Who won the Collins-Dawkins Debate?

You didn't provide a link to the actual debate, and that may have helped keep people away. It turns out the "debate" was actually an article by Time Magazine's David van Biema about a discussion with Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins. The article was titled God vs. Science. There's a lot of preliminary introduction by Biema, and the actual discussion with Dawkins and Collins doesn't begin until page 3.While Dawkins says a fair amount that I can agree with when he writes in isolation, his tone is always a problem, and when he speaks to Christians his approach is absolutist, boorish, confrontational, and ultimately just plain unconstructive and unhelpful.--Percy

Typical British understatement, that was a hoot! Oh, wait a minute, you're from Oregon.Richard Dawkins has more courage than I ever would have guessed for going on TV with that comedian.--Percy

The Colbert Report is a show on Comedy Central. His show is all comedy, he doesn't do real debate. Check out his website (The Colbert Report) and you'll see some clips from last night's show and get the idea. The third clip is an interview with Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, another very serious guy with a serious point to make, and he gets the same treatment as Dawkins. Every guest on The Colbert Report gets treated this way. They know that when they come on.The 4th clip from last night begins with another real hoot: "Everyone who knows me knows I'm no fan of scientists. Anyone who dedicates their life to searching for an answer other than 'God did it' is no friend of mine."There doesn't appear to be a link to any audio or video from the Collins/Dawkins debate that is the subject of this thread.--Percy

Those who lose their sight and never regain it are just as often the subject of heartfelt prayers.--Percy

You cited the story of your nephew regaining his sight as evidence that there is more out there than meets the eye while ignoring that there are as many stories on the negative side of ledger. There may indeed be more out there than meets the eye, but one doesn't make a case by cherry picking positive evidence.As has already been noted, you're picking which evidence you're paying attention to. For example, you don't say anything about the original infection being the result of insufficient prayer, or about the unfairness of a 2-year old being singled out for suffering.There are always ways in which the evidence can be reconciled with a omnipotent and beneficent God. You can say God works in mysterious ways, how could we ever know God's true purpose. Or you could say that God allows free will, so how could God deny the bacteria the opportunity to infect yet another victim. There are probably numerous ways the existence of evil in the presence of a omnipotent and beneficent God is explained.But if you pose the question differently, if you instead ask whether it is reasonable to conclude from things like 2-year olds going blind that there is a loving, caring and beneficent God at work, you would say no, it is not.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Change modifiers of God.Edited by Percy, : Typo.

That's just a flip dismissal of a very important point. The human foibles that Schraf listed are the same ones that the collective enterprise of science is designed to protect against. Understanding how our universe really works requires the elimination of things like confirmation bias, wishful thinking and selective thinking, and approaching the world scientifically leads to understandings that hold for everyone, such as how gravity and light work and so forth.If you instead fail to eliminate these types of thinking then you'll never arrive at consensus viewpoints. You'll instead end up with fragmentation into many differently believing groups, which is just what we see with the tens of religions and hundreds of sects. Such thinking is what makes it possible for charlatans like John Edward to dupe the public.--Percy

Yes. Logic. Discarding contrary evidence is the antithesis of rational thought. This shouldn't have to be explained, so I won't try. If you want to say that your beliefs are based upon faith, I have no problem with that. But if you want to claim that there is a rational foundation for your beliefs, then the argument put forth in your message is not rational.Consider this question: How would you tell the difference between a world where there is an omniscient caring God and one in which there isn't?--Percy

It was flip and and it was a dismissal, because Schraf's definitions were not the point. The point was that these human foibles that obstruct rational thought lead to erroneous conclusions, and these foibles are the very ones that the scientific process addresses. The scientific process recognizes that people in the aggregate can construct much more rational conclusions than individuals. Schraf was not dismissing evidence for the supernatural. She was pointing out how the weaknesses in perception and logic that people are heir to have to be counterbalanced by the careful and rational analysis that science makes possible if the conclusions are to be trustworthy. The problem with your supposed evidence of the supernatural is that it isn't reliable or replicable. Your approach leads not to conclusions true for everyone, but to the fragmentation in belief so prevalent in religion.--Percy

I want to try to help by adding a little bit to what Nator and others are saying. We're not saying your beliefs are wrong. Hopefully you would agree that your beliefs are based upon faith. All we're saying is that if you and TL believe that you've laid a rational and scientific evidential foundation for your beliefs, then you're wrong. Valid, rigorous studies demonstrating meaningful cause and effect are extremely difficult to conduct, and what you and TL are describing bears no resemblance to such studies, and so has none of the validity that such studies would normally have.So you can rightfully interpret the recovery of sight or the return to health of an ill baby as a sign of the power of prayer and faith in God, but not as rational, scientific evidence of the positive effect of prayer.Studies of the power of prayer have actually been done. Most indicate no correlation between prayer and health, but my recollection is that some of the studies did indicate a slight positive correlation, and you might want to seek out information about these.Watch out for a study from two or three years ago that showed a marked positive correlation. It turns out the evidence was fabricated. Coincidentally given recent events, the person who did the fabricating was already in a lot of Hovind like trouble by the time the data tampering came to light, not only for not paying his income taxes, but also for burning down his house for the insurance.--Percy

