The Antecedent Probability Principle, the Proportional Principle & Carl Sagan

Then do put me right. Give me an example of a miracle that is worthy or capable of rational investigation.

This is from the OP. So is it your postion that miracles cannot exist?Is it also your position that if the SN exists it cannot defy natural laws?Do you claim that miracles cannot exist because the SN does not exist?

Since it's your thread, can you define miracle before I give an example?I have prayed for healing for myself before and I was healed. Is that a miracle?

The evidence is in the Wiki. I can do no more for you than that.But - once again - it's not my position that the pursuit of knowledge about our world needs to be rational (although in the case of String Theory, it clearly is); my position is that any claims made about our world must be evidence based in order for us to rationally accept them.So if String Theory ever produces anything, those that know about these things will demand evidence and eventually proof. If it can not mach that standard, it will not be accepted as fact - it will remain a hypothesis.
(It's clearly not a theory at the moment - that's just loose language.)

No. You need to read my next sentence."I'm sure this begs the question. Maybe someone who has properly studied this can take the argument further?"It's my BELIEF that miracles do NOT exist. My belief can be changed by the facts. That would require a miracle to be proven. Again No. By definition, SN must defy natural laws. It's my BELIEF that miracles do NOT exist. My belief can be changed by the facts. That would require a miracle to be proven.

I'm happy with any normal definition. Try this one:miracle |ˈmirikəl|
noun
a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency: the miracle of rising from the grave. Recovery from illness is not miraculous - it's a known and largely understood biological process. Had you been dead and buried for a month and THEN healed yourself, I'd be more interested.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

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Unevidenced claims is what we are comparing.

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Answering the question would require you to specify the claims that you are talking about. Is there any good reason why you didn't do that ?

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Is dismissing something like miracles irrational to do because at the moment there is insufficiant evidence to suggest they may occur?

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Is dismissing string theory at the moment irrational because there is insufficiant evidence to suggest that it is the answer to the universe?

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Dismissing specific miracle claims with very weak evidence (at best) seems to be rational. Dismissing a promising theory just because it has yet to accumulate sufficient evidence for acceptance does not seem to be rational.

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Unevidenced ones based on insufficiant evidence.

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And those beliefs are ?Quite frankly it seems to me that rejecting the stories of miraculous milk-drinking cow statues of some years back is quite different from rejecting String Theory. But you seem to think otherwise. Want to say why ? Or maybe accept that it is a good idea to clarify what you are talking about, instead of evading the question?

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I don't believe it's irrational to investigate miracles when other unevidenced claims are also being investigated.

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That really depends on what you mean by unevidenced, and the cost and the likelihood of an investigation producing useful results (positive or negative) is an obvious factor, too. For instance it would be a waste of time and money to mount a full scale expedition to investigate Ron Wyatt's claims of chariot wheels in the Gulf of Aqaba.However, and this is the really important point - INVESTIGATION IS NOT BELIEF. So that is just a side issue....Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

You mentioned bringing back people from the dead. How about an example of that?

I didn't say it was your position. But we seem to agree that Einstein's pursuit was rationale. But given that you've admitted to knowing nothing at all about that pursuit, I don't understand how you reached your conclusion. In short your personal conclusion is not evidence based.In any event, I'm simply attempting to use your metric to make that determination. Einstein understood his near decade long pursuit to be rational endeavor. Why cannot I use your proposition to investigate Einstein's belief? Really?? Then who the heck posted this sentence in this very thread??From Message 34
I'm finding it difficult to figure out what your position is. You state a belief that the pursuit of string theory is rational because it is evidence based, and it later turns out that you have no idea about the subject at all. If it isn't too meta for me to ask, how did you form that belief without looking at the evidence?I think I'm going to lurk for a while. I find the discussion interesting, but my part in the discussion does not seem to be very productive.

I doubt this will help, because I still have no idea what you're trying to get at but:As a general principle, anybody doing research into the nature of our world (which I assumed was what we were talking about and which I also assume includes Einstein and String Theory) - will be using rational, evidence based approaches. If they aren't then they can never convince another scientist of their results.(And this last is why I don't need to understand either String Theory or Einstein's methods myself to be able to say that they are rational - because they are supported by the scientific community as legitimate for their purposes)On the other hand our man with the sponge on a stick, was not using any kind of rational process - even though, by a loose definition, he could conceivably be said to be searching for knowledge.But I really don't care about the pursuit of the knowledge, it doesn't matter a damn whether Einstein was doing what Sponge on Stick man is doing or whether String Theory physicists are secretly using crystal balls to get their answers. It's the answers themselves that matter.If Einstein had said that E=MC^2 arrived as a message from god, we'd demand evidence of it's truth before we accepted it. Of course that evidence would, in the main, be in the form of his methodology - in Dr A's words, he would be required to show his workings.If you want to move this forward, you're going to have to say why you think Einsteins methods and beliefs matter to whether we can accept claims without sufficient evidence.

Do you know whether string theory has produced any answers?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

No.