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mszegedy comments on How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 - Less Wrong
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Which is more likely "God exists" or "I just hallucinated that" For the third one, probably that He exists, for the second one, definitely hallucination, for the first, I'm not sure.
I once conducted an experiment in which I threw a die 500 times, and then prayed for an hour every day for a week that that die consistently land on a four, and then threw the die 500 more times. Correlation was next to zero, so I concluded that God does not answer prayers about dice from me.
Haven't you ever heard the saying, "God does not throw dice games"?
Wasn't that what Einstein said about QM?
Almost. Eliezer is making a bad wordplay with what Einstein said.
I wouldn't expect a deity to answer that sort of prayer. You're not being sincere, just trying to test them, which many canonically find annoying because it shows mistrust; you don't need that die to land on a four; it suggests you'd use prayer to lowly ends (e.g. "Let me score a touchdown" rather than "Please solve world hunger"); it gives an easily publishable result, which no deity would characteristically accept - if they didn't want to be discreet they'd still be doing showy miracles. Studies where you pray to cure cancer or something are much stronger evidence.
Do those studies have a placebo group?
I read about a study like that, in which Christians prayed for people to recover from cancer. There was barely any difference between the patients that weren't prayed for, the patients that were prayed for and knee that they were being prayed for, and the patients that didn't know that they were being prayed for.
I recall the same study - and I seem to remember that the patients who knew they were being prayed for did a bit worse.
Actually, if you run the test, you are. Given that you'd have changed your mind if it had gone the other way, of course.
(Related: Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable)