Searching for GOD...

[Walt Zingmatilder]

If it doesn't stand to reason, it is probably wrong. If a rationale doesn't fit the data, we might need to rip it up and start again. We all use a combination of logic, common sense and personal experience like you say, so how come we arrive as such vastly different conclusions ? We are born into this world, blinking in bafflement and wonder; our parents give us a story which seems to make enough sense for the time being, they give us a sense of purpose and a sense of our place in the greater order of things.  That background story needs to be constantly revisited as we go through life accumulating new experience and insight but your rationale seems to me straight out of Sunday School, as if you've got stuck at that stage, never moving on.

The new experiences and insights I have accumulated since my childhood have actually increased my Christian faith, which is now far stronger than it ever was during Sunday School sessions.

Confirmation bias, Alan. You choose to ignore the fact that the same kind of experiences and insights as yours are felt by followers of other religions/gods.

But since you are of no religious persuasion it should be obvious to you Len you cannot assimilate experiences and insights like you can facts.

We cannot be therefore as authoritative on 'the same insights' as you are portraying.

Secondly I would say that eastern religions deliberately major in different insight types than the Abrahamic religions. Even between those there are difference. There is no resurrected Jesus to enter into a relationship with in all but one and I would imagine the love say a muslim might have for Mohammed might be based on his example of Islam or surrender is on a different basis than a Christians love for Christ.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

I see the obvious fallacy in the pavement example...

Good. I count that as progress of sorts - you seem to be aware of at least one logical fallacy.

...but I can't relate to a similar fallacy in any of my posts.

Oh dear. Your posts are littered with them - it's as simple matter to count them after all. Really, it is. Pick any one of the posts when you've attempted an argument and I'll dissect it for you - it'll be full of logical fallacies. In fact, take the "cracks in the pavement" post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy - more than once you've told us that you've made an "interventionist" prayer, and the thing you prayed for happened afterwards. You then concluded that the prayer was in fact "answered".

That's fallacious thinking.

Is any of this sinking in yet?

Anything?

They all make perfect sense to me.

No doubt. It's the "to me" that's the problem though: to other people who do understand logic and reason, your posts make no sense whatever.

Incidentally, don't feel too bad about this - you're not alone. Hope for example constructs his efforts almost entirely from logical fallacies, as does Alien to a lesser extent. Vlad on the other hand goes catastrophically off the rails for the one argument he does attempt (about philosophical naturalism) but also he just throws abuse at anything he doesn't like or comprehend (which is pretty much everything else). Sassy is incoherently rambling, while Corrie2 is content to cut and paste bits of a book she thinks to be "holy".

The theists I do have time for are the Wiggs's of this world - he clearly has a belief, but he seems to be content to keep it to himself rather than to attempt arguments for its objective truth for the rest of us too.

Like I said, you're not alone in the hopelessness of your thinking...

...but that doesn't stop it from being hopelessly wrong I'm afraid.

[Alan Burns]

You may not like what science is telling us about the sub-conscious controlling our actions but that doesn't mean it isn't the case. It is early days regarding that area of scientific research though but the indications are that that is how things work. You might just need to learn how to deal with that.

I am aware of the discovery that specific brain activity occurs seconds before we make apparently conscious decisions, but  the scientific deduction that sub conscious brain activity alone controls our apparently free will decisions is blatently incorrect.

No, I can't agree.

Participants of major sports such as F1 racing, football, boxing, tennis etc all have to make instant decisions based upon real time conscious awareness.  If brain activity needs to be induced seconds prior to implementing a conscious decision, there must me something outside the deterministic rules of science which induces it.

I'm afraid the idea of instant decision is 'blantantly incorrect' to use your phrase. We all have reaction times - and top sports men have generally better reactions times than the man on the street - but even so top F1 drivers have crashes and can't react in time. Sports men practice and practice so that the best reaction in a particular situation is programmed in - and they can predict what might happen from the developing evidence of what has built up to the event and be more prepared for that event. Have you heard of the phrase 'instinctive save' when goal keepers pull of close range blocks?

None of wht you say suggests the existence of something outside of the deterministic world.