That isn't how it is done. You do not compare, of those prayed for, how many regained limbs and how many do not. With only that data you have no way of knowing how many regained limbs are significant.If you're measuring the efficacy of prayer on regaining limbs, then you must measure how many of those prayed for regained limbs versus how many of those *not* prayed for regained limbs. In other words, you must hold two prayer meetings and compare the results. At one prayer meeting the people pray, but not for anyone to regain limbs but for something else, or perhaps they only pretend to pray. At the other prayer meeting the people actually pray for people to regain limbs. Now you compare the numbers of people who have regained limbs from the two prayer meetings to see how well prayer works for regaining limbs.Of course, in order to have significant results you'd have to conduct many prayer meetings of both types. I'm going to put in my bet ahead of time that both prayer and non-prayer will prove equally successful in helping people regain lost limbs.It's the same for any thing for which you want to study the efficacy of prayer. While keeping all other conditions of the experiment exactly the same, you have to run the experiment twice, once with prayer, and once without prayer. If you don't run the experiment without prayer, then there's no way of knowing how many people get better anyway.Here's an example. Say you want to measure the effect of prayer on the 5-year survival rate of colon cancer patients, so you have to design an experiment and run it for two groups of people who are as identical as two groups can be. One group you pray for, the other you don't. The unprayed for group is called the control group. If 50% of the people in each group are still alive in 5 years, then you know prayer had no effect. But if 60% of the prayed for group has survived, now you know you're on to something. No. Absolutely not, unless by "prove" you mean some sort of spiritual belief type of "prove". I'll leave it to others to tear this apart, or at least I hope someone will, because it deserves it, much as I prefer to be a nice guy. It's thinking like this that leads parents to pray for kids with bowel obstructions instead of seeking professional medical care (yes, it's a true story, he died a couple decades ago, look up Chad Twitchell). It will have no scientific significance whatsoever. It's all anecdotal. Just thinking of doing this indicates our point isn't getting across. The types of approaches you're taking are not the way man has increased his understanding of the world. They are the opposite of that. Your approach is the way superstition and backwardness maintain themselves.--Percy

Hi Truthlover,We're not suggesting you spend your life doing scientifically valid studies. We're not trying to tell you what to do at all.All we're saying is that the methodology you're following does not lead to reliable knowledge, and in fact is an approach known to produce bad results. It is an approach consistent with superstition and backwardness. It is an approach worthy of the most unscientific cultures across time.What if you're inclination wasn't toward prayer but toward human sacrifice, like the Aztecs. Using the exact same methodology you do they concluded that sacrifice produced positive results and continued the practice over hundreds of years.A false belief in the power of prayer is not harmless. It isn't a case of, "I'll say a prayer, and if it works it works and no harm done." The Twitchell's believed in the power of prayer to heal their son Chad of his bowel obstruction, and he died from lack of medical care.I only used the "regained limbs" example to introduce the scientific methodology, in that way staying with something familiar to you before going on to the next step. Regained limbs would be truly miraculous, but in truth this isn't a claim ever made for prayer. The actual example I provided for you and that you didn't address was the effect of prayer on the the 5-year survival rate of colon cancer patients.Your description of a range of quality of experiments is just a rationalization to continue believing what you want to believe in the face of contrary evidence. I agree that it is possible that less than optimally designed or carried out experiments might still lead to useful knowledge, but your approach isn't less than optimal. It's wrong.--Percy

Hmmm. We're not communicating somewhere. Your approach is not "the only approach currently available." Not only that, it is an approach consistent with superstition and with the most backward cultures across time. It is the same approach the Aztecs used to justify human sacrifice. I know I'm repeating myself, but that's because these are points you haven't addressed.Not only is your approach not "the only approach currently available," I described a far superior approach: double blind studies. That is an approach that leads to reliable knowledge and a better understanding of the world around us. It can and has been used to study the efficacy of prayer. The specific fault I noted with your approach is that you ignore negative data. Ignoring data is a sure way to arrive at invalid results. I'm not questioning your beliefs about prayer, I'm questioning your belief that there is a rational basis to your beliefs about prayer. There is no such rational basis for your belief. Ignoring relevant data and thinking that a good idea is the opposite of rationality. I see. God listens to the prayers from your church, but not the prayers from these other churches. This is the fragmentation problem of religion I mentioned earlier. Without a rigorous method of inquiry people are free to reach any conclusions they like. Many church-going people the world over believe their religion is the one, right and true religion. They can't all be right. I didn't say this, but let's look at it another way. If you're only approach is to cherry-pick data, then there is truly no way for you to know anything. Is that really your only approach?People solve problems all the time without taking a rigorous scientific approach. All we're telling you is that a method that includes cherry-picking of data is highly unlikely to yield satisfactory results. When you're trying to figure out why your car sometimes doesn't start, throwing out the data that it doesn't start on cold days isn't likely to help you reach any useful conclusions. In the same way, when trying to figure out whether prayer works, throwing out the cases where it doesn't work won't tell you anything useful. Throwing out relevant data is fundamentally irrational to problem solving. There's no getting around it.--Percy

