If prayers go unanswered....?

Realize that the purpose of prayer is not to influence events or outcomes, but rather, to be a tool to help you accept whatever the outcome actually is.I mean, how could it be otherwise? Why would God change his plans just because you asked him to? If what you asked for was better than what was going to happen, why wouldn't God have made that happen already?

Why? Why would God act? Why would he change his plan just because you asked him to?

Well, it depends on your confidence interval and how many axes of freedom are present in the experiment space, but basically you can look it up on a chi-square and it'll tell you how often a coincidence needs to occur before we stop considering it coincidental.What is not often considered by believers is the fact that we have mathematical tools that can be applied to tell us what is coincidence and what is not, and that your freehand seat-of-your-pants estimation of significance is liable to be almost always completely wrong.

One sludge and one trial? Probably not high, but since we don't actually have a model, it's not possible to apply the tools.With enough sludges and enough trials? Apparently 1/1, because it happened, obviously.

Basically these are statistical tools that allow us, within the bounds of whatever confidence interval you choose (generally 95% or 99.5% are common intervals), the likelyhood that a given outcome is significant, or merely coincidence.If it's possible to clearly explain these techniques in the confines of a single post, I don't have the mathematical training to do it. Well, its not that its just believers who are usually wrong when they guess significance, its everybody. All humans are pretty much awful at judging the significance of outcomes, especially the ones happening to us; its a known psychological condition of the human mind. The presumption of error in this case is not a preconception; its a conclusion from observation of human behavior.

If the only God you can believe in one whose actions are indistinguishable from random outcomes, then why bother to believe in God at all?

Then you give the exact opposite impression in your post. Let me show you:

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Where is God in all this? Surely He would be aware that His actions would lead to the formulation of the predictive theorems before He grants the prayer request. Would He do it anyway?

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Maybe, I certainly could be wrong about this, but IMHO I suspect that when and if God chooses to step back into human history such that his actions are easily recognizable and incontrovertible proof is given of His existence, it would be more significant than as a statistic.

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Now, what that says to me is "God acts, but since he doesn't want to give away the game, he doesn't let his actions be detected." That's a God who, if he is acting, doesn't act in a way that is statistically discernable from random outcomes. Your post 75 certainly isn't the position of a person who believes that God takes real, significant action in the world.Unless you're saying that God disguises his existence by refusing to act at all. Either way, I don't see that a God you can't count on to take any action that wasn't going to happen anyway is much of a God worth worshipping.

Ok, great. So back to my question. Why is a God who doesn't act in a way we can detect worth worshiping? If his actions can't be distinguished from what would have happened normally, how can he be said to be acting at all?If a guy came up to you, and told you that he was responsible for the Red Sox victory, even though he had never been to Chicago, nor seen them play, nor knew anything about baseball, and had certainly never spoken to or communicated with the team in any way - indeed, he had had no detectable influence on the game or the team whatsoever, how would you react? How credible would you find his claim, especially in the presence of other, more likely explanations like "the team really worked hard this season"?Personally I think the idea of giving credit to God in one breath and asserting that his influence is always undetectable with the next is an insult to the men and women of the human race who are actually working to improve things, and whose actions are very much detectable. Credit where credit is due - to the people whose existence and actions we can observe, not to some do-nothing God.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 04-04-2005 02:10 AM

Same thing. Statistical methodology allows us to detect non-random influences on outcomes within a certain confidence interval.The only way to avoid detection by those methods is for God to act pseudorandomly. I thought you had already realized that. So? Maybe that guy was actually God. It's just an analogy, anyway. Yes, you did say that:

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He chooses not to be quantified objectively by humans, He chooses not to make his presence known in this age in a wholly discernable way.

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There's no such thing as "half-detectable." There's no such thing as having a non-random influence, but being able to escape detection. It's all or nothing. The only way that God can escape the detection of his influence is to make sure his influence appears to be as random as the way things would be otherwise.And why would we believe in such a God?

I'm trying to understand, I truly am. So, what you're saying is, he never answers the prayers of anybody who is keeping track. So how do we know he answers any prayers? Your key phrase is essentially meaningless. Sorry, my bad, I thought we were speaking English, and employing concepts like "reason." "Half-detectable" is not a coherent concept in any workable epistomology. It's meaningless, empty. It's as meaningless as a "colorless green idea." And that's really the issue, isn't it? For a believer, faith trumps reason, evidence, logic, everything. Everything we might employ to determine the truth about our universe, faith circumvents and says "fuck all that, lets just skip to the end where we draw conclusions." That is, any conclusion you want. You would actually have to be using logic for your logic to be circular.

Sorry. Was I a little too direct for you? I'll remember to couch my arguments in confusing, obfuscating verbiage designed to magnify my intelligence at the expense of clarity.

Another way to put this is that the believer can never be right, and therefore, isn't.I mean, if you think that explaining occurances with the most likely explanations, instead of leaping to conclusions about invisible, all-powerful deities isn't a rational course of action, then why don't you just come out and say so, and we'll have that discussion? Why would you prefer that, given an occurance, we make up whatever makes us feel good instead of try to suss out what actually happened?