What would count as proof of God

[Jarhyn]

Apologies if a proposal for establishing evidence a god's existence along the following lines has already been made and dealt with, but I am not going to read 1035 posts to check.

Around eight years ago I thought of a scenario that might work, at least for an interventionist, personal one. A lot of Christians (and not only Christians, come to think of it) believe in the power and efficacy of prayer. Well, it should be possible to empirically test for the existence of their God. Gather, say, 4,000 people suffering from trachoma and divide them into four groups. One will be treated by doctors, one will be prayed for, one will be prayed for and treated by doctors and one will be utterly ignored. None of the patients will know which group they are in.

The result will be pretty convincing if the prayed for groups fare best by a statistically significant margin. If it doesn't, of course, it proves nothing. Perhaps God was busy having a shit at the time, or maybe he just hates some sinners and gave them trachoma as punishment. Or he might have played his favourite trick: he was testing his followers' faith.

Still, if experiments of the kind I just sketched can be repeated with similarly favourable results for the prayed for groups, it could be said that evidence for a personal, interventionist God has been provided.

Military chaplains pray very carefully. It's educational.

Thry do not pray that all deployed units return from battle without harm, because there's little chance they'll beat the spread on that one.
They pray that the men return, if that's God's will, but if it's His choice that a life ends on contested soil, they ask that the fallen serviceman be taken up to Heaven, 'saved' by God.
So there's no way anyone can sit thru the benediction, then get mad at the funeral for a failed prayer.

I think either similar caveats will be added to the experiments' prayers or whining that skeptics wrote the prayers, not believers.

Yeah, when you pray to "let what happens happen" some shit happens and then it's happened and that's what you prayed for, huzzah".

It's a self fulfilling prophecy, of the most masturbatory kind.

I may be a wizard, but I always ascribe all results to medical science.

I know as a fact that the ritual aligns the self to the intention, and aligning intention properly is the key to successful execution.

Or in plain English, the ritual aspects, when applied right, merely act to mnemonically reinforce maintaining treatment properly, and they only work when the person participating understands this. You remember the silly thing you did frequently following doing it, and the why you did that silly thing, and then do the less silly thing that you would have otherwise forgotten about.

Thus healing magic is possible, it's just not what usually happens, because people are fucking idiots and every time someone like me explains it, the worst of the muggles hear "magic healey thing make effect workey, I no need work".

The magic is the cue to do the fucking work.

 

[Hermit]

Apologies if a proposal for establishing evidence a god's existence along the following lines has already been made and dealt with, but I am not going to read 1035 posts to check.

Around eight years ago I thought of a scenario that might work, at least for an interventionist, personal one. A lot of Christians (and not only Christians, come to think of it) believe in the power and efficacy of prayer. Well, it should be possible to empirically test for the existence of their God. Gather, say, 4,000 people suffering from trachoma and divide them into four groups. One will be treated by doctors, one will be prayed for, one will be prayed for and treated by doctors and one will be utterly ignored. None of the patients will know which group they are in.

The result will be pretty convincing if the prayed for groups fare best by a statistically significant margin. If it doesn't, of course, it proves nothing. Perhaps God was busy having a shit at the time, or maybe he just hates some sinners and gave them trachoma as punishment. Or he might have played his favourite trick: he was testing his followers' faith.

Still, if experiments of the kind I just sketched can be repeated with similarly favourable results for the prayed for groups, it could be said that evidence for a personal, interventionist God has been provided.

Military chaplains pray very carefully. It's educational.

Thry do not pray that all deployed units return from battle without harm, because there's little chance they'll beat the spread on that one.
They pray that the men return, if that's God's will, but if it's His choice that a life ends on contested soil, they ask that the fallen serviceman be taken up to Heaven, 'saved' by God.
So there's no way anyone can sit thru the benediction, then get mad at the funeral for a failed prayer.

I think either similar caveats will be added to the experiments' prayers or whining that skeptics wrote the prayers, not believers.

