I will now prove atheists are illogical Part 2.

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by jedimiller, Mar 25, 2012.

  1. Nullity

    Nullity Active Member

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    Oh give it a rest. Other than the number of Christians figure, I never tried to hide the fact that my numbers were based on some guesswork. However, I was purposely being conservative with those numbers specifically for that reason.

    That being said, for every one of those numbers, I asked you what you thought was acceptable. Of course, you provided no answer, so I stuck with my conservative estimates.

    Thing is, the number of Christians figure was from 2005, so there are most likely more now. In addition, I would guess that the average number of prayers is more than once a day, but as I said, I purposely kept it low. Based on this, the percentage of "answered prayers" would be even lower.

    But just to prove a point, let's say that the average number of prayers per Christian is only once a week (church). I'm sure that you would agree that is an insanely low estimate. That still only comes out to 0.0092% of prayers "answered". Let's try once more - let's bump up the number of prayers answered per year by an order of magnitude - 100 million. Now the percentage comes out to 0.092%. That's still less than one tenth of a percent!

    So now, even if my numbers are wrong (and I'm sure they are), they are so much in your favor that it doesn't really matter. My numbers not being exact is part of my point. It's a shame that you won't ever understand why.

    Walking to a church and asking them about their "answered prayers" is irrelevant to my point.
     
  2. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    Well, there is an interesting thing about prayer - the most common method of answered prayers is ... other people - people moved by teh holy spirit to help their fellow human beings.
     
  3. Prof_Sarcastic

    Prof_Sarcastic New Member

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    Or to put it another way, "there's always a good reason to be skeptical."
     
  4. Jonsa

    Jonsa Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    No not at all.

    I merely question why when these so called miracles or answered prayers happen that there isn't anyone around to document them.

    Surely if a preacher could actually cure people they would want the world to know of the efficacy of prayer and faith.

    this would be the ideal circumstance for faith to meet science and vice versa, yet, there isn't a shred of evidence or study.

    hmmmmmmmm.
     
  5. stig42

    stig42 New Member

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    that shows peapole who belive in the holy spirit exist may not prove your holy spirit itself
     
  6. stig42

    stig42 New Member

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    ok god would be perfect if existed hows that going to help you dtermine if it exists
     
  7. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    #1 - why anyone should treat your gues work as anything other than random, and in this case derisive, speculation ... well, we shouldn't.

    #2 - I asked you to walk into ANY church and ask about someone's testimony and then exptrapolate that over the aggregate (as in number of believers per church, etc.) in direct contravention to your made up numbers.

    One can be tested, and giving polling techniques is valid use of statistics. Your? Are quite literally as imaginary as that spaghetti you just ... didn't eat.

    If someone on your side would care to actually make a case about why you are logical rather than pedantic group of curmedgeons who are never wrong because you never actually claim anything and can only tell everyone else why they are wrong - which is a good case when you are using imaginary numbers - would be nice.

    Make a case rather than another excuse. Your line of reasoninig is as illogical as the faith that spawned the excuse.
     
  8. fishmatter

    fishmatter New Member

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    How would you propose testing whether or not a prayer was answered? Is there a reliable way to differentiate between an event that took place as a result of prayer from the same event that just happened? I don't see how, faced with no way to control for anything and a sample space of 1, you expect to get a meaningful number.

    Frankly, if the only kind of evidence you're willing to suggest involves walking into a church and asking to hear some stories then you really don't understand how seriously scientists take words like "knowledge," "belief," and "proof." Just the possibility that someone could lie without my knowledge means the data is worthless. I'm not saying that anybody would lie, but I don't have to. Unless I can say there's no way anybody could have lied nobody serious would ever take data gotten this way seriously.

    You do see this, don't you?
     
  9. Jonsa

    Jonsa Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Does anyone know of any serious scientific study of the healing miracles of the televangelist crowd?

    Their followers obviously beleive to the tune of millions if not billions a year.
    Is this simply another case of faith requires not proof?
     
  10. RevAnarchist

    RevAnarchist New Member Past Donor

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    No my friend you misunderstand what I said. I said that there are more than one universe, even science says so. If not more than one universe, there are more than one dimension. People stars planets and things like that are in a universe called a temporal universe. Temporal means time dependent. In Gods universe time has no meaning. God created time when the universe was created, science knows that time was created in the big bang as well. So what I was saying that God when in his timeless universe his home and where we will be going after death there he is perfect. Here in this universe the universe that he created where time effects everything, we humans see God as imperfect because we are confusing the effects of time, or a universe designed to run in accordance with time and the laws of physics with imperfection. There is some question if God actually often visits our universe 'personally'. He usually sends a messenger such as angels or Jesus, but that is a question for another thread.

    reva
     
  11. RevAnarchist

    RevAnarchist New Member Past Donor

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    Yes that would be one way that the natural could be seen to be obeying the supernatural. I do believe in prayer and other supernatural things. However, in my opinion, and I may be risking my eternal soul for this, prayer is not like sending God a PM. I think prayer works something like quantum entanglement. So a group of the faithful praying has more effect than one person praying. I am confident that science and metaphysics will merge one day.

    reva
     
  12. fishmatter

    fishmatter New Member

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    It would be really helpful if you stopped using the word "created" to describe phenomena that scientists do not believe to have been directed by any kind of intelligence. I mean, how much satisfaction can you possibly get destroying an argument nobody appears to be making?

