So, much like the ‘rejected for ideology’ thread, this thread stands testament to the ability of creationists to believe things which are demonstrably, objectively untrue.
I’m sure that various law enforcement agencies, out of desperation or foolishness, have indeed engaged psychics over the years. I know they have in fact, And this seems to have led to the belief that it’s now a normal standard part of procedure.
Except it’s not. If it was, and it was done ‘all the time’ it would be easy to fill up the comments with news and links to where it was done. But that won’t happen will it?
And I wonder, if psychics were used all the time why do we still bother to train agents? Why not just train them in psychic? Why bother with surveillance and evidence gathering if ‘all the time’ psychics are giving the correct answer?
Or perhaps this is creationist doublespeak. Perhaps the FBI use physics all the time, but unsuccessfully! Either way, I look forwards to reading all about the evidence the FBI are indeed doing such a thing all the time.…
DNA_Jock,
Wrong. No one (virtually) is claiming that just because you pray for the lottery you will win the lottery. That is exactly why I said the girl who said her prayers didn’t come true, when actually it looks like they did come true, just not how she expected, is blind to her own good fortune.
And this is more the premise of a religious faith. Its not just, ask, give me, give me, and you will get. I don’t know any religion that seriously thinks that. Rather its more about good intentions, and being virtuous, and you will see a reward for your better nature. So sorry, but maybe that’s why folks such as yourself (or Rummy) have been disappointed by religion. They think they should just be able to sit on their ass and do nothing, and be given things. Yet, as Rummy said, if he goes out and fills out applications, and THEN gets a job he needs, well, that of course is all his own doing!
But I will take note of your concession, smoking doesn’t cause cancer. But some folks who smoke have had cancer, and it may or not be related.
We don’t either phoodoo. I didn’t think like that when I was a Christian, and I don’t think any religious person ever really thinks like that. This is an excuse, a rationalization you’re coming up with, to try to explain why it is we don’t find your prayer-apologetics persuasive.
What you do think, however, are rationalizations. You have a string of bad excuses for why we should continue to think prayers are being answered when it appears that they are not.
For example, you will just rationalize that the prayer is being answered much later, and you will rationalize that it was because the prayer happened, than due to people’s own actions and hard work, or mere coincidence. Like the hypothetical example I gave with a person praying to get a job, but nothing happens, and then going out and actually searching for a job through their own actions, they then get a job. And here you will offer up the laughable rationalization that it was the praying that landed the job, as opposed to the applying for jobs and going to job interviews and becoming good at it through practice and hard work.
You could have prayed to a jug of milk in the same way, and then went and done the actual work yourself of getting the job by applying for it, and then eventually when you get a job, someone like yourself will say “see, the jug of milk answered your prayer, just later, not immediately after you asked for it”.
And if they don’t get a job, a person like yourself will come along with the rationalization that the person looking for a job is not somehow virtuous enough, or has in some other way failed to make themselves deserving of the Milk-Jug’s grace.
No, that’s not answered prayers. That’s your good behavior being reflected in other people’s perceptions of you. If you are nice to other people, they are generally nice back to you. That’s not an answered prayer, that’s another bad rationalization you are offering.
You have this internalized set of fits-all excuses that could never be proven wrong to you, when you will allow yourself infinite leeway to come up with excuses for why it didn’t work. No matter what outcome we observe, you have some canned response that fits it. You immediately get what you prayed for? Well then you were deserving and God/Milk-Jug/Lord Vader answered it.
You don’t get it immediately, but much later after you worked hard for it yourself, something like it? Ahh but you see the answer to your prayer was just “wait and see”, and then it happened.
What you prayed for never occurred? Oh well you were probably just selfish in asking for it, and need to have better, less selfish intentions. How dare you pray for someone who is suffering to get better, you selfish bastard.
No, I’ve never thought that. In part because I was taught the same silly excuses you were. That prayers are answered in proportion to how good a person you are, whether you’re being selfish, etc. etc.
I then realized these apologetic arguments are all bad excuses and rationalizations designed to fit any imaginable outcome. And that religious people allow themselves to continue to believe in the efficacy of prayer with an endless amount of motivated reasoning, excuse-making, and ad-hoc rationalizations, even when there’s zero evidence it works above the level of chance.
