Lemdro.id

11 points

9 months ago

No no a stick won’t work, the invisible dragon is very small and agile and would easily dodge your stick. It only makes itself known when it wants to.

I feel the same about eyewitness accounts of miracles. Eyewitness testimony is not evidence. It could be a good place to start to investigate miraculous claims but that’s all.

I’m not dismissing claims because it doesn’t align with my experiences, but because there is no reliable evidence. In fact depending on the type of diety you propose I think many claims can be shown to be false because they a contradictory with reality.

I’d be interested to hear the evidence you have for sure. I’m open to changing my views. I’m not scholar but my understanding is that the best we have is a collection of anonymously written books which isn’t enough for me to accept such a huge claim.

I don’t know about the origin of the universe but I don’t think anyone claims things came from nothing, we simply don’t know what was before the big bang. Not knowing the answer to me isn’t a good enough reason to assume a divine entity is responsible.

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Sotuanduso@lemm.ee

-7 points

9 months ago

Eyewitness testimony isn’t evidence, eh? Before I get too invested in this, I want to know what you do consider to be evidence. Suppose that, hypothetically, I run a study where I recruit 1000 people off the street. I tell them that at some point over the next 10 days, I’m going to pray for them to experience peace. For each person, I roll a 10 sided die to choose which day to pray on, do so, and record the result. Then at the end of the 10 days, I bring them all back and ask them to indicate on which day they felt the most peace. ~600 of them say the same day that I rolled for them, ~150 of them are one day off, and ~100 can’t give an answer. If this were to happen (solely hypothetical, ignoring any arguments about whether God would play along for a study,) would that count as evidence?

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15 points

9 months ago

Yes that would count as evidence but only if you modified your experiment slightly:

Don’t tell anyone that you will pray for them.
Instead of personally praying for each person, give the list of participant names to someone you trust.
This person can then pray for a subset of the people listed on random days, recording the person they prayed for and the day.
You conduct interviews with the people as you suggested.
After you record the results of the interviews, you then look at the data from the person who prayed and see where things matched up. You can then observe if there are any statistically significant differences between those who were prayed for and those who were not

The reason this counts as evidence is because it’s not eyewitness testimony, it’s a controlled experiment which should be reproducible by anyone. By itself it doesn’t prove anything but it would help to start building a body of evidence that prayer can work, or not depending on your results.

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TheKracken@lemmy.world

11 points

9 months ago

This is how you do experiments. Double blind all the way.

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Sotuanduso@lemm.ee

-2 points

9 months ago

So if it doesn’t meet the standards of a double blind study, it’s worthless as evidence? What about case studies?

I get that double blind studies are superior because they combat bias, but sometimes double blind studies aren’t what’s been done. Other types of studies aren’t invalid, you just have to take them with salt and consider alternative explanations - just as you do with a double blind study.

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3 points

9 months ago

Case studies are similar in my mind to anecdotes or eyewitness testimony, an interesting starting point or indication that something might be worth digging into but not really evidence.

And yeah I suggested a double blind study because it has the most value for providing potential evidence although even that is no guarantee depending on the experiment design. It’d definitely be a good start though at the very least. You could do a non blind study but then the fact that it’s non blind will be the first thing to come up and cast doubt on the results. If you want to provide solid evidence I don’t think you would want to settle for less than that if you can avoid it.

FWIW I think there have already been studies done on prayer but they don’t seem to be conclusive from what I could tell at least but hey, I’m not a scientist. You just asked what I’d consider evidence so hopefully this has helped answer that somewhat. Even with a double blind study though I think you would have some work ahead of you but you’d definitely have my interest!

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Sotuanduso@lemm.ee

1 point

9 months ago

Honestly, I’m getting flashbacks from old debates where people were really picky about evidence. If you don’t mind a too-long backstory, read the next paragraph. Otherwise, skip it. Sorry for the amount of context needed.

There was a certain mobile app I played with an arena gamemode, where each player was part of a certain arena pool, and you could go up in the ranks by attacking others or go down by being attacked. I figured that, for each arena pool, there’s a certain point of no interest, beyond which nobody would bother attacking you because they don’t play that gamemode. As part of a debate on Reddit, I wanted to give a general indication of where this point was. To do this, I set my defense team to actual garbage (that anyone who unlocked the gamemode could stomp,) stopped doing offense, and recorded my arena ranking as it dropped. This went on for many weeks, and I published my results to Reddit, figuring that when it stops dropping, I’m probably somewhere near the point of no interest. The other guy refused to accept that it had any worth as an indication, though, because it was a sample size of one and too stochastic. We argued about it for… probably weeks, I can’t remember.

Anyways, because of that argument, I’m cautious about dealing with internet debaters who have rigorous standards about what counts as evidence. I’m just a guy on the net, not a professional scientist, I don’t have the energy to do research papers to convince one person of something they’re probably not going to believe anyways. This thought especially comes up when I hear things like “if it doesn’t meet the standard, it’s worthless.” Though looking back, it appears I put that word in your mouth, sorry.

To be honest, you’re still setting off that red flag in the back of my mind, but unlike everyone it’s been a problem with before, you seem pretty friendly about it (unless you’re one of the people downvoting my every comment.) I’d be willing to talk about it, but it would have to be with the understanding that I don’t have scientifically rigorous evidence because I’m not a scientifically rigorous professional. What I do have is personal experience about subtly yet distinctly answered prayers, paired with mental note-taking to ward off confirmation bias. I also have a couple anecdotes that work better as funny little stories than evidence. And I also have, as mentioned before, a line of reasoning showing that it’s extraordinarily unlikely for the disciples to have been conspiring or hallucinating when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, though I’d have to dig up my notes on that.

Does any of that interest you?

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1 point

9 months ago

Yeah that’s a totally fair point about the standard of evidence and a good one to bring up. The example you used is a good one too, personally for that kind of thing I would say my standard of evidence would be much lower because I would judge it to be more reasonable, I might not even need evidence at all there and just be willing to take your word for it unless I was particularly passionate about the game then what you provided would likely suffice to me.

I think in this case a good thing to consider might be what standard of evidence you would hope is used by the manufacturer of your car when it comes to the safety systems, materials etc as assuming you drive you place your life in the hands of your car often. Would you hope that the materials were thoughrouly researched, peer reviewed, iterated on and rigorously tested? I’d think so, at least I would. So why in the case of a divine entity potentially torturing you for eternity if you get it wrong would you be willing to accept anything less? What if you get it wrong, and you end up in the hell of some other deity?

I’m not biblical scholar or scientists by any means but my understanding is er actually do not have direct eyewitness accounts recorded for these things. We have second or third hand accounts, or claims that a certified number of people were witnesses but no independent statements from said witnesses beyond the one claim. Even with reliable eyewitness testimony that would not be enough for me to truly believe someone rose from the dead, I would need a lot more than that.

I’m definitely willing to read your notes though if you are willing to post but that’s all I can promise. I try to be fairly open minded but I’ve layed out earlier what it would take to convince me that prayer works and even if that burden would be met, it wouldn’t prove to me that a God exists. That I believe is fundamentally unprovable and undisprovable because of the nature of the claim, similar to claiming we are all living in a simulation. So I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to spend the effort but I definitely appreciate the engagement. I have not been downvoting you either for what it’s worth, I think we’ve had a good discussion even if neither of us changed our minds.

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