[quote]therajraj wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
If God were a natural law and not a conscious being, id would be testable. But your dealing with consciousness and presumable dealing with something that doesn’t want to play a silly game. You would have to be able to control God as a variable and by definition alone, that is impossible. I guarantee every time you try to quantify pray like that, you will not only fail but I am pretty sure you’ll get some messed up results. People don’t like being treated like idiots and God isn’t much for it either. He’s not a vending machine. You don’t insert 50 Our Father’s and out comes a fishing pole.
Prayer works for me. He answers my prayers, I can’t prove it to you, but I don’t care either. I know it’s true.[/quote]
Well you can read through this if you’d like.
Apparently praying for medical patients doesn’t work. Most studies that aren’t found to be fraudulent end up failing. By the way this study was funded by Christians.
I thought you all you needed was the faith of a mustard seed?
[quote]pat wrote:
Really? Even if it disappears instantly? What scientific probability allows for instant cures?
You really need to bring up a specific example. Just saying 'miracles ain’t true ‘cause science says so’ is not compelling. Bring up a specific example if you wish.
I usually don’t bring up the case of miracles because they are hard to prove over a forum. The way to do such a thing properly is to both simultaneously experience the miracle.[/quote]
Spontaneous remission occurs at a rate on par with it’s historical percentage. The rate itself is dependent on the disease of course.
Lemme guess, god only has interest in spontaneously curing x% of each disease and likes to keep it relatively constant?
Available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can cure cancer or any other disease. Even the “miraculous” cures at the French shrine of Lourdes, after careful study by the Catholic Church, do not outnumber the historical percentage of spontaneous remissions seen among people with cancer.
[quote]pat wrote:
What about correct recollection of things occurring outside their local. Say when somebody ‘sees’ what another person is doing and where, when they had no way of knowing that becuase their clinically dead? In other words how do you account for people who saw their children playing somewhere else or recalling things that were occurring somewhere else while they were dead?
I can see the ‘it’s all in your head’ argument when it comes to non-verifiable phenomenon, but when it comes to experiencing verifiable things they had no way of knowing, then it’s a bigger problem to say that. [/quote]
I’ve never heard of that. Is this a common occurrence? What I mentioned about seeing imagery occurs often.
[quote]pat wrote:
That’s not the soul, that’s the personality. What makes you think that soul and personality are related?
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If you think the soul is piloting the body then it should be who you are and thus your personality.
Are you saying the soul isn’t who you are and doesn’t contains all your personality traits?
[quote]pat wrote:
Man is special. That has nothing to do with creatures else where. If there is life somewhere else, we’ll never know it. The reason is time. The window of time in which life has existed on Earth is very small. Since you’d have to travel vast distances that even takes light thousands of years to travel, the chances of you reaching a place that may have life, right now, is nil. By the time you got there, life there may be extinct. There is a very small amount of time that even life here will be able to exist. This planet will not be hospitable to life as we know it for very long.
But, we are very narrow minded about our view of life. For all we know a rock could be alive, life can come in the form of a vapor or mist. Life can be a cloud of dust. We only think of life as biological, but it can be anything.[/quote]
Whether we can ever contact other intelligent life does not speak to the probability of there being intelligent life.
[quote]pat wrote:
It’s impossible, period. When I say nothing, I mean complete absence. Nothing doesn’t exist, something that doesn’t exist, can’t do anything. Most people see ‘nothing’ as ‘very little’. For instance, many people would claim a vacuum is nothing. But a vacuum is something, it occupies space, occurs in time and if you put something in a vacuum, the vacuum will act on it. So a vacuum is a something not nothing.[/quote]
We don’t have a ‘nothing’ to test whether something cannot come from nothing. If we don’t have ‘nothing’, how can you conclusively say something can’t come from nothing? You can’t.
[quote]pat wrote:
A complete absence of all properties. ← Technically, you cannot really define ‘nothing’ because to define it is to make it something. But as close as we can get is not having any properties at all.
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So if we can’t assess nothing because we do not have nothing, how can you conclusively say something cannot come from nothing?
[quote]pat wrote:
That highly fallible science is the only thing that tells us the truth about existence? No. Or are you saying you don’t believe in science?
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It’s strange to put your faith in science because it regularly changes and things get disproven? Oh please. Have you ever been to a doctor, do you eat food, are you aware we put a man on the moon, do you wear glasses? All these things are science in action. There is good reason to rely on the findings of science and you know it. Secondly, as we progress, the overturning of long standing scientific models decreases greatly. The chances of us one day overturning the theory of gravity or finding out our understanding is very wrong for instance, is close to none.
There isn’t a problem with science, it’s with you. You’re expecting firm, true, authoritative answers to questions because that’s what religion offers. Religion is unchanging, it says “god did it!” and that’s all you ever need to know.
This need, this intense curiosity we have with not knowing is what drive scientists to find answers. Scientists are ever trying to approach that truth, but we’ve come to understand with our failings and our limited knowledge that all science is tentative. They aren’t absolute truths. Your religious mindset has made you expect to get absolute answers because that’s what your religion tries to give you. I never understood why the answer “I don’t know” is so uncomfortable for some theists. As if not having the answer to everything somehow means science falls short.
Everything in science comes with an asterisk beside it that says: based on the best and most current data available. Tell me something pat, doesn’t this asterisk come along any statement of fact you make to other people? Therefore, is it reasonable to expect a statement from a scientist to not come with such a caveat?
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Actually, Newton’s theory of gravity had some issues that Einstein later ironed out. It was an imperfect model based on observations of gravity’s effect and as more data and other brilliant people came along, it was later modified. Gravity still works the same as it did millions of years ago, the only thing that changed was our model for understanding it.
Bare in mind that science works according to certain axioms. What they are can vary depending on the field and the experimental design. One is that the physical universe can be studied. This requires a physical existence that’s observable, changes, and can be known to at least some degree. You can’t put these axioms through a scientific test.