Yes, you are right; Believers will try to defend their position. Their problem is that their god is said to answer prayers. There are dozens of verses in the Bible asserting that. I quoted a number of them here and proposed a blind, reproducible study with control groups to test that.

As designed, it will never happen, of course. Too expensive, and no ethics committee would allow two groups - 1,000 people with trachoma to undergo no treatment at all, and another 1,000 to be "treated" with prayer alone.

 

[Keith&Co.]

The magic is the cue to do the fucking work.

Every sailor i knew had a ritual they went thru before or during patrols. Some said 'for luck' some said, habit, or tradition. Or "my sea-dad used to do tjis, so i honor his memory."
Or the guy that smoked one cigar, only on the Maneuvering Watch, only on the way out, lit at THE moment we cast off lines, tossed overboard to port when we offloaded the pilot to starboard, "Well, my wife doesn't lrt me smoke, it's my only chance."

Either way, we did these rituals and we came back from patrol.
We also drilled the holy gummy bears out of the crew for Damage Control. We practiced certain maintenance developed from an analysis of the Thresher's sinking. We briefed every evolution with thd plan and the recovery plan if shit went south. We did everything we could to keep ship, crew, mission safe.
But it was those little rituals that kept us afloat, dammit.

 

[Jarhyn]

The magic is the cue to do the fucking work.

Every sailor i knew had a ritual they went thru before or during patrols. Some said 'for luck' some said, habit, or tradition. Or "my sea-dad used to do tjis, so i honor his memory."
Or the guy that smoked one cigar, only on the Maneuvering Watch, only on the way out, lit at THE moment we cast off lines, tossed overboard to port when we offloaded the pilot to starboard, "Well, my wife doesn't lrt me smoke, it's my only chance."

Either way, we did these rituals and we came back from patrol.
We also drilled the holy gummy bears out of the crew for Damage Control. We practiced certain maintenance developed from an analysis of the Thresher's sinking. We briefed every evolution with thd plan and the recovery plan if shit went south. We did everything we could to keep ship, crew, mission safe.
But it was those little rituals that kept us afloat, dammit.

The drills to me are the most important and significant rituals.

Because they are the things that make "do the fucking work" happen when the triggering context arrives rather than "run around like a brokedick".

I will say insofar as some of those little patrol ritual's reminded them of the reasons and the things outside the structure of their regimented life that the regimented life was built up and around to protect. There is a certain magic there, too, but more subtle.

 

[Copernicus]

Your argument depends too heavily on proving a negative, which is quite impossible.

I don't know why this claim is so popular. It's not true.

It's correct to say that you cannot always prove a negative; But there are certainly negative claims that are easy to prove.

Fair enough. In the case of the existence of elves and gods, I think that it is true. And don't pretend that you can dictate the definition of either. That is determined by general usage patterns that are outside the control of individuals trying to win an argument.

Science cannot prove metaphysical physicalism--the thesis that everything is physical. That is its foundation, i.e. the assumption that it is based on. To undermine that assumption, one needs to show that there are physical phenomena that cannot be explained by any known physical force.

Not only are there no such phenomena, there cannot be any such phenomena unless our models of reality are wildly and very obviously wrong.

They're not. We checked.

That is not an argument against my point that science is powerless to prove its principle assumption--metaphysical physicalism. Logically, any such attempt would just be circular reasoning. Moreover, you cannot guarantee that we have actually checked. For example, we cannot check what we have not observed, and we have not observed every phenomenon in the universe. We don't even know for certain that  Uniformitarianism is true. Our models of physical reality have been wrong before, and the chances are very good that they will be proven wrong again. But we can never be certain that physicalism is true. That must always remain an assumption that undergirds scientific methodology. Science operates on the basis of methodological physicalism.

Rather, one can make an argument that spiritualism (metaphysical dualism) lacks any evidence to make it a reasonable assumption.

Oh, you can certainly make that argument; And it's a very good one. But now it's also possible to make a far stronger argument, and to say with certainty that metaphysical dualism is simply wrong.

I believe that it is certainly wrong, but it is a belief based solely on my limited experience of reality.

