AdeleneDawner comments on Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable - Less Wrong

124 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2007 03:21AM

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Comment author: AdeleneDawner 21 September 2010 11:09:23PM 3 points [-]

my opinion is that it is here that results are predetermined and evidence and method made to support pre-determined [desired] outcomes.

Are you referring to something specific you've seen in our way of doing things, or just assuming that since we disagree with you we must be doing something wrong?

I have observed and found that human evolution forever problem solves, only to find temporary solutions, new found errors, and omissions, revealing yet another problem. this feedback loop will never cease.

If you mean evolution in a literal sense, of course, that's how evolution works - and it's a feature, not a flaw, since it allows species to avoid getting stuck in a local maximum rather than finding the best configuration for their environment. That's entirely irrelevant to the rest of your comment, though, so I expect that's not what you mean.

If you're using 'evolution' to mean 'thought', please don't. It's incredibly annoying.

However, if a relationship in Christ through faith can increase the likelihood of one's success in these and any other pursuit.....you have the free will and intellect to find any and every answer upon your own discovery and learning processes.

We've actually discussed that, on more than one occasion.

Theists don't have any observable advantage over non-theists on matters of chance. God doesn't rig the dice for you.

In every properly-conducted study - and note that we're using the same definition of 'properly-conducted' there as we do everywhere else, and it doesn't involve looking at the results and seeing if we agree - prayer has been found to make no difference to things with objective outcomes. It does have some interesting and useful effects on emotional state, in some situations, but those can be achieved just as well through brief, secular meditation.

There are significant advantages to belonging to a social group like a church, but those advantages are social, not theistic - equivalent benefits can be gained by belonging to many other kinds of social groups, if one lives in an area that's not hostile to non-theists. If one is in an area or situation that's hostile to non-theists, it may indeed be clearly better to profess belief in God, to avoid being ostracized - but that's not significant evidence that belief in God is useful outside of that kind of situation, and no evidence that God actually exists.