The "blatantly incorrect" phrase was used to indicate that a wrong conclusion could be drawn from the experiments that show specific brain activity to occur seconds before an apparently free will choice is made.  I was illustrating the impossibility of there being a several second lag between brain activity and awareness of that brain activity in the case of free choices in situations such as active sports.  I concede that instinctive reactions to situations could induce a much faster response than a conscious free choice, but a goalkeeper may still have to choose between catching or punching the ball away.  It is difficult to see how every free choice we make could occur in our sub conscious brain activity.

[torridon]

I assume that my thought processes are controlled by whatever comprises my conscious awareness, and it is driven by whatever happens to be my will at the time.  The fact that conscious awareness and will are not definable in physical terms does not mean they do not exist.  The physical mechanism through which awareness and will operate is probably through quantum events which have no discernable cause because they are not driven by deterministic events.  I am fully aware that my will can change from moment to moment for no apparent reason other than it is what I want at the time.

You seem half way to recognising here that we are not free, in the full sense. You recognise here, that we have no control over our will. We form desires, and we try to act on them, but we are not free to choose which desires to form in the first place, and to try to claim such would imply a circularity.  Our will is just one manifestation of the underlying principle of cause and effect.

[Maeght]

The "blatantly incorrect" phrase was used to indicate that a wrong conclusion could be drawn from the experiments that show specific brain activity to occur seconds before an apparently free will choice is made.

Then it was incorrectly used.

I was illustrating the impossibility of there being a several second lag between brain activity and awareness of that brain activity in the case of free choices in situations such as active sports.

No, you were stating that it was impossible - which is incorrect.

I concede that instinctive reactions to situations could induce a much faster response than a conscious free choice, but a goalkeeper may still have to choose between catching or punching the ball away.  It is difficult to see how every free choice we make could occur in our sub conscious brain activity.

its not difficult at all, as I described. Most average people wouldn't stand a chance of making a save playing in goal but goalkeepers have specific skills such as a good reaction time and practice and practice to instintively judge what might happen as a situation develops. One of the keys to good goalkeeping is positioning - they don't just stand in the middle of the goal then instantly react flying around like superman, they get in the right spot and 'make themselves big' and often the ball just hits them because they have put themselves in the right place. The catching or punching option usually comes from crosses where there is more time for the response to be determined.

I think if you are going to invalidate the scientific evidence of the sub conscious controlling our apparent conscious decisions you're going to have to come up with a better argument than that.

[Alan Burns]

 - more than once you've told us that you've made an "interventionist" prayer, and the thing you prayed for happened afterwards. You then concluded that the prayer was in fact "answered".

That's fallacious thinking.

You have no way of knowing whether the "answer" to a prayer request occured through God's intervention or through chance events.  If you do not believe in God, you are inevitably biased towards the latter explanation, but there is do definitive way of proving this to be the case, unless you can prove that God does not exist.  It is not comparable with the cut and dried logic behind your "cracks in the pavement" example.

[Outrider]

But the idea of 'prayer works' is then defined naturalistically which is pointless in terms of the claim - there is no 'yes' here, it's simply that the people carrying out the experiments should no understanding of the philosophy of science as a method

No, the idea of something working is defined and measured - if there was no effect claimed there could be no investigation. If there had been a measurable success then we would have struggled, because prayer defies description.

The point is that the claim 'Prayer Works' claims measurable effects from supernatural mechanisms. We only need show the claimed effect is either non-existent or from other sources to disprove the claim, we don't need to understand anything about prayer.

If I threaten to shoot people with a water-pistol full of cursed water that will cause them to immediately die we don't need to understand the details of the curse to disprove the claim.

O.

[Outrider]

If it doesn't stand to reason, it is probably wrong. If a rationale doesn't fit the data, we might need to rip it up and start again. We all use a combination of logic, common sense and personal experience like you say, so how come we arrive as such vastly different conclusions ? We are born into this world, blinking in bafflement and wonder; our parents give us a story which seems to make enough sense for the time being, they give us a sense of purpose and a sense of our place in the greater order of things.  That background story needs to be constantly revisited as we go through life accumulating new experience and insight but your rationale seems to me straight out of Sunday School, as if you've got stuck at that stage, never moving on.

The new experiences and insights I have accumulated since my childhood have actually increased my Christian faith, which is now far stronger than it ever was during Sunday School sessions.

Confirmation bias, Alan. You choose to ignore the fact that the same kind of experiences and insights as yours are felt by followers of other religions/gods.

