[quote]pat wrote:
The New York times? Really? So they say the prayers of strangers don’t work? Whatever. Again, you are trying to play a conscious being for a fool. He ain’t going to play. What so hard to understand about that? Your dealing with a conscious being. There is one imporatant variable you cannot control in that experiment, God.
What your telling me here, is God doesn’t act like you think he should therefore he does not exist.
I mean the whole idea is so stupid it laughable. You’re trying to force God’s hand. His hand won’t be forced. You can’t measure prayer. That whole idea is absolutely nuts. You cannot control God, therefore you cannot measure him with science… It’s like trying to heard cats.
To think that you can control God as a scientific variable may be the dumbest thing I have heard yet by atheists? He doesn’t play games.
Conscious being. He is a conscious being. You cannot control that.
Man can’t even control wives, you think you can control God? You think your doing an experiment on God? He may be doing an experiment on you instead.
There is only one way to test is prayer works and that to do it yourself. It’s a personal thing, not a public thing. There is nothing you can do about that. It cannot and never will be measurable. Science is very, very limited is scope and cannot measure the metaphysical.[/quote]
There are many studies, I just posted one that was recent, on a topic that was interesting (healing) and funded by Christians. If you want to hold the position that science cannot demonstrate prayer that’s up to you. But to a rational mind, if god intervenes in the physical world as you say, that should be demonstrable. Otherwise, believing god answers prayers is an irrational position.
[quote]pat wrote:
But that doesn’t mean those cure didn’t happen. Tell me how that proves nobody was miraculously healed. Do you know every instance of miraculous healing? And therefore you know they are all lies?[/quote]
I can’t prove to you to an absolute certainty they weren’t miracles. However based on the evidence, spontaneous remission occurs in nature and occurs at a relatively constant rate.
[quote]pat wrote:
Why don’t you ask the people who were cured? They’ll tell you. [/quote]
And so will people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. They’ll tell you about their account and you’ll find striking similarities between completely different alien abduction accounts.
Do you believe these people were abducted by aliens as well?
[quote]pat wrote:
You know why miracles are rare? Because if they were common, they wouldn’t be miracles.
[/quote]
They are rare because our knowledge has advanced and we can better explain occurrences within the natural world.
[quote]pat wrote:
Yes, from those whom I have read about NDE’s, many report things they could not have possibly known from the place they were. They see people and things, where they are at and what they are doing. You cannot chalk that up to being in your head.
[/quote]
I’ll have to look into that
[quote]pat wrote:
The soul is not the personality at all. I don’t know how people even come up with that? What does personality have to do with soul? [/quote]
What exactly is the soul to you then? If the soul is what lives on after you die and it does not contain who you are (your personality) what does it contain?
[quote]pat wrote:
And it what I am trying to say is it does not matter if there is intelligent life or not. It says nothing about us, or God.
If there is intelligent life anywhere else we’ll never know it. But it doesn’t matter if there is. Why couldn’t there be other intelligent life and God still exists. Shouldn’t an all powerful being create more that one intelligent life form if he wanted to? [/quote]
If there’s intelligent life out there, why would that make us special and why god create us in his image? Why wouldn’t he create himself in a more intelligent life’s image?
Again I’m not saying this proves there is no god, but I consider it nudging us into that direction.
[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:
I can, nothing can’t yield anything because it does not exist. Nothing doesn’t exist literally. Something that does not exist cannot yield anything.
If you think it’s even remotely possible, you just haven’t really thought about it. Think about what nothing is, it’s self evident that it cannot do anything because it does not exist.
I can conclusively say that something cannot come from nothing. It’s a transcendental conclusive unalterable truth that is absolute in every way.
[/quote]
No it’s not.
You cannot say to an absolute certainty something cannot come from nothing. I’m not talking about logic based on probability, I’m talking about syllogistic logic. I will admit it’s probably true, but it’s not an absolute certainty.
[quote]pat wrote:
I didn’t say science isn’t useful. I use and love science very much, but I understand what it is and it’s limits. You think it holds the key to everything, but it doesn’t. It is a very limited information set. That’s what you don’t understand. Science, how ever useful it is to us, really tells us very little about the world, the universe and existence itself. Most of it is just guesses. Limited guesses on a limited information set. Science is indeed a wonderful thing, but it’s limited. [/quote]
It’s not “just guesses”.
That is absurd.
[quote]pat wrote:
This is what I mean when I say you need to look at what science really is. Do you know what science wholly relies on? Logic. Without logic, science is dead. Can you measure logic? No. Logic is the measure. When you understand that, you know a whole lot more about the world than you get from the news paper.[/quote]
Great and beliefs not based on evidence, reason or logic are unjustifiable since they have no basis.
