John Platko wrote:ADParker wrote:Really?! Wow!
So now you are claiming that not only is the supernatural immune to "scientific" investigation, but than even any affects on the real world that are caused by the supernatural are also immune?!
That somehow (I can't imagine what that "how" could be, must be magic
) if to use your example:
A bunch of people are selected, and some are prayed for (to a supernatural entity), and some not. That because 'the supernatural' is involved it would be impossible to simply count how many in each group got what was prayed for (improved health, less complications, a pony for Christmas...whatever) and how many did not?! And impossible to then compare the numbers and see what group fared better?!
Yes. That's about the size of it. Simply impossible to count.
Before getting