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Author | Topic: Evidence for the Supernatural | |||||||||||||||||||||||
nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: So, basically, everything that happens might be supernatural, and it's up to the individual to decide if it was or not? So, considering that people can convince themselves of just about anything if they want to, there's no real way to tell the difference.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: You are right, but the issue here is, are these events actually happening repeatedly at a rate which is greater than chance would predict or do people just remember the "hits" and disregard the "misses"? It has long been understood that the latter is much more likely the case. This and other normal tendencies for humans to recognize patterns and cause and effect relationships can lead us down the garden path into thinking that "something is going on" when there really isn't. That's why the scientific method is such a powerful tool. It is specifically designed to compensate for and eliminate many of these natural human tendencies to make connections when there really aren't any. On the other hand, maybe God is punishing your mom by giving her a lot of back pain. Maybe the closeness and bonding she would have experienced with the rest of the office staff had her back gone out and they had had to take her to the hospital would have been a truly great experience, but God denied all of them that by making the files easily accessable. See how easy it is to pick what situations you would like God to be responsible for and which ones you don't?
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: So, are you saying that nobody knows anything and all perceptions and versions of reality are to be considered equal? So, the 10 who say they are Elvis really might all be Elvis, and that this is equally likely as all ten of them being crazy?
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
bump.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
bump.
Truthlover?
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
bump
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
bump
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Hi TL,
Yep, you were right about what I was interested in you responding to, and to be frank, I like reading what you write a great deal, so I was interested in what YOU had to say.
quote: Very true. However, this is not really how you began the thread. You began by ststing what happened to your Mom that day in the office, and saying that a lot of such occurrences add up to something significant, even so significant that it may start to be admissable in court. That's making a claim that you believe you can demonstrate the actions of God in reality. Belief and subjective feelings inside I have no qualms with. It's the former claim of yours and the like that must be rigorously examined.
quote: Oh, I think I would have better odds than that.
quote: Exactly true.
quote: It's not so much about the odds as it is about your selective memory. You remember the "hits" and disregard the "misses". Or, you attribute the good things or powerful things that happen to you to God's intervention and the mundane urge you had to scratch your backside you attribute to nothing at all. Or maybe you attribute it to forgetting to put the fabric softener in the wash.
quote: You don't have to be unstable to be vulnerable to fallacies. In fact, the smarter you are, the easier you can convince yourself, because smarter people are better at recognizing and making connections. Look, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm just making the point that the experiences that you have had are meaningful to you because of the connections you made to your emotions, with your very natural and human selective memory, etc. We ALL do this, all the time. It's just that when you start claiming that you have something that would hold up in a court of law, well, I'm just going to grill you on it, you know? In closing, I'd like to say that I think that doubt, in particular, self-doubt about what one knows is the best path to truth and true knowledge. ------------------"Evolution is a 'theory', just like gravity. If you don't like it, go jump off a bridge."
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Wow, a journal? That's really cool, TL.
Please, though, you don't actually have to prove anything to me at all. I don't want to, in a sense, "make" you do more work or take up more of your time than you really want to donate here. I'd be interested in reading it, although I do have to say that when you say that you are "good at noticing the misses", you are kind of missing my point. How are you going to attend to the misses if a "miss" is something, in many cases, a non-event? What does a non-coincidence look like? That's why you need to pick a very specific prediction or thing to happen or not happen by a certain time and see what happens, preferably judged and recorded by a third party. I know this probably sounds nitpicky and tedious to you, but it's how we figure out if things are happening in reality or not. And hey, don't worry about taking a while to answer. I was "bumping" the thread as much to remind myself to not forget about it. Thanks.
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