But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let's say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual.
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting. You'd want to try many times more than that at least before you start to have enough information to draw reliable inferences from, unless the effect size is really large and obvious, say, all five people on the real ritual get better the next day and none of the five on the placebo recover within a week.
You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can't figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn't than maybe it's because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don't understand their reasoning.
People recover from most ailments on their own for perfectly natural reasons. Some people fail to recover from ailments that other people recover from, but it's not as if this is an incomprehensible phenomenon that flies in the face of our naturalistic models.
If no proposed supernatural intervention changes a person's likelihood of recovery relative to placebo, then it could be that there's no way of isolating supernatural intervention between groups, but a much simpler explanation to account for the observations is that no supernatural interventions are actually happening.
People used to see the appearance of supernatural intervention everywhere, but the more we've learned about nature, the less room there's been for supernatural causes to explain anything, and the more they've become a burden on any model that contains them. It's possible that some phenomena which are unexplained today can only be explained in the future with recourse to supernatural causes, but given the past performance of supernatural explanations, and the large amount of informational complexity they entail, this is almost certainly an unwise thing to bet on.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don't have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
I'm glad you're comfortable with this sort of environment. If you're going to make judgments on the basis of your own experience though, it's good to try to incorporate the evidence of others' experience as well.
Personally, from around the age of ten to twelve or so, I experimented a lot with the possibility of god(s). I tried to open myself up to communication with higher intelligences, perform experiments with prayer and requests for signs, and so on. I never received anything that could be interpreted as a positive result, even by generous standards. I certainly don't dismiss other people's claims of experiences associated with the supernatural, I think for the most part people who report such experiences are telling the truth about their own recollection of such events. Indeed, given what I've since learned about the workings of the human brain, it would be surprising to me if people didn't report supernatural experiences. But given that people reporting supernatural experiences can be accounted for without recourse to actual supernatural events, as a consequence of human psychology, the question I'm inclined to ask is "does the world look more like what I ought to expect if reports of supernatural events are at least partly due to an actual supernatural reality, or like I ought to expect if the supernatural doesn't really exist?"
There are some things in the world that I can't explain, which could, theoretically, have supernatural causes. But there are no things in the world I have encountered which I would have firmly predicted in advance to be true if supernatural claims were real, and false if they were not. For instance, if some maladies, such as amputation, only recovered when people called for divine intervention, and never when they did not, I would think that the prospect of an underlying supernatural cause was worth taking very seriously. Or if people all over the world had religious experiences, which all pointed them in the direction of one particular religion, even if they had no cultural exposure to it, that would be indicative of an underlying supernatural cause. But when viewed together, I think that the totality of humans' religious experiences suggest that what's going on is a matter of human psychology, not an underlying supernatural reality.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let's say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and ...
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting.
Well, it's standard in medicine to have large RCTs because of various reasons(*), but I'd hardly say "barely worth the bother of conducting". Every bit of randomized data gives you evidence about cause and effect that, while sometimes weak, does let you update your posterior (a little or a lot) without worrying about the myriad issues of confounding ...
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.
(Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome message, and I've stolen heavily from it.)