    Science does not "say" that there is more than one universe. In ways that we've not been able to test it is possible, mathematically, that a multiverse exists. And this is all any serious scientist will tell you - that it's currently unobserved but not ruled out by the math.

    This is a disturbing trend I've noticed here in the short time since my arrival. The misconception that science claims absolute knowledge about anything non-trivial is ridiculous. And I've already heard someone mock the scientific community because the things that were taught as facts in the 1980s have all been proven wrong. I'm at a loss for words trying to understand how this, perhaps the most admirable and valuable part of science, could be so misunderstood.

    But anyway, let's go for precision, cool? You wouldn't like it if I lambasted the bible because of the eleventh through fifteenth commandments, all of which condemned various types of cheese on particular days of the week, would you? My argument might even sound witty and clever but since this stuff isn't in the bible you would have every right to point it out to me, too. At least I hope you would.
     
  13. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    So, there is always an excuse to deny. Millions of people report having had prayer answered, and all atheists can do is scoff ... in accordance with their faith. Imaginary numbers are fine though ....

    Most scientists are religious. I will leave it to you to figure out, but, once again, another atheist hides behind science - when science leads to having an open mind about these things.

    What is definitely on disply here is anything but an open mind. After all, millions of people are now written off as liars ... because you just need them to be. Nice.
     
  14. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    Science claims that the universe was 'created' in the Big Bang. If this opens disturbing theological questions for you, challenges you faith, then its best to explore them rather than simply dismiss them and ask other people, particularly in a debate forum, to kindly stop talking about them in a way you find ... disturbing.

    THe universe was created.
     
  15. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    THat is a hell of a leap J. Televangelists to ... millions of answered prayers a year.

    Once again, the intent is clearly to deny.

    The challenge was simple. Walk into a church, and begin to ask people, with an open mind, about their testimony. No one is going to say, "Well, I was sitting on my coach playing with some test tubes and muching on some morning after pills, when it dawned on me that there was a God!"

    I realize its much easier to stay in a cocoon of denial, but that is a choice. IMO, not a very good one, and if finding the truth of a subject is the real goal - a patently illogical one.
     
  16. stig42

    stig42 New Member

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    rev are we going full infinit multiverse hear wher evry thing that could be allways has existed? that would still leave us whith question of can the gods exist and to know that we would have to figure out how a god would worck and to figure out how all posible laws of physics worck in order to know if god can be and therfore is also if gods exist beyond time are they creatours? from their perspective woudnt all temporeluniverses and all times inthem have always existed? wount ther be no cause and effect existince being an eternal unified whole?
     
  17. DeskFan

    DeskFan New Member

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    Not all atheists believe in the big bang theory, therefore your whole argument is invalid.
     
  18. Junkieturtle

    Junkieturtle Well-Known Member Donor

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    That's hardly what people are saying. The common rebuttal to someone mentioning the Big Bang as the start of the universe is "what created the big bang"? Usually what follows is something about God doing it in one way or another. It's just an extra step. We don't know where the Big Bang came from and we don't know where God came from, assuming he exists. Picking a side, be it science or religion, is exactly that. Picking a side. The one that is closest to your views, or the one that makes the most sense to you, or the one that sounds the sexiest, etc etc. Everyone has their reasons for choosing which route to go, but neither route is fundamentally more correct than any other right now because we have evidence of none.

    So if you want to believe that the biblical God created the universe, that's fine. If you want to believe in all the different theories on how the Big Bang began, that's fine too. Atheists are no more illogical in this than a religious person, it's just personal preference.
     
  19. fishmatter

    fishmatter New Member

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    No, did no such thing. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Think it through:

    There's a difference between being unable to say as a matter of fact that someone is telling the truth and calling that person a liar. The first is a simple acknowledgement that people would be capable of being mistaken, misremembering, or even outright lying and we wouldn't be able to tell.

    Poof! There goes your experiment. Once you allow for that uncertainty it's not even worth counting how many people agreed to participate. Unless you were willing to preface your paper with a statement like "we believe that are truth of our conclusions falls somewhere between completely and not at all."

    Can you state definitively that it would be impossible for anyone to lie? Of course not. Does that mean you're calling everyone liars?

