What makes you unbelieve Crash ?

Grouping is a feature of random distributions.A million people play the lottery and only one of them gets to win. To that one guy, it's a pretty big deal, and if he's an average guy, he's got some problems that this money is going to totally take care of.So it's no surprise that it feels like an answered prayer to him. Winning the lottery seems so impossible that he can only conclude that it's the hand of God. But the significance changes when you look at those other 999 thousand folks who didn't win. Oh, they could have used the money too, don't you think?It's not a matter of how many of your prayers have been answered. It's a matter of how answered prayer follows the exact random distribution we would expect if "answered prayer" was just conincidence. Heck, it gets even better if you'll take "no" as an answer to prayer - then it's not even possible to falsify prayer. It's not that I wouldn't believe what was right in front of my face. But God's a pretty big deal, and so any entity claiming to be God is going to have to meet some pretty high standards. I don't entirely understand why you think I hold that position.

You can believe what you like, for whatever reasons you like. I've never told you otherwise. Believe in God, if you want. Why should I care?The reason I don't believe in your God is because it's obvious to me that it doesn't exist. The universe we live in doesn't look the way it would if the God in the Bible actually existed. Instead, it looks like one of two things is true - God acts like he doesn't exist and lets things happen at random; or else God doesn't exist at all.Since I don't think the first one is true, I conclude the second. Ultimately there's no way to distinguish between them - there's no test you could devise to substantiate the existence of a God who acts like he doesn't exist. It's just that I don't generally assume the existence of entities who could never be substantiated, so, ergo, atheism.

Yes. I've come to the conclusion that God doesn't exist.But like any reasonable person all my conclusions are tentative, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.The current evidence to me deomstrates that God doesn't exist. But concievably, evidence could exist that would convince me otherwise. So it's not like my mind couldn't be changed. It's just that I haven't seen anything that has, yet. No. But I ask you to compare your outcomes against the outcomes of the other 6 billion people on Earth, many of whom w might assume pray just as hard as you. And then consider the odds of your prayers being answered just by random. Say, for a given prayer, it's one in a million.Ok, one in a million odds. Sounds unlikely, right? But is it really so unreasonable to suggest that there's 999 thousand other people who prayed for the same kind of thing and didn't ever get it? Not to me, I guess. No, it'S saying "you won the lottery, yes, but it didn't take anything but random chance for that to happen. Somebody had to win; there's absolutely no significance to the fact that it was you."

Right, and when we talk about God, what I'm trying to show you is that you can only reach that conclusion through faulty reasoning - fallacious induction from evidence.The conclusion that the God of the Bible exists is not supported by the evidence. It's fine for you to believe in God. But you're mistaken if you state that the evidence supports that belief. That's generally what gets me into the conversation - not that you believe in God, but that you think there's evidence for God. There's not, and I think that's a mistake that deserves to be corrected. That's fine. I'm convinced that there are no logical fallacies in my induction from the evidence, so there's no reason for me to doubt that my conclusion is inaccurate. It would take new evidence to convicne me otherwise, and that's it. It's gotta take something new, something no one has ever seen before, to convince me that God exists. (Obviously that evidence would have other qualities besides being new.)

If God doesn't exist, but you reach the conclusion that he does, then you've done so through faulty reasoning.Obviously this isn't something I expect you just accept. I realize that this is a claim that I have to support and I do, every time I'm involved in a discussion of the existence of God. It's not so much that as it is the fact that any time someone has tried to substantiate the existence of their God, their proof has relied on one or more logical fallacies.I guess I'm waiting for the argument that substantiates God without being fallacious. What, I'm just supposed to fall in line just because everybody else is dumb enough to? You'll pardon me if maybe my standards for belief are a little higher than other peoples'. Is the answer ever "no"? If you'll accept that as an answer, how could a prayer ever be not answered?In other words your outcomes are exactly what I would expect if answered prayer was random.

No. But if God is supposed to be an entity that takes unique action in the world, then we can test for that. The only kind of God you can't test for is the one who acts like he doesn't exist. Is that what you expect of the God of the Bible?I can't prove that no God exists. But if you say that God takes action in the world, I can prove that your God doesn't exist, by showing you that no such action ever occurs. Your personal testimony is insufficient. Prayer studies show that prayer is not effective in casuing any sort of effect. The studies are designed to eliminate a very specific human problem - the same problem that you ave right now. It's called "response bias" and it's the tendancy to re-interpret events so that you're proven right no matter what actually happened. See? Response bias. You shouldn't have made an appeal to numbers, then.

I'm saying you don't even remember when prayers aren't answered because you have a considerable interest in being right about this. You forget the significance of prayers that aren't answered and magnify the significance of the ones that are. But many, many more are not. The prayer studies show that there's no effect to prayer in terms of healing more people than heal normally, without prayer.But, of course, you have the bulletproof explanation - God knows when he's being put to the test, and refuses to play. A perfectly unfalsifiable explanation - there's no way to prove God exists if he's content to act like he doesn't exist.Well, I'm not convinced. I'm not about to believe in a God that doesn't even have the decency to take action in a meaningful way.

But the test is people who genuinely need healing. They're not setting up fake cancer patients or burn victims or something - they're taking real patients with real needs, splitting them into two groups, and having people (unbeknownst to the patient) having a believer pray for them. They they keep track of recuperation rates.So what you're saying is that God refuses to help people who need it because somebody's keeping track. That seems petty to me. Because if it can't be falsified, there's no way to know if it's true or not. Falsifiability is the condition where it's possible to distinguish between a hypothesis being true and being false. If you can't do that then there's no way to know that it's true.When we say that something is falsifiable, we simply mean that it's possible to know if it's wrong or not. The people who are praying are believers, so that's clearly not the issue here. It's just that their prayers have no more effect on the patient than doing nothing at all, which is what you would expect if God doesn't exist.

That's generally because the rest of the rhetoric is something along the lines of "God is infinitely awesome," or "God can do anything," or "we should all be as thankful as we can be that God loves us so much," etc.In otherwords the rhetoric about God is universally and superlatively positive. Consider my comments an attempt to balance that out. I say provocative things about God to draw response, and to put into perspective the fact that believers accept (and are even thankful for) treatment from their God that would be characterized as abusive neglect and abandonment from any human. I don't, of course, believe that God actually is an abusive parent. I don't believe anything about God other than that he doesn't exist. Because the alternative mandates the belief in everything that can't be falsified, which includes the gods of all religions, every kind of mythical creature, all invisible, intangible entities, and a host of other ludicrous suggestions.If you go around believing that an unfalsifiable thing is true, then you have to do that for all unfalsifiable things. No. It's like this: Mike (or whoever) says "God has such-and-such nature." (I notice that you don't consider it arrogant to make statements about God that you agree with, like "God is good" or "God is infallible." Very inconsistent of you.) I respond with "if you were right about God, then such-and-such would be the case. Since it's not, I can conclude that the God that exists, if any, does not have the nature you say he does."I've never made the claim that I know that no kind of god exists. But given specific claims about what someone thinks God is like, I can determine if those claims are supported because there should be evidence that would exist if God actually had that quality.

Would you accept payment for your job on the same terms? "Well, Mr. Preach, you'll do this lame, labor-intensive job with no guarantee of payment. I mean, we tell people that we pay them, but only after they move to an undiscovered country so there's no chance they can come back and actually confirm payment. There's obviously no way for you to contact them to corroborate our guarantee.""Hrm, a life of suffering and only your word that the reward will actually happen. Sure, sign me up!"Look, it's fine for you to believe whatever you want to believe. I just don't find it reasonable to believe what you believe. There is of course no law that says your beliefs have to be reasonable.

Sounds a lot like the retirement fund the employees of Enron got - they worked hard for years and in the end, got nothing. What's your guarantee that the reward is there? I guess what it's done is present further confirmation of my thoughts on believers - they're more than happy to praise behavior in their God that in a human would constitute exploitation and abuse.

Yup, that's confirmation bias.I imagine that if she hadn't gotten any job, she would have taken that as an answer to her prayer, too.

Yeah, but I get those things too, and I'm not in your retirement plan. If everybody gets them, why do you conclude that when they happen specifically to you, it's not just coincidence like for everybody else, but evidence of some divine agency? Sounds like a double standard.

You possess an amazing facility for missing my point. It's actually my fault. I keep anticipating your arguments and refuting them before you've actually made them, which isn't fair to you and can be confusing. So I'll back up a step, and respond to this again: People of every religion, and of no religion, get those things to the same degree that people of your faith do. Why is it that Christians experience the same degree of good and bad circumstance that everyone else does?If we can go back to your retirement plan analogy, it's like this. You get an anonymous money order in the mail in an unmarked envelope. It's valid money but you don't know who it's from. You're in the retirement plan (The Jesus Trust) so you assume that it's from them.The problem with that theory is that when you ask around, it turns out everyone you know got one, including people who claim to be in another plan or in no plan at all. What's the explanation? How do you know that the plan you're in isn't a scam?

Your points were a response to an argument you misunderstood, so I figured they were irrelevant. I'm not sure why you think I'd waste our time responding to rebuttals to arguments I'm not making. I didn't see that you answered the main point at all, which I will summarize: How can you claim to be the recipient of the benefits of God if all humans, believers in God or not, get the same benefits?Tell me if I need to make that clearer. You can't claim that the good things that happen to you (or even the bad things) are the direct result of your faith if everybody, faith or no, recieves the same things.