Because people can always just invent some excuse after the fact, for why the prayer didn’t work. It generally comes in two forms. It didn’t work because you’re selfish/undeserving/insincere, or it does work you just need to give it time and wait more (with no time limit of course). And then when you’re dead and it was never answered, well you just weren’t deserving of it but prayer totally still works. To someone else. Eventually.
It’s my doing writing the application and CV, filling out forms, and sending it, and going to a job interview, and practicing and rehearsing what to say beforehand, researching the company etc. etc.
Then, when I am being judged among a set of candidates, I will see if that work paid off. It takes a special kind of lunacy to think the people interviewing me have no opinions of their own, and that God is somehow intervening to overrule their free will to force them to give me a job they otherwise would not if I had not prayed for it first. Clearly that is straight up insane to believe.
It’s funny though, I’ve been told numerous times during my life as a Christian, by other believers, that to anyone who sincerely believes and has faith in their heart, they can literally move mountains. Ask and ye shall receive.
Of course, the first thing you do as a young child when you hear that is you go test it. Full of faith, you go and try to move a mountain with your new inspired belief. And nothing happens. Then you go back and say it doesn’t work, and then you’re fed the quintessential fits-all bad excuse: You weren’t sincere and didn’t really believe.
And everyone, somewhere inside, when they hear that excuse, recognizes it for it for what it is. A shitty rationalization people have internalized to explain why prayer doesn’t actually work.
You just have to understand that “literally” doesn’t literally mean literally.
Oh, so you do believe in free will at least. How so?
No, I was pointing out the absurdity of believing that God is responsible for someone getting a job by forcing a person (who is believed to have free will by the religious) to pick and offer the job to a candidate they otherwise would not have offered it to if there had been no praying.
You misunderstand, phoodoo,
I was not trying to make any theological point, although your ideas about my religious experience are waaaay wide of the mark. I was merely trying to explain to you a simple point about experimental design. The smaller your effect size, the greater the number of [independent] replications you will need in order to overcome the (extremely well-understood) noise that random sampling will introduce into your data. There is of course a second source of error, that I was going to explain next. Systematic error. Larger trials do nothing to overcome any systematic error.
The best description of this distinction comes from the awesome book “The Ascent of Rum Doodle”: During their sail to Yogistan, the expedition’s scientist decides to test his boiling point apparatus — a crude altimeter.
“By taking the average of many readings, he was able to ascertain that they were 153 feet above sea level.” Others pointed out the patent absurdity of this result. As I recall, an argument about oblate spheroids ensued.
So you don’t think they actually had a choice about hiring you then, right?
We’ve been over this thing about choice already(they had a choice, they’d just always choose what is in their nature to choose), no reason to repeat it here to distract from your continued failure at defending the inefficacy of prayer.
https://www.thermoworks.com/bpcalc
Well, but it is so humorous it does bear repeating. We don’t have free will. But we can make a choice. But we can only choose what is in our nature, and we can’t choose what is not in our nature, so your only choice is the one choice.
Crystal clear.
If only we knew how decisions were made in phoodoo world we’d all feel so silly right now! As materialism doesn’t explain squat, that thread was a place for explanations from those that presumably have them. Like phoodoo.
But alas they were never forthcoming. 2,199 comments, but not one from phoodoo making an alternative case to that which he continually mocks.
You judge someone else’s opinion without actually having given your own to be judged. What is crystal clear is what that makes you!
For example, a robot on a car production line cannot choose to run for the hills…….
Yeah we choose what we want. Big surprise.
So anyway, when you pray for a job, apply for it, then eventually get one, what did the prayer accomplish? You believe the guy hiring has free will, so what if he doesn’t want to hire you? You pray, God likes you, so God just makes him hire you against his will? God changes his will to be what God wants his will to be?
I am trying to understand what your position is, because you are the one making the claim that prayers don’t work. My claim is that you don’t know that, and yet you continue to claim you do. Then you write this ridiculous convoluted mess about no free will, that can choose, and free will maybe can or can’t be changed according to a “nature” (which no one knows what that means) , but since there is no free will, its not the free will being changing its the choosing being changed, but the nature, well we don’t know if that can be changed because we don’t know what it is and where it comes from, but Rumraket has it all figured out in his confused mind and THAT is how he knows it can’t be affected.