    Let me try to depersonalize it. Let's say you were charged with figuring out what effects opium had on, I don't know, soil acidity. Millions of acres of potentially ruined land in Afghanistan from stuff people drop when they're harvesting. So obviously you need to get your hands on a bunch of poppies and grow then somewhere, but let's say that's not feasible. So you've got to get a bunch of opium and do your best to distribute in your experimental garden like you imagine it would in Khartum.

    The problem is opium isn't easy to get a hold of. But you do know a guy who knows a guy who can get you a great deal on the stuff so you pay him in unmarked bills and start heaving it into your backyard. And you start measuring things and, yup, all kinds of things are happening. This doesn't look good at all.

    And then someone points out to you, after you've spent months doing the work and more time cleaning and abating, that any domestic illicit opium is heavily cut with all kinds of things to make it more profitable. So now you realize you just dumped a whole bunch of mysterious stuff back there that was laced with a bit of opium. Or maybe it was highly pure. Could you state with any certainty that you had a full understanding of what goes on in a poppy field in Afghanistan? More importantly, would it even occur to you to claim in defense that the opium dripping off the bulbs over there was definitely cut with all kinds of street impurities?

    Because that's what you accused me of doing when you said I was writing off everyone as liars. Now do you get it?
     
  20. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    Nothing beyond the Big Bang can be proven one way or the other, there are from the moment of creation on, fairly compelling, never definitive, proofs of God. Its definitely a possibility if not an outright probability.

    Nevertheless, how many 'science' minded atheists do you think take the tone that there is no God because ... er, science and junk! Well, when we examine that, we find the science actually disagrees with such certainty.

    It is what, IMHO, delienates a real atheist from merely a militant nhilist who calls himself an atheist. The former is indeed driven by logic and a bit of intuition, the former? THeir passion against religion.
     
  21. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    Lets pretend you are talking to someone who has posted numerous examples of answered prayers, miracles down through the ages, now, not only are claiming that the denial isn't happening - but that someone is being deliberately obtuse for noticing the deliberate denial of everything.

    As for Poppy Fields in Afghanistan, I understand enough of what is going on their to not just stake my life on it - but the lives of 19 year old young men. We leave next week.

    Some of these debates are not merely about ideas, a fact that many atheists will only find out when its too late.
     
  22. fmw

    fmw Well-Known Member

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    This is a fairly weak "proof." In the first place, it is not atheists that find the big bang theory appealing. It is scientists - astronomers - cosmologists, some of whom are atheist and some of whom are not. It is a theory, by the way, not a proven fact. it is a logical way to explain why the universe is expanding in every direction. It is not the only logical way to explain it and there are other theories.

    Secondly you attribute "creativity" to the big bang as though there were some intelligence to it. I know of no scientist that would ascribe any intelligence to the big bang. The big bang might have been one of many big bangs. Our universe may be one of many universes. We don't know. Science doesn't know. It is a mystery.

    So you are trying to "prove" a point by basing a theory that doesn't belong to the group you are arguing against and that is a mystery. Doesn't that strike you as fairly weak for a "proof?" It does to me. You need to do more work on it.
     
  23. fishmatter

    fishmatter New Member

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    My point was just that we've got good criteria for determining the truth of a hypothesis, and controlling for bias until nobody can think of any ways it could crop up is part of the process. As I said, nobody at all has to be lying but the test you propose wouldn't know that and the results wouldn't say anything definitive. You've already got what you consider solid anecdotal evidence, so why bother with such a terrible study? You need something much more rigorous if you intend to learn anything from its results.

    This is admittedly a tough request. Interestingly, one of the largest prayer studies ever held (through Harvard, I believe) was funded in part by a legitimate religious organization. And it's very rigorous, believe me. The found nothing conclusive as far as positive or negative effects that prayer might have. And to their credit they published the results despite having hoped for different results. `A quick google and I think I've found it. The STEP study. Have a look if you're interested.

    So, again, I'm not calling anybody a liar. But unless I can state without the possibilty of being wrong that they're not then the study is useless.
     
  24. Neutral

    Neutral New Member Past Donor

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    Yes we can test teh hypothesis - and its pretty damb clear that miracles are indeed happening. Its clear, to the tone of millions if not billions, that prayers are indeed being answered.

    The source of this, shockingly ... just like I have said all along, is not scientifically verifiable.

    You disagree and charge bias ... well, consider your own please.
     
  25. fishmatter

    fishmatter New Member

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    I really need to watch my words to avoid you misunderstanding them. I meant bias in the mathematical sense, as a measure of reliability of data. I didn't mean political or religious bias.

    I must have missed it when you accepted that it's not scientifically verifiable. Di you propose the way to conduct the study which I then criticized, or was it someone else? I'm participating in a lot of threads at the moment so again, I'm sorry if we've been talking at cross purposes.

    But do you accept my main point then, that the study, whoever proposed it, tells us nothing because we can't rule out the possibility that some or all of the anecdotes are not true? Without judging anyone, to be sure.
     

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