I just said that's the difference between agnostic (I.E. there's no evidence in support of but there's also no evidence against) vs atheist (there's no evidence in support of therefore it must not exist.)
So, why aren't you agnostic about Thor?
Or about The Great And Powerful Space Werewolf? Or about the Monetarium particles that are *really* the source of value in objects, and that's why they're worth money?
Why aren't you agnostic about every other cockamamie half-assed nonsense that's ever been created? After all, there's no evidence even *possible* against most of them. Shouldn't you be taking your carefully considered and only-logical "neutral" position in the middle and arguing that they MIGHT be true?
You seem to work from a base assumption that if there is no evidence for something it must not exist even if there's no evidence against it.
That's pretty much exactly right: If there's absolutely no reason to believe a hypothesis *might* be true, there's absolutely no reason to behave as if it *was* true. And before you come back with first-year philosophy sophistry, there *is* such a thing as testing a hypothesis by assuming it is true and seeing if the expected results appear.
They don't.
Ever.
What gets *really* clever is when you discover that supposed "real effects" of religion, such as the tendency of recent converts to change for the better and make improvements to their lives, is that it's been proven that religious conversion itself does this.
As in, NO MATTER WHAT RELIGION IT IS, you get the conversion effects. And it's addictive, too - which is why you get people who are actually addicted to the emotional sensations of being "born again", and so they change religion over and over and over again to make their brains produce that same new religion feeling.
But anyway.
I seem to recall there being some evidence that prayer did speed healing, although I don't remember the details of the study.
There was such a study. However, their results were not duplicable, AND further examination revealed that their study was quite deliberately "gamed" to produce the pro-prayer result - they'd chosen their subjects and determined control-vs-test knowing, in advance, which patients would go to which group, meaning they assigned the ones most likely to recover into their test group.
If the study showed significant differences, believers would say it was evidence of god, non-believers would say it was a placebo effect, or positive social reinforcement, or some such.
Bullshit. The placebo effect is *measurable*, and well-known. The whole point of a drug study is to determine if your results are better or worse than placebo, after all, and that's why there's such a thing as control groups.
And, fundamentally, with *every single question* except the existence of God, a complete lack of evidence in favour combined with no reason to believe combined with millenia of failure to produce even one result combine to the conclusion that the hypothesis is meaningless. And I want to know why *that* question gets the special pleading you're so eager to do, accusing me of poor thinking and logical failure when you yourself make that exact same "logical failure" with regards to the Space Werewolves.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-04 03:33 am (UTC)So, why aren't you agnostic about Thor?
Or about The Great And Powerful Space Werewolf?
Or about the Monetarium particles that are *really* the source of value in objects, and that's why they're worth money?
Why aren't you agnostic about every other cockamamie half-assed nonsense that's ever been created? After all, there's no evidence even *possible* against most of them. Shouldn't you be taking your carefully considered and only-logical "neutral" position in the middle and arguing that they MIGHT be true?
You seem to work from a base assumption that if there is no evidence for something it must not exist even if there's no evidence against it.
That's pretty much exactly right: If there's absolutely no reason to believe a hypothesis *might* be true, there's absolutely no reason to behave as if it *was* true. And before you come back with first-year philosophy sophistry, there *is* such a thing as testing a hypothesis by assuming it is true and seeing if the expected results appear.
They don't.
Ever.
What gets *really* clever is when you discover that supposed "real effects" of religion, such as the tendency of recent converts to change for the better and make improvements to their lives, is that it's been proven that religious conversion itself does this.
As in, NO MATTER WHAT RELIGION IT IS, you get the conversion effects. And it's addictive, too - which is why you get people who are actually addicted to the emotional sensations of being "born again", and so they change religion over and over and over again to make their brains produce that same new religion feeling.
But anyway.
I seem to recall there being some evidence that prayer did speed healing, although I don't remember the details of the study.
There was such a study. However, their results were not duplicable, AND further examination revealed that their study was quite deliberately "gamed" to produce the pro-prayer result - they'd chosen their subjects and determined control-vs-test knowing, in advance, which patients would go to which group, meaning they assigned the ones most likely to recover into their test group.
If the study showed significant differences, believers would say it was evidence of god, non-believers would say it was a placebo effect, or positive social reinforcement, or some such.
Bullshit. The placebo effect is *measurable*, and well-known. The whole point of a drug study is to determine if your results are better or worse than placebo, after all, and that's why there's such a thing as control groups.
And, fundamentally, with *every single question* except the existence of God, a complete lack of evidence in favour combined with no reason to believe combined with millenia of failure to produce even one result combine to the conclusion that the hypothesis is meaningless. And I want to know why *that* question gets the special pleading you're so eager to do, accusing me of poor thinking and logical failure when you yourself make that exact same "logical failure" with regards to the Space Werewolves.