But since you are of no religious persuasion it should be obvious to you Len you cannot assimilate experiences and insights like you can facts.

We cannot be therefore as authoritative on 'the same insights' as you are portraying.

Secondly I would say that eastern religions deliberately major in different insight types than the Abrahamic religions. Even between those there are difference. There is no resurrected Jesus to enter into a relationship with in all but one and I would imagine the love say a muslim might have for Mohammed might be based on his example of Islam or surrender is on a different basis than a Christians love for Christ.

Can I frame this and put it up in the Tate under the title 'Special Pleading'?

O.

[Maeght]

You have no way of knowing whether the "answer" to a prayer request occured through God's intervention or through chance events.

Nor do you then.

[Outrider]

You have no way of knowing whether the "answer" to a prayer request occured through God's intervention or through chance events.  If you do not believe in God, you are inevitably biased towards the latter explanation, but there is do definitive way of proving this to be the case, unless you can prove that God does not exist.  It is not comparable with the cut and dried logic behind your "cracks in the pavement" example.

And because there is no purported mechanism by which prayer can be understood to operate, you have no way of knowing whether an individual prayer has been answered or not.

What we can do, though, is analyse large numbers of events to see if statistically prayer has an effect on the trends.

We've done that. It doesn't.

O.

[Rhiannon]

It's the morality of prayer that fascinates me. To believe that God would help and heal people in group A but not group B - babies, children, mothers in childbirth included - because they are or aren't in his 'club' is an obscenity. If it is true then God is obscene, not a God of love.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

You have no way of knowing whether the "answer" to a prayer request occured through God's intervention or through chance events.

And you have no idea whether my not stepping on the cracks in the pavement caused Spurs to win later that day. That's the problem - we each observe an event that follows another, and then just assume that the first was causal of the second.

Now it is of course possible that by chance we're both right in our causal attributions, but the evidence and logic is strongly against it: there's no process or method that takes us from A to B; there's no correlation between not stepping on the cracks/praying and the outcome other than the one anecdotal example each of us points to. What happens if we do each one, say, 1,000 times - are the results the same as they would be if neither had done our thing?; there's no means of eliminating alternative, naturalistic outcomes etc

In other words, a "the doctors had given up on little Timmy, I prayed for him, he got better, therefore prayer works" is precisely the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.       

If you do not believe in God, you are inevitably biased towards the latter explanation, but there is do definitive way of proving this to be the case, unless you can prove that God does not exist.  It is not comparable with the cut and dried logic behind your "cracks in the pavement" example.

If you don't believe in pavement crack avoidance as a means of changing the future, you are inevitably biased against that explanation but there's no definitive way of proving this to be the case, unless you can prove that not stepping on cracks in the pavement does not change future events.

Do you see the problem here? Not only is a prayer anecdote "comparable" with the crack avoidance hypothesis, it's precisely analogous. Any objection you raise to my dismissing prayer as causal of outcomes applies exactly to your dismissal of pavement crack avoidance as causal of outcomes. That's what post hoc ergo propter hoc means, and all it leaves you with is a faith belief. Just saying that B (little Timmy getting better/Spurs winning) followed A (prayer/avoiding pavement cracks) so A must have been causal of B is broken thinking.

And that's the problem - this is just one example of the fallacies you use routinely, which is why you give the rest of us no choice but to dismiss your attempts at argument out of hand. Avoid the fallacies, and then perhaps there'd be something to consider.   

 

[Rhiannon]

Spurs winning? I might need to reconsider the miracle thing...

[bluehillside Retd.]

Rhi,

Spurs winning? I might need to reconsider the miracle thing...

Yeah I know. I picked Spurs just because they happened to win yesterday, no other reason. I'm a Gooner me!

[Rhiannon]

Rhi,

Spurs winning? I might need to reconsider the miracle thing...

Yeah I know. I picked Spurs just because they happened to win yesterday, no other reason. I'm a Gooner me!

Ah, my commiserations. Still, my club enjoyed our opening day of the season. 

[Gonnagle]

Dear Blue,

Poor you!! Atheist and a Arsenal supporter, I will pray for you.

Gonnagle.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi Gonners,

Poor you!! Atheist and a Arsenal supporter, I will pray for you.