And we also need at least an attempt to explain phenomena such as the Big Bang and the existence of order rather than randomness in the physical universe.

No, we don't. Not in the context of discussing whether individual humans can or cannot be influenced in unknown ways. This question is ONLY related to the origins of the cosmos by the very fairytales under dispute; There's exactly zero reason to imagine any connection whatsoever between a hypothetical god that influences humans, and an equally hypothetical god that creates universes.

I agree with you. I have no reason to believe that you are wrong about this. However, I do not have absolute certainty that I am right, and I hope that you don't either. That certainly is not the way scientists approach their subject matter. Just because I cannot imagine an alternative explanation, that does not mean that one is impossible in principle.

I do think that science accomplishes that, so I am with you in spirit, but I struggle with positions that suggest science can definitively rule out the existence of gods.

Why?

Is this just because you've convinced yourself that the false claim "It's impossible to prove a negative", is true?

No. It's because I believe that physicalism is empirically unproveable. It can only be an assumption. And I also believe that we cannot know what we have yet to observe in the future. So I don't accept the claim that gods can be ruled out with absolute certainty, although I feel confident that they don't. I have no reason to abandon the assumption of physicalism.

 

[bilby]

Our models of physical reality have been wrong before, and the chances are very good that they will be proven wrong again.

That's a very popular claim.

It's an equivocation fallacy though, so it's not one I subscribe to.

There's a big difference between the "wrong" of saying that Newtonian gravity predicts the wrong orbit for Mercury, and saying that Newtonian gravity is wrong, therefore it's possible that a dropped rock will fall sideways.

Our models of physical reality haven't been wrong before. Not in the sense that things previously experimentally demonstrated to be true turned out to be false.

They have been wrong in the sense that predictions derived from the model have been inaccurate when tested in more extreme conditions; But that kind of "wrong" isn't a problem for my argument, which (I repeat) explicitly refers to things occurring at human scales.

Our lack of knowledge of what happens in extreme conditions, or at vast scales, isn't a loophole into which a claim of incomplete knowledge at human scales can be inserted.

 

[Copernicus]

Our models of physical reality haven't been wrong before. Not in the sense that things previously experimentally demonstrated to be true turned out to be false.

They have been wrong in the sense that predictions derived from the model have been inaccurate when tested in more extreme conditions; But that kind of "wrong" isn't a problem for my argument, which (I repeat) explicitly refers to things occurring at human scales.

I would say that it is a problem for your argument when a model of the physics makes a wrong prediction, because there may be no way to tweak the model or scale it up to make an accurate prediction. Sometimes a paradigm shift is needed. You may still be able to use the old model for many practical purposes, but it still represents the wrong model for others. A worse problem that I see for your argument is that you are making a philosophical argument, not an empirical one, and you need to go beyond science to support it. For example, you take a uniformitarian position on the laws of physics, but that is only an assumption that is methodologically convenient.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Our models of physical reality have been wrong before, and the chances are very good that they will be proven wrong again.

That's a very popular claim.

It's an equivocation fallacy though, so it's not one I subscribe to.

Was it Isaac Asimov who said something like, "Some people think that the world is flat. Some think it's a sphere. It's an oblate spheroid, so both of them are actually wrong.
But thinking that they're equally wrong is the most wrong position."

 

[bilby]

I would say that it is a problem for your argument when a model of the physics makes a wrong prediction

You would be mistaken. A model that never makes a wrong prediction at a relevant scale is right at the relevant scale.

That it might be wrong at irrelevant scales is of zero importance.

 

[Copernicus]

I would say that it is a problem for your argument when a model of the physics makes a wrong prediction

You would be mistaken. A model that never makes a wrong prediction at a relevant scale is right at the relevant scale.

That it might be wrong at irrelevant scales is of zero importance.

But not irrelevant vis-a-vis your rigid position on scientific proof. Models are only as good as they fit with the facts, and one can never be absolutely certain of their accuracy.

