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Author | Topic: designing a convincing prayer experiment | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Hi Stephen,
Thank you for yet another demonstration of your lack of scientific background:
No, Loehr was a scientist, and all his experiments were double-blinded. A double-blind test means that neither the experimenters nor the subjects know whether they're in the experimental group or the control group. In other words, a double-blind test only applies when sentient beings with awareness, like people, are involved, in order to protect against the placebo effect. Since Loehr's experimental subjects were plants, not people, and since plants aren't normally considered sentient, the experiment could only be single blind, where Loehr didn't know which plants he was praying for. Maintaining your history of inconsistency, you also change your story. In your opening post you say that Loehr did "kitchen table experiments". But as soon as someone inquires, suddenly these "kitchen table experiments" become scientifically rigorous "double-blind" experiments. Clearly you are once again making it up as you go along. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Faith and science are two different realms. Science tells me how to land on Mars, faith how to land in heaven. Stephen is arguing that faith is science and that his faith can tell him how to land on both Mars and heaven. This is patently ridiculous.
Your viewpoint is at odd with Stephen's, not mine. The enemy of evolution is not necessarily the friend of faith, and Stephen provides an excellent example by putting God to the test through scientific experimentation. This is aside from the fact that Stephen seems to bollix every attempt at seeming scientific, which was really my only point in the message you replied to. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
In any case, although the studies were done in a kitchen, he did do his best to insure that he wasn't fooling himself. So can we. Replication is required if you're being scientific. Loehr's experiments were never published in any peer-reviewed journal, so the possibility of replication doesn't even exist. Why can't such a great scientist as yourself use the term "double-blind" correctly, and why do you drop all scientific requirements for evidence and experimental results to instead accept anecdotal data? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
You still provide no hint of a scientific approach informing your opinions, and your unfamiliarity with science is made clear by your misusages of many scientific terms and concepts, like "double-blind" and "evidence".
Subjective experiences are not scientific. Message 162 of The best scientific method thread addresses this perhaps most pronounced deficiency of your approach to science. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Stephen ben Yeshua writes: That picture under your name keeps making more and more sense. Hey, don't get too personal, I'm one of the few here using an actual photograph! ![]() Seriously, let's keep this on an objective and scientific level. You're supposedly a scientist. How do you, as a scientist, justify your promotion of Loehr's non-scientific experiment as legitimate science (not to mention turning from legitimate discussion to ad hominems). If you truly want to define a persuasive prayer experiment, which the title you've chosen for this thread implies, then why not simply point to which of Loehr's methods have scientific potential and suggest them for inclusion in the experiment you're designing. Though, of course, actually designing an experiment would contradict what you just told Trixie, ie, that you don't test God anymore. Sigh, consistency is such a chore, isn't it? ![]() --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
You haven't answered Abshalom's question. Here it is again:
Abshalom in Message 37 writes: (1) Does that prove existence or even likelihood of a supreme god whom we successfully petitioned with prayer to have possitive effects on Group "A"; or (2) Does that prove existence or equal likelihood of an evil entity, or a trickster god like Pan, who finds it amusing or beneficial to his purposes to retard the seed germination and subsequent health of seedlings in Group "B"? And, of course, there are many other possibilities. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Stephen ben Yeshua writes: If the prayers are formed correctly, you separate out the various hypothetical gods, so that some become more likely to be the cause of whatever results you got, others less likely. You just have to write the prayer based on what each one, hypothetically, wants to hear. Where does the scientifically developed information about which prayers work with which Gods come from? And then please answer Abshalom's specific question about how you tell the difference between God helping A and Satan hindering B. --Percy [This message has been edited by Percy, 01-27-2004]
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Hi, Stephen!
If we're talking about scientific experiments, then you're not making any sense at all. I asked, "Where does the scientifically developed information about which prayers work with which Gods come from?" You answered:
1. Speculation, or any proposed self-description or other description of the hypothesized spirit being. Dreams, like the idea about benzene rings. Imagination, like the quantum ideas. There is nothing scientific whatsoever about this. It is completely subjective. Should we conclude that you have no scientific information for this?
