impossible.
KOM, You make the brazen assumption that because something can not be investigated scientifically, it can not be studied by any means. What religion and philosophy claim is that there are ways of knowing about god even if those ways are not scientific.
Whether or not something can be measured or proven scientifically says nothing about whether or not it is important. Demonstrate to me scientifically that you feel love for your family members. Demonstrate to me scientifically that wild flowers are beautiful. Demonstrate to me scientifically that kindness is a good character trait. All of those things make a significant difference in my life even though I can not study them with science.
BTW: A friend of mine who is a religious statistician performed the prayer and coin flipping experiment and was convinced that God had answered his prayer. His study still wasn't scientific because it wasn't done with the proper controls and blinding.
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quote:No I would, conclude that effect of prayer within that experiment was statistically insignificant, which does not imply that the effect of prayer in some other context would be insignificant.
In which context do you believe that prayer could be found to be significant? Statistics are available for health, mental fitness, marriage, family, financial security, etc. Which one of these categories do you think might gainfully demonstrate proof of prayer's effect on a subgroup?
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I should also note that it is important not to confuse whether something is statistically insignificant with whether or not it is significant in some other respect. The chances that you will win the lottery are statistically insignificant. This does not imply that winning the lottery is an insignificant event.
One can imagine a coin flipping God who only deviated from random statistics 1 time in a million, but selected those non-random flips in such a way that they had a dramatic impact on peoples lives. Suppose that the coin flipping God chooses to follow a random flip distribution unless someones life depends on the outcome of the flip. This of course is a very rare occurance and so it is extraordinarily unlikely that a scientific study would be able to detect the pattern. The pattern would none the less be very significant.
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quote:But here's a more important question: what is the value of something with no perceptible effect?
quote:A difference that makes no difference, is no difference; if your creator is not distinguishable from chance, then its existence is a point of airy philosophy, signifying nothing.
Both these have the same answer. The only reason I'm involved with this discussion is this weird insistence that having a perceptible effect is sufficient to make something the subject of science.
I've repeatedly given the examples of effects of God which are evidenced only by testimony. It's clear that, if those events happened, they had perceptible effects. Yet they cannot be studied scientifically. Even if we had perfect recording equipment and measuring equipment on hand at those events, we couldn't prove it was God creating those effects.
quote:And the same applies to purpose, value, and meaning : If I do not know, and cannot even in principle find out, what these values are, then as far as I'm concerned they might as well not exist.
Good thing science isn't the only means of of knowing or finding things out.
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quote:Which one of these categories do you think might gainfully demonstrate proof of prayer's effect on a subgroup?
You miss my point. I don't think that scientific method can be used demonstrate the significance or insignificance of prayer. I can't pick one of your categories because prayer is something I believe to be outside the realm of scientific investigation.
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quote:I can't pick one of your categories because prayer is something I believe to be outside the realm of scientific investigation.
So your argument is that prayer is answered so rarely or inconsistently as to be statistically insignificant and therefore unmeasurable? Seriously, is it your belief that God answers such a tiny percentage of His prayers that their effects cannot be detected as deviations from the expected result?
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quote:If I may continue your analogy, the six-over-two bit would be to see whether it is possible to agree on a procedure for testing whether a given rational is pi. In mathematics this would be trivial, but this is a rather more emotional subject. So far I do not see anyone agreeing that we can indeed test whether n / m = pi for specific n and m.
KOM, you are missing the point. No one is questioning whether or not one can test whether n/m = pi for specific numbers n and m. We are questioning whether or not proceeding with such tests is a valid way to proceed in proving the point. If we proceed in that manner, then we have to test every possible pair of integers and show that their ratio is not pi. Since there are an infinite number of integers, this can never be accomplished. If we start with Dag's approach, all he has to do is find one example of integers whose ratio is pi.
(Of course I should note that it has been proven that pi is an irrational number by an entirely different approach. My point isn't that your conclusion is inherently wrong, but that your approach can not logical succeed in proving your point.)
If we are trying to determine whether the scientific method is a valid means for investigating the existence of a creator, it is irrelevant whether or not one can imagine a creator that could be investigated by the scientific method.
The relevant question is whether one can invision a creator that could not be investigated by the scientific method. If we start your way, we have to demonstrate that every imaginable God who could be relevant to us can be studied scientifically. All I have to do is come up with one example of a possible creator that can not be investigated meaningful through science and I've proven my point.
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quote:Whether or not something can be measured or proven scientifically says nothing about whether or not it is important. Demonstrate to me scientifically that you feel love for your family members. Demonstrate to me scientifically that wild flowers are beautiful. Demonstrate to me scientifically that kindness is a good character trait. All of those things make a significant difference in my life even though I can not study them with science.
I can certainly demonstrate that a threat to your family members causes agitation, changes in brain chemistry, a fight-or-flight reaction. That is observation. I can then correlate with your reported feelings, and say 'this looks like the traditional definition of love'. That is inference. Which part of this is unscientific?
quote:I've repeatedly given the examples of effects of God which are evidenced only by testimony. It's clear that, if those events happened, they had perceptible effects. Yet they cannot be studied scientifically. Even if we had perfect recording equipment and measuring equipment on hand at those events, we couldn't prove it was God creating those effects.
