Just a question...

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It's not fair because Creationism is biased, and not science.

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Well, that's not strictly accurate.Both are biased.Creationism is biased in favor of a preconceived conclusion found in a 2000 year old religious book.Science is biased in favor of the evidence as observed.

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I then noticed about 10 people responding to his posts, which is a very typical occurrence at EvC for anyone espousing Christian, conservative, or creationist views.

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Neither Purpledawn and LindaLou are Christian, conservative, or creationists.They do, however, get "piled on" when they espouse nonsense in the form of bad arguments for poltergeists, bigfoot, and quack alternative health practices.Bad arguments, inaccuracies or misrepresentations get pounced upon, no matter who they come from.

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I'm past doubting, jar, thanks be to God, but I know many others are not (yet) so blessed.

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If you are "past doubting" then you are past learning.You are doomed to stagnate in a dead belief.How sad and wasteful.

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Yes, I am "past learning" about the existence of God in that I have sufficient empirical evidence of my own to satisfy all previous doubt, and I have now put that question aside.

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I strongly suspect that you don't actually have emprirical evidence, but subjective evidence.Meaning, you don't have evidence for the existence of God that is;1) falsifiable, and
2) not falsified.

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I couldn't predict what the next logical event should be, but when each new event occurred, the sense of it became clear in relation to previous ones in the sequence. There was a kind of elegance about it that was marvelous.

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That's a classic post-hoc fallacy, plue selective thinking; source

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For example, if my series of events were, let's say, a series of paint strokes, and each stroke appeared at random, but together they finally culminated in a flawlessly executed portrait of a woman, let's say the Mona Lisa, then we would be discussing the mysterious creation of a marvelous piece of art, not a classic logical fallacy.

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You wrote:

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I couldn't predict what the next logical event should be, but when each new event occurred, the sense of it became clear in relation to previous ones in the sequence. There was a kind of elegance about it that was marvelous.

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You clearly say here that the "sense" of each unpredictable event became clear to you only after looking back at the previous sequence of events.Such a scenario is pretty much guaranteed to be rife with bias, since the further along you get, the less likely you are to notice when things don't make sense.We humans are hard wired to see patterns, connections, and meaning in and between events and concepts; so much so that we are very, very prone to seeing them when they aren't really there. Numerology comes to mind here.Most of us can quite easily look back at our long or short term lives and make connections between unpredictable events that, in retrospect or even as they happen, seem amazing.But, even if a long series of amazing events happened to you, so seamless as to be described as elegant, why on Earth does that indicate the existence of God?Doesn't that seem rather self-centered?

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Suppose, just prior to the paint strokes occurring (as described in the previous example), you had been prompted (say, by a "still, small voice") to answer the question, "What is your favorite portrait?" and you had answered unequivocally, "the Mona Lisa...THAT is my favorite portrait!" and then, suddenly, the Mona Lisa portrait mysteriously appeared only hours later, what would you say? Would you describe THAT as self-centered?

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Why are you talking about a painting? What does that have to do with anything, unless it is the very thing that happened to you?You claimed that you had no way of predicting what was coming next, but a half-finished portrait provides some pretty good clues about what will appear next. If the nose is there, for example, you have a pretty good chance of predicting where the eyes and mouth are going to be.

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It's pointless to discuss this thing any further when I have already stated repeatedly that I wasn't trying to convince anyone,

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Just so you know...What you walk into a room of science-minded people and say "I've got emprirical evidence for the existence of God" (with no quotes around that word), don't be surprised that they challenge you.Furthermore, when you tell them, "Well, I don't mean "empirical" the way scientists mean it, but in my own personal way.", you should also expect some discussion of that.

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That was the most ridiculous thing you've ever said.

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Well that was a completely meaningless, worthless statment unless you take the trouble to explain why you think it was the most ridiculous thing I've ever written.

I think crash was paraphrasing one of my favorite Feynman quotes:“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”The most difficult bias to detect is bias we ourselves have.This makes sense, since if we could spot our own biases, they wouldn't be biases anymore.Individual bias is one of the things the scientific method corrects for.

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bias: A bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective.

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Yes.Science is biased in favor of empirical evidence.That's obvious, isn't it?I think you are getting caught up in the common misconception that bias is always a bad thing, which is isn't, of course.I am, for example, biased in favor of ethical business practices as opposed to unethical practices.

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Mator said, back in message 61 "Science is biased in favor of the evidence as observed. "

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The evidence as obsevered is unbiased.

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Evidence itself isn't biased. Evidence are just events or facts that are what they are.It is only subsequent conclusions drawn from the evidence, or the way the evidence was gathered or analysed that can be biased.When comparing "different ways of knowing about reality" as LindaLou had put it, it is very clear that science is biased in favor of the evidence when determining what we know. This is in contrast to philosophy or religion, which use sophistry of revelation to claim they know something about reality.Again, bias isn't always a negative thing. I am biased in favor of strong flavors as opposed to delicate ones, for example. Is that bad?

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I still say, you cannot say, science is biased on unbiased evidence.

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Did you mean "based" on unbiased evidence?If so, then you're wrong, I think. Evidence itself has no bias. Evidence is just the facts. It is things like the length of a tail, the structure of a molecule, the height of a sine wave. The measurement, interpretation, or method of gathering of that evidence, for example, can be biased, though.

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The evidence is the root, and if that is unbiased, then so is science.

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I agree that evidence is the root, but no evidence is ever biased.Bias is what happens when people try to describe nature. Nature is the evidence.If you don't agree, then perhaps you can explain to me how evidence itself, rather than the measurement or interpretation of that evidence, can be biased.How can a sine wave or molecule be biased?

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Remember, science is only as good as us, and if we were to find a better way of doing science tomorrow, we would do it, so science itself is not biased on anything.

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Sure it is.Science is biased in favor of empirical evidence. This is a good bias for it to have. Remember, science did not always have such a strong bias in favor of empiricism. It used to allow all sorts of religious and social "evidence".Creationism, by contrast, is biased in favor of revelation. This is fine for religion but terrible for making discoveries about the natural world.

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Science can adapt much better BASED on unbiased evidence over things like religion, and your taste buds, which change over time.

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Please explain how evidence itself can be biased.

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And I wouldn't use the word biased the way you used it to describe what flavors you like. I think that is an incorrect way of using the word.

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I know you think that.

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Bias is usually used to describe an unfair, or subjective view on things, not what flavors you like.

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And that is an incorrect, or at least incomplete and limited, definition of bias. This is a short article from the Skeptical Inquirer that explains a little about "good" and "bad" bias.

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You just like them, you are not biased towards them.

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That's bias, riverrat.

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Thats just the way I see it, and reading the definition in wikipedia kind of confirms that for me.

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Well, the Wikipedia definition isn't a particularly good one, I'm afraid.Edited by nator, : No reason given.Edited by nator, : No reason given.

If you had said the same thing as Percy, the same way he said it, I would have fallen over in a dead faint.