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brazil84 comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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I'm confused again. Are you telling me you are an atheist?
About Hebrew Bible God? Of course! Unless you can think of some sensible way to interpret Genesis (and the rest of it) that hasn't occurred to me and lets you salvage a God.
Do you understand that in the West, when people say they believe in God, they are normally referring to the God of Abraham?
And do you agree that there exists weak evidence for the existence of God?
That is what I thought when I was younger. In practice I've found that when talking to people in depth about their idea of God, they often have a slightly different idea of what God is supposed to be than other people I've spoken to.
Yes: a lot of people claim to have experienced God directly, which is weak evidence for God's existence. (Assuming they're all talking about essentially the same thing when they say 'God,' anyway.)
Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
But by what standard do you reject such evidence?
If I recall correctly, there are studies that demonstrate the power of believing one is being prayed for, whether or not one actually is. In studies where the people being prayed for don't know about it, there is no significant difference.
The largest study I know of found the opposite effect: people who knew they were being prayed for had slightly worse health outcomes.
I did a google search and found this, among other things:
http://scientificinquiry.suite101.com/article.cfm/pray-for-me
Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence.
(Incidentally, I tried pulling up meta-analyses on the effect of prayer and found this Cochrane meta-analysis which finds no consistent effect of being prayed for on ill health.)
:shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
The same standard I use to reach an a-homeopathic conclusion notwithstanding the evidence for homeopathy working, or an a-alien-abduction conclusion notwithstanding the evidence for people being beamed up and anally probed by aliens.
Namely, can I fit the idea of God existing/homeopathy working/alien abduction into my broader understanding of the world, or would it require overturning practically my whole understanding of how reality works?
So if I understand you correctly, there is no possible evidence which could convince you of the effectiveness of homeopathy, or the existence of God?
On the contrary, it is quite possible that there could be evidence that would convince me of either of those things. It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics. If it could somehow be demonstrated that Avogadro's number were 300 orders of magnitude too tiny, and that molecules were a googol times smaller than we thought, and could explain why our earlier experiments had led us to our original estimates of Avogadro's number and molecular sizes, then that would tend make the effectiveness of homeopathy (more) plausible.