When you said that my argument was an "equivocation fallacy" I was puzzled, because it wasn't. You may have meant "equivalence fallacy", which is how Keith&Co may have taken it. But I wasn't engaging in either kind of fallacy, because my words were used consistently, and I wasn't arguing that the arguments in favor of God's existence were in any way equivalent to those against it. Quite the contrary. I am a "stone cold atheist", just like you. I simply take a slightly different epistemological stance, especially when it comes to science. I still maintain that it is all about plausibility, not possibility.

 

[bilby]

But I wasn't engaging in either kind of fallacy, because my words were used consistently

You may have been unaware that you were using the word "wrong" in two different ways, but you were doing so nonetheless, as I detailed above.

There's a big difference between the "wrong" of saying that Newtonian gravity predicts the wrong orbit for Mercury, and saying that Newtonian gravity is wrong, therefore it's possible that a dropped rock will fall sideways.

 

[bilby]

Models are only as good as they fit with the facts, and one can never be absolutely certain of their accuracy.

There has never been a model as rigorously tested, nor as accurate, as the Standard Model.

Doubting the accuracy of the Standard Model's predictions at human scales is many many orders of magnitude less sensible than doubting NASA's descriptions of the Moon on the grounds that they don't mention cheese as a substantial component of the lunar regolith.


Holding forth as a real possibility that there could be an unknown force that influences the lives of individual humans is as reasonable and sane as not only claiming that the Moon is made of Stilton, but also that you have it under your bed.

Proof? Well, there's another word with shades of meaning. Purists will claim that proof is only for mathematicians and alcoholics. But the everyday definition of the word is more than met. If intervention in human lives by an unknown force is possible, then literally everything you can imagine, and a fair bit that you cannot imagine, is also possible.

Rocks falling sideways are a vastly more plausible way in which physics could be wrong, than unknown forces acting at human scales.

People who have no problem accepting as hard fact that dropped rocks don't fall sideways nevertheless get all mealy-mouthed and pathetic with their claims about what constitutes a fact whenever religion gets involved. I suspect it's the consequence a deeply buried instinct not to paint dangerous lunatics into a corner to avoid their becoming violent.

We can say with absolute confidence and certainty that the Moon landings weren't faked; But say the same about the non-existence of gods, and suddenly everyone is "you can't prove a negative". Yeah, you can. And we have. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't even expected or predicted. But it's happened, and the options now are only acceptance or ignorance.

That most people choose ignorance is hardly out of character for H. Sapiens.

 

[Copernicus]

But I wasn't engaging in either kind of fallacy, because my words were used consistently

You may have been unaware that you were using the word "wrong" in two different ways, but you were doing so nonetheless, as I detailed above.

There's a big difference between the "wrong" of saying that Newtonian gravity predicts the wrong orbit for Mercury, and saying that Newtonian gravity is wrong, therefore it's possible that a dropped rock will fall sideways.

If the model predicts the wrong orbit for Mercury, then the model is wrong. In one case, the adjective is used as the modifier of a head noun. In the other, it is used as a predicate adjective. Other than that, it seems to have exactly the same meaning. Perhaps there is a nuanced distinction that you wish to make in defining its usage in one construction but not the other. I don't see it as a significant one.

I think that we are in violent agreement about how science works, and I don't think that anything I have said about epistemology or plausibility resonates with you. We both have arrived at the same conclusion that science rules out the existence of gods but have different ways of characterizing the epistemological significance of that conclusion. So maybe we should just let it rest at that. It's not worth spending our few remaining heartbeats in trying to resolve the dispute. I agree with you that belief in gods is incompatible with science but not that science disproves the existence of gods.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think that we are in violent agreement about how science works, and I don't think that anything I have said about epistemology or plausibility resonates with you. We both have arrived at the same conclusion that science rules out the existence of gods but have different ways of characterizing the epistemological significance of that conclusion.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "science rules out that gods are necessary"? Science can't rule out whatever is past the universe, if such a thing exists.