So until you can make some kind of rational point about influencing future events, all we really have is your gibberish which you claim means you know something what is going on. One would be quite foolish to think this means anything whatsoever.
Perhaps the claim that prayers don’t work is too broad. Some very careful double-blind studies have been done to test and measure the efficacy of prayer, all of which have so far come up empty. But this doesn’t mean prayers can/t work, it only means that in a few carefully controlled circumstances, they do not have the desired effect.
Beyond this, at least in my reading, the claim that prayers work is supported in two ways. First, by disregarding all prayers that fail for some reason – foolish requests, insincere praying, etc. After all, people have prayed for certain futures trillions of times over the course of history, some of which are simply bound to come true even if by sheer coincidence. And second, something is sure to happen as time passes, and it seems human nature to point to anything and say something like “THERE is my prayer being answered. Not at all what I had in mind, but the target god of my prayers, being far wiser than I, chose to do something wiser than what I wanted!”
I visited a casino, where I watched the simultaneous issuing of hundreds of fervent prayers. Somewhat less than half the time, a play would win and the gambler would credit his god for answering his prayer. Somewhat more than half the time, the casino would win, and the gambler would conclude that his god was trying to teach him of the evils of gambling – and “answered” his prayer by engineering a loss! Meanwhile, based solely on mathematical odds, the house could estimate their daily winnings at each game to within a fraction of a percent. The gods of gambling strongly support the odds.
Flint,
What studies? Can you name them so I can tell you how flawed they are (you know, like skeptics do. I read their playbook once)?
There are in fact studies that show that prayers DO work, so I am wondering why you are making the opposite claim. Is this sort of like your apocryphal casinos story?
The only controlled study of intercessory prayer that I am aware of is Leibovici 2001,which I cited in this very thread.
If there are other studies, particularly any studies that would seem to confirm this amazing effect, please provide the citations, so that we can judge for ourselves.
Your description of Sheldrake and Smart 2000, was highly inaccurate; you have yet to even acknowledge that Jaytee went to the window before the beeper went off.
Edit to clarify: study that showed an effect. Unsuccessful studies abound.
This, for example, represents the bleeding edge of PSI and remote healing research:
Schmidt et al, Explore (NY). 2019 Sep – Oct;15(5):334-339.
Can you spot the problem, phoodoo?
DNA_Jock,
Jock Jock Jock, how many times do I have to tell you, you attempting to hand wave away studies doesn’t impress me in the slightest. You are not even doing a decent job of it, because of course the dog went to the window a few times when the owner wasn’t coming home, no one claimed it ONLY went to the window when the owner was coming home, you are just talking nonsense now. The dog went to the window SIGNIFICANTLY more when the owner WAS coming home. You still don’t get the significantly part?
Anyone can try to claim a study is flawed. I can do exactly that with your pharma paid cancer studies. And frankly, I intentionally gave you an example that was the most benign, the most simplistic study of physic abilities that I knew of. There are LOTS of others. But why would I waste my time with a skeptic cheerleader.
You think I don’t know how predictable you are? I gave you the steps already, “They don’t exist, its not true, even if it is it doesn’t mean what you think, the authors are biased, we already knew, we predicted it….”
Your cancer studies don’t exist. They are not true. The authors are biased…
Nonsense. The studies exist. They have been done by professionals much more qualified than you. They have shown positive results. Stop trying to deny it, you look silly.
phoodoo, dear, Jaytee went to the window SIGNIFICANTLY more in the ten minute period before the beeper went off than he did during the “main period”.
When the beep was early, Jaytee went to the window too soon (i.e. before the beep) in 2 out of 6 cases. That’s a little awkward…
When the beep was late, Jaytee went to the window too soon in five out of 6 cases! That’s a show-stopper!
Here’s a shocker: the longer Pam is away, the more Jaytee goes to the window.
I am not tying to impress you in the slightest, phoodoo. I am in fact sinfully proud of your low opinion of me. I am simply pointing out (for any numerate audience) that you are repeatedly wrong.
Anyone can claim that a study is flawed; that is oh-so-true. The issue is how they discuss their reasoning.
You are unable to discuss statistics. At all. Additionally, your attempts to throw shade are hilarious. For example, the studies that show a link between smoking and cancer are in general NOT funded by pharma. Referring to Sheldrake and Smart as “professionals much more qualified than you” is selective credentialism, and delightfully wrong.