So kind! If ever I can reciprocate - dress in a grass skirt, bang some coconuts together, sing "I Should Be So Lucky" in Swahili, that kind of thing - just let me know 

[Alan Burns]

AB,

You have no way of knowing whether the "answer" to a prayer request occured through God's intervention or through chance events.

And you have no idea whether my not stepping on the cracks in the pavement caused Spurs to win later that day. That's the problem - we each observe an event that follows another, and then just assume that the first was causal of the second.

Now it is of course possible that by chance we're both right in our causal attributions, but the evidence and logic is strongly against it: there's no process or method that takes us from A to B; there's no correlation between not stepping on the cracks/praying and the outcome other than the one anecdotal example each of us points to. What happens if we do each one, say, 1,000 times - are the results the same as they would be if neither had done our thing?; there's no means of eliminating alternative, naturalistic outcomes etc

In other words, a "the doctors had given up on little Timmy, I prayed for him, he got better, therefore prayer works" is precisely the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.       

If you do not believe in God, you are inevitably biased towards the latter explanation, but there is do definitive way of proving this to be the case, unless you can prove that God does not exist.  It is not comparable with the cut and dried logic behind your "cracks in the pavement" example.

If you don't believe in pavement crack avoidance as a means of changing the future, you are inevitably biased against that explanation but there's no definitive way of proving this to be the case, unless you can prove that not stepping on cracks in the pavement does not change future events.

Do you see the problem here? Not only is a prayer anecdote "comparable" with the crack avoidance hypothesis, it's precisely analogous. Any objection you raise to my dismissing prayer as causal of outcomes applies exactly to your dismissal of pavement crack avoidance as causal of outcomes. That's what post hoc ergo propter hoc means, and all it leaves you with is a faith belief. Just saying that B (little Timmy getting better/Spurs winning) followed A (prayer/avoiding pavement cracks) so A must have been causal of B is broken thinking.

And that's the problem - this is just one example of the fallacies you use routinely, which is why you give the rest of us no choice but to dismiss your attempts at argument out of hand. Avoid the fallacies, and then perhaps there'd be something to consider.   

You have used a considerable amount of contrived logic to create a bizarre comparison between cracks in the pavement and answers to prayer.  The irony is that without your gifts of perception and intelligently driven free will you would never be able to contrive such a scenario.

I do not consider answers to prayer to be the foundation of my Christian faith - it is just a consequence that once you have faith, you realise that God can answer prayers.

People often ask why God is apparently selective in the prayers that get answered, and use this as an argument that God does not answer prayers, but that they are just random coincidences.

Does a parent always answer a child's request by giving the child anything that is requested?  The parent will listen to the child's request, then use their judgement on the best way to respond, which may not always be what the child wants.  Also, the request might me impossible to implement.  We, as a child of God, do not see the big picture.  I just have faith in God's love for us all, and know that every prayer will be answered.

[Rhiannon]

I read a good analogy this morning - some of us still carry round bottles of milk from our childhood even though the nourishment it used to give us went sour long ago.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

You have used a considerable amount of contrived logic to create a bizarre comparison between cracks in the pavement and answers to prayer.

There’s nothing “contrived” about it – I was merely explaining to you the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Sadly, it appears to have fallen upon deaf ears but it’s a fallacy nonetheless regardless of how you populate it – prayers or pavements, it makes no difference to the principle.

The irony is that without your gifts of perception and intelligently driven free will you would never be able to contrive such a scenario.

That’s not an irony, and it’s the appearance of “free will” as you think it to be for reasons that have been explained to you many times now but that you fail nonetheless to grasp.

I do not consider answers to prayer to be the foundation of my Christian faith - it is just a consequence that once you have faith, you realise that God can answer prayers.

Again, you miss the point. I do not suggest that “answers to prayers” are the foundation of your faith. That’s all you have though – personal faith. You can no more “realise” that a god can answer prayers than I can “realise” that pavements affect football scores. All that each of us is doing is deciding that something is true by applying bad reasoning to a sequence of events.   

People often ask why God is apparently selective in the prayers that get answered, and use this as an argument that God does not answer prayers, but that they are just random coincidences.

Sort of. What “people” actually do it to explain that the incidence of surprising outcomes after praying for them is exactly the same as it is when you don’t pray for them. So yes, “random co-incidences” is the default until and unless anyone can finally suggest a coherent reason to think otherwise.

It’s a secondary issue though to point out that a supposedly good god would in fact be a pretty scummy god if prayer actually worked – concerning himself with getting you the promotion you wanted for example rather than with curing the baby with cancer.

Does a parent always answer a child's request by giving the child anything that is requested?  The parent will listen to the child's request, then use their judgement on the best way to respond, which may not always be what the child wants.

That’s called “casuistry” – another example of bad reasoning. If you want to go with it nonetheless, what kind of parent would exercise his judgement to allow one child to win the school raffle, but the other not to be cured of a serious disease for example? Surely a good parent or god should grant his favours to do the most good rather than just according to the pattern you’d expect to see if there was no parent/god don’t you think?

Also, the request might me impossible to implement.

How can something be impossible for a god who can do anything he wants to do?

We, as a child of God, do not see the big picture.  I just have faith in God's love for us all, and know that every prayer will be answered.

First, clearly every prayer is not answered – people pray for lots of things that don’t happen.

Second, yes I know you have “faith”. The problem though is that’s all you have – which is fine for you personally, but you have no arguments of any kind to suggest that your faith beliefs are objectively true for anyone else too.

Third, you still have no basis to suggest that prayer works in the absence of any method to show that praying can be causal of outcomes. 

[floo]

I read a good analogy this morning - some of us still carry round bottles of milk from our childhood even though the nourishment it used to give us went sour long ago.

Not that we ever had milk bottles where I come from, but it is a very good analogy.

[Outrider]

The irony is that without your gifts of perception and intelligently driven free will you would never be able to contrive such a scenario.

Perception is not a 'gift', it's merely a trait. Even if you could come up with some viable concept of free will, there's nothing in the response to sensory awareness of phenomena that might require it.

I do not consider answers to prayer to be the foundation of my Christian faith - it is just a consequence that once you have faith, you realise that God can answer prayers.

There's still a huge leap, though, even if we were to accept the proposition of 'gods', from 'can' answer them to 'does' answer them.

People often ask why God is apparently selective in the prayers that get answered, and use this as an argument that God does not answer prayers, but that they are just random coincidences.

Not so much that they are random coincidences, per se, so much as when tested gods answering prayers turns out to be exactly as effective as random coincidence.

Does a parent always answer a child's request by giving the child anything that is requested?

No, but you can punch the parent, you can question the parent, you can know definitively when the parent as or hasn't answered the request.

The parent will listen to the child's request, then use their judgement on the best way to respond, which may not always be what the child wants.

But it will be  a response, a direct response that's manifestly apparent as a response. 'Answered prayers' are indistinguishable from 'gods work in mysterious ways' from 'shit happens' to 'nothing to see here, life goes on'.

O.

[Alan Burns]

Perception is not a 'gift', it's merely a trait. Even if you could come up with some viable concept of free will, there's nothing in the response to sensory awareness of phenomena that might require it.

But perception involves much more than a response to sensory inputs.  It is easy to see a scientific depiction of how sensory input data can induce responses through built in instinct and learnt experiences via specific reactions in the brain cells, but perception requires an awareness of what is going on, and this awareness is what I believe to be God's gift to us.  It is what makes us human.

[Alan Burns]

What we can do, though, is analyse large numbers of events to see if statistically prayer has an effect on the trends.

We've done that. It doesn't.

My personal prayers have never been tested for statistical analysys, but my own perception is that I have had prayers answered in abundance, getting much more than I asked for or expected.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

But perception involves much more than a response to sensory inputs.  It is easy to see a scientific depiction of how sensory input data can induce responses through built in instinct and learnt experiences via specific reacions in the brain cells, but perception requires an awareness of what is going on, and this awareness is what I believe to be God's gift to us.  It is what makes us human.

Do you want me to point out the fallacies at play here? Why would you think "awareness" isn't obtained from the bottom up, or that it's necessary to posit a god that's not needed for it to exist anyway and then to give it to us as a "gift", let alone a god for which there's neither coherent argument nor evidence of any kind?

To help you understand emergence, try this: the English language is a complicated thing isn't it - involved, data rich, rules orientated etc and yet there's no-one in charge to invent or regulate it. It's just emerged, and you wouldn't feel the need to invent a god to make it so. If you can accept that very complex properties like language can emerge from simpler component units, why then arbitrarily decide that it can't in respect of just one other property - consciousness?