2. You pray with and without the clause, "deliver us from the evil one." to the God, Jehovah, who is hypothesized to make the devil come or go. You also "curse" certain ones, asking Jehovah to make the devil mess with certain ones, a la Job. And where does this information come from? If your answer is the Bible, then surely you understand the Bible is not a scientific resource and so cannot be cited in scientific work. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Stephen ben Yeshua writes: Percy writes: There is nothing scientific whatsoever about this. It is completely subjective. Should we conclude that you have no scientific information for this? So, we throw out Benzene rings? Wavy light particles? C'mon Percy, this in nonsense. Benzene rings and wave/particle duality were not discovered using subjective Bayesianism. To the contrary, we have hard evidence of both. So, perhaps you can explain to us what is scientific about this:
1. Speculation, or any proposed self-description or other description of the hypothesized spirit being. Dreams, like the idea about benzene rings. Imagination, like the quantum ideas. And tell us where the information for this comes from:
2. You pray with and without the clause, "deliver us from the evil one." to the God, Jehovah, who is hypothesized to make the devil come or go. You also "curse" certain ones, asking Jehovah to make the devil mess with certain ones, a la Job. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Thanks for the reference. I had already found the link and read that passage, and I commented on a couple other portions in Message 170 of the The best scientific method thread.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Stephen ben Yeshua writes: Percy writes: So, perhaps you can explain to us what is scientific about this (discovery of benzene rings): It was the critical step in the discovery of benzene rings, which had been an insoluble problem, before the dream. You're confusing the source of inspiration with evidence. A scientist was able to interpret his data because of a dream, but we don't accept benzene rings because of the dream, but because of the evidence.
By the way, you apparently subscribe to a scientific method which does not allow anything from the Bible to be used in forming hypotheses or gathering data (?). I don't. For the Bible to be scientific it must be falsifiable. Are you willing to leave the Bible open to disproof? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Stephen ben Yeshua writes: We agree that it may help us interpret objective data that can be evidence for a theory. I thought that that's what I've been saying all along. It certainly is what I wanted to communicate. Maybe demons have been confusing the transmission. Maybe it has. Your theory is that demons exist. When asked for evidence supporting your theory, you provided only subjective evidence in the form of annecdotal stories, one personal and the rest from the Bible. If this is an example of your approach to developing theory, then it is severely flawed because of it's reliance upon subjective experience.
Of course the Bible is falsifiable. Well, the actual issue is whether the Bible can be considered a scientific resource, which means that not only must it be falsifiable, but its experiments must be replicable. In other words, we must be able to repeat the experiments that produced the evidence of demons in the Bible. You're going to have to expound on this a lot more, because the Bible is full of anecdotal stories, not descriptions of experiments. You *do* realize, I hope, that many stories in the Bible have already been falsified, for example chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, and the Noachic flood, at least in any global sense. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
Hi Stephen,
This is also a reply to your Message 153 in the History's Greatest Holocaust Via Atheistic Ideology thread. I'm trying to centralize discussion on this topic into a fewer number of threads, perhaps eventually just one. So, quoting from that other message:
Stephen ben Yeshua in Message 153 writes: Percy writes: For example, in other posts you conclude the existence of demons... You'll have to cite a post where I conclude anything... And yet a mere 6 hours earlier in your above post you wrote:
Ignoring my repeated statements that prayer studies that use anti-demonic prayers, such as are prayed by Christians praying the Lord's prayer, as well as Bible Code studies, Theomatics, and studies by those testing the orthodox theology hypothesis on NDEs, all confirm the idea that demons exist... One may express the same thought with many different words, and you and I have said the same thing. You're quibbling about non-existent word distinctions to deflect attention from the inherent contradictions in your position. Since you prefer the term "confirmed", I can accurately say you believe the hypothesis that demons exist has been confirmed by prayer studies and the Bible. There is nothing scientific about this position, and it doesn't follow HD. Your arguments tend to have at least one flaw. Here I enumerate your arguments and identify the flaws:
You're inability to make correct statements or reason logically is why we know you're no scientist. While demons may be the cause of your disability, there is no evidence of demons, and it's much more likely that you're just another impassioned Christian blinded by overzealous faith. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 23190 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.6 |
You already replied to this, see Message 224, which was your reply to Message 214 of the same thread, which was a copy I posted after I noticed you missed the original.
--Percy [This message has been edited by Percy, 02-18-2004]
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