You can never prove a causal relationship, for anything. But you can assign some kind of probability.
As for testimony, you have yet to offer a means of choosing between them. Why take the word of Mark, Luke, and John, but not of Joseph Smith? On the face of it, the accounts look equally coherent and plausible. What is the value of a god that is indistinguishable from the ramblings of a deluded man?
It occurs to me, however, that I've been ignoring the most obvious way to investigate gods : Shoot some believers. If there is an afterlife, they come back and report on it.
...
...
Well, we learned at least one thing about the quality of the afterlife.
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quote:All I have to do is come up with one example of a possible creator that can not be investigated meaningful through science and I've proven my point.
My assertion is that a Creator who cannot be investigated through science is, with the possible exception of effects in the afterlife, absolutely meaningless and unnecessary. You may as well posit that some Creator created the universe and then died immediately; it would be exactly as useful a theory.
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quote:So your argument is that prayer is answered so rarely or inconsistently as to be statistically insignificant and therefore unmeasurable? Seriously, is it your belief that God answers such a tiny percentage of His prayers that their effects cannot be detected as deviations from the expected result?
No, my belief is that prayers are generally answered in ways that defy scientific observation. For example, I believe that one of the key ways God answers prayers is by giving people hope and joy. There are no objective measures of hope and joy all we can do is ask people if they feel joy when they pray. This can't be reduced to a scientific study for many many reasons.
For example, if we were to find that people report feeling joy when they pray, it could be because they have been socially programmed to feel joy when they pray, or because are programmed to lie about whether they feel joy when they pray or because praying triggers the release of endorphins. And if praying triggers the release of endorphins and we could measure that response we still couldn't determine whether that release of endorphins was caused by social programming, innate biological mechanisims or devine intervention. Even if we could determine that it was do to biological mechanisms that all are encoded in our genes, that wouldn't eliminate the possibility that god put those mechanisms in our genes in answer to our prayers.
It would also be impossible to do a controlled study of such effects because you couldn't randomly select people and have one group pray and the other group not pray and expect to get valid results. One of the key postulates in most religions is that prayer must be sincere and faithful to be heard. There is no way you can randomize and get sincerity.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: KOM, you are missing the point. No one is questioning whether or not one can test whether n/m = pi for specific numbers n and m. We are questioning whether or not proceeding with such tests is a valid way to proceed in proving the point.
The first question to ask is whether we can even agree on terms, in order to have a meaningful discussion. I do not intend to proceed by systematically shooting down an infinite sequence of gods. I am merely trying to see if we can agree on what 'scientific' and 'testable' mean. Thus far, the answer appears to be no.
quote:The relevant question is whether one can invision a creator that could not be investigated by the scientific method. If we start your way, we have to demonstrate that every imaginable God who could be relevant to us can be studied scientifically. All I have to do is come up with one example of a possible creator that can not be investigated meaningful through science and I've proven my point.
Right, which is the point where we investigate whether such a creator is interesting or not. You can certainly imagine a particle that doesn't interact with anything, but to assert its existence is as meaningless as the sentence 'Racist bananas chase invisible smileys'. I want it established, before we begin any discussion, that the qualities 'creator' and 'investigable by science' are not mutually exclusive. You people are jumping far ahead in the discussion : We have yet to come to an agreement on what the terms mean, and you are already drawing conclusions!
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quote:As for testimony, you have yet to offer a means of choosing between them. Why take the word of Mark, Luke, and John, but not of Joseph Smith? On the face of it, the accounts look equally coherent and plausible. What is the value of a god that is indistinguishable from the ramblings of a deluded man?
Irrelevant to the reason I brought it up in this thread. (BTW, this illustrates the reason I wasn't participating before - you're inability to refrain from the same tired arguments that have been discussed to death when they are not at all relevant to the discussion.)
The reason I brought it up was simply as an illustration of a way in which God could have a perceptible effect and yet not be scientifically studiable.
Suppose the strong-wind theory of the sea of reeds parting is accurate. There's no way to know from scientific measurements if the reason the wind blew and the water parted was because God wanted Moses and his followers to escape or because Moses was a lucky guy. None. Zero. Zilch.
If natural processes can be used by God to accomplish a purpose which is inherently unknowable to us without revelation, then revelation will be needed to study the cause of such events.
Since you have said revelation is not scientific, then anything which requires revelation to understand cannot be understood by science alone.
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quote:My assertion is that a Creator who cannot be investigated through science is, with the possible exception of effects in the afterlife, absolutely meaningless and unnecessary.
Do you consider your love for your daughter meaningless and unnecessary? Yet love can not be meaningfully quantified in any scientific sense. There is no way we can prove that what you feel when you feel love is the same as what I feel when I feel love. We can measure the effects the love has on your behavior, but that is not the same as measuring the love itself.
Do you consider beauty meaningless and unnecessary? It also can not be measured by science.
Although I can not measure or study God in any scientifically valid way, I can sense his influence in my life. The influence is as real as the influence your love has on your actions. It is more real than the influence a piece of beautiful music has on me.
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