Science to this point has managed to explain a lot without god ever entering the conversation. What remains is not understood... and not defaulted to god. Much to the point that god(s) existence appears to be irrelevant for our widescale observations of the universe, hence, gods are not necessary.

Learner wants to suggest a test to look for intervention. We have explained a boatload of processes that have no intervention. As for our "souls", I think brain trauma (where as people become different people after massive head injuries) is quite possibly the easiest way to debunk the soul. But Learner wants to test for the soul, because it creates a gap to stuff faith inside. If we can't disprove a soul... there can be a soul. Which is a desperate plea, as it requires failure to disprove instead of act to prove in order to propagate it.

Whether we can disprove the soul isn't relevant. It is just a minor pigeonhole trap created by an ever evaporating dogma of religion that attempted to explain science. The dogma went from an expansive encyclopedia set that explained god did everything, to a single book explaining god was the cause of the big stuff, and now remains as a pamphlet with a just a few bullet points:

• Origin of Universe
• Soul
• Order from disorder

 

[Tharmas]

The dogma went from an expansive encyclopedia set that explained god did everything, to a single book explaining god was the cause of the big stuff, and now remains as a pamphlet with a just a few bullet points:

• Origin of Universe
• Soul
• Order from disorder

I don’t particularly want to get involved in the current discussion on the question of how we know what we know, but reading through the thread reminded me of something. Years ago (like thirty plus) I found myself in a situation where I needed to contemplate the nature of god-hood, if any. I hit upon the following:

Given that any omnipotent god would be transcendent by definition, then any entity that can be defined cannot be god.

That satisfied me for a while, almost, although in the end it seemed a bit vacuous to pass muster, to say the least. Recalling that pronouncement just now made me smile to myself a little ruefully.

 

[Elixir]

But Learner wants to test for the soul, because it creates a gap to stuff faith inside

I say let him have it if it comforts him.
Personally I have no use for constructs that have no power of explanation or prediction, but YMMV.
If learner can detect souls in a manner that is both explanatory and predictive, I’ll be all ears and filled with admiration. If he only “detects” souls to his own satisfaction, I see little harm in that. (As long as he isn’t trying to sell his vaporware to innocent others).

 

[bilby]

(As long as he isn’t trying to sell his vaporware to innocent others).

I would say that you are too kind.

It's not sufficient to merely avoid harming others with abject nonsense (and I seriously doubt whether any theist genuinely manages to clear even that very low bar).

Abject nonsense must be actively opposed. The only thing necessary for stupid to triumph is that smart people do nothing.

The existence of a theist who isn't being challenged for their nonsense is a threat to the reason of every naïve person they encounter.

 

[Elixir]

Abject nonsense must be actively opposed.

I would say exposed … prolly the same thing, but it sounds nicer.

Anyhow, if it’s something that amuses, comforts or helps stabilize some individual I don’t see any ethical way to forcibly abridge their beliefs if they evidence no harm. If you expose the nonsense and the holder of that nonsense doesn’t “get” the exposure for whatever reason, what steps should one take in opposition?

 

[bilby]

Abject nonsense must be actively opposed.

I would say exposed … prolly the same thing, but it sounds nicer.

When you are dealing with a memetic disease that has been enndemic for millennia and has killed millions, many of them in the most agonising ways, I am not sure that it's appropriate to be 'nicer'.

That many of the locally dominant strains of this infection have recently evolved to be both rather less dangerous and rather less infectious is not a sufficient reason to tolerate them, as there's no particular reason to expect that they will remain that way if allowed to fester.

 

[Elixir]

When you are dealing with a memetic disease that has been enndemic for millennia and has killed millions, many of them in the most agonising ways, I am not sure that it's appropriate to be 'nicer'.

Heh. That’s exactly how religions seem to view each other.

The obvious Darwinian solution (tying nicely into the overpopulation non-problem) is a vast global ongoing cage match. Sorry, no nukes allowed. Let the cults and sects face off and do their best to cleanse the species of those who are preventing or depriving them of an earthly utopia or a cushy afterlife.
Oh, wait. That’s what’s already going on!