I'm probably over-emphasizing this, but this showed up in today's WSJ (To Treat Cancer, Herbs and Prayer - WSJ, but you need a subscription): I'm sure you disapprove of these "cures" as much as we do, but these are the kinds of things that can happen with the type of fuzzy thinking you're advocating. Believing that critically essential knowledge for life can derive from sources other than rigorous scientific investigation can kill you. As Sam Harris said about the threat of religious belief to civilization, "We're in danger of losing everything we have," and losing your life *is* everything to the individual.It doesn't take rigorous, scientific, double-blind studies to move through everyday life, but it does take a little logical thinking. Ignoring relevant evidence while solving a problem is the antipathy of rational thought. It isn't that you can't learn useful information with methods that fall far short of scientific rigor, it's that ignoring key evidence will never work no matter the other details of your approach.You say you think it is okay to ignore negative evidence when laying the foundation for your belief in the efficacy of prayer, and we're only telling you that you are dead wrong, that such an approach can lead only to erroneous conclusions, and that it is reminiscent of the most backward approaches to "knowing" across all time.--Percy

If this means you still think it's okay to ignore negative evidence, then you're still quite obviously thinking irrationally. But this is a different wording then you've used before, and I think you're referring to something else this time, namely that for many things we already know the negative impact of not taking positive action, such as praying for someone who's become seriously ill instead of taking them to the doctor. Naturally this is true, but it isn't what we were talking about. And no one is suggesting that you should. What we're pointing out is that you've chosen a completely invalid method (ingoring negative evidence) almost guaranteed to yield incorrect results except through sheer luck.Let me once again raise an example you haven't yet addressed. Consider the Aztecs, who were inclined toward human sacrifice rather than prayer. Today we reject human sacrifice, but the Aztecs justified human sacrifice using the same method you use to justify prayer: to them it seemed to work. If you accept that there is no rational basis for human sacrifice, then you must also accept that there is no rational basis for prayer, because you and the Aztecs arrived at your conclusions via the same way of thinking. Either both human sacrifice and prayer are valid, or both are invalid. It can be no other way. Such studies have already been conducted. Most have found no correlation between prayer and outcome, some have found a very mild positive correlation. That's good, but again I think you might be addressing another issue. We weren't talking about ignoring the possible downside of witholding professional medical care. We were talking about the irrationality of any method that attempts to draw conclusions from a data set where the negative outcomes have been excluded. Yes, of course, because modern medicine has a remarkable history of success, especially compared to any faith-based alternative. As long as prayer is never used as a replacement for modern medicine it can do no harm. But there is no rational basis by which to conclude that prayer has a positive effect. You can only believe this out of faith.--Percy

Okay, if you say so. But it seemed at one point that that was exactly what you were saying, not once but several times. For example, this is from your Message 114: Maybe this is the problem: We're not assuming no limbs grow back. We *know* no limbs grow back. We don't have to do a study to find this out. But that is rarely the case with medical conditions, which are probably the target of most prayers. In the real-world example that I provided, the 5-year survival rate of colon-cancer patients, you have no idea what that survival rate currently is, both with and without prayer. And that will be the case for any real-world medical condition you care to name. Does prayer make colds go away faster? Are evangelicals healthier as a group? Do they live longer? In order to answer these questions you need to know the outcomes for two different groups, one prayed for, one not prayed for. In the case of your anecdotal experiences, you just really have no idea how the groups compare. You're at a significant advantage with respect to the Aztecs, yet you conclude just as poor an answer. You have a lot of knowledge and evidence about what modern medicine can do, and you can inform your conclusions about the efficacy of prayer with that knowledge. The Aztecs had no knowledge of modern medicine and so didn't have that option. That you can be fully aware of modern medicine and how the body really works and yet still believe you have a rational basis to conclude that something as irrelevant to health as prayer can have a positive effect is far more irrational than concluding that equally irrelevant human sacrifice, a practice of the Aztecs performed with full ignorance of science and modern medicine, can have a positive effect. Let me provide a very clear example of your method. You pray for everyone in a hospital. Some people get well and go home, some people die. You conclude from this that prayer works. This conclusion has no rational basis. That doesn't mean it is right or wrong, but if it's right then it's by sheer luck. Valid conclusions do not derive from such fatally flawed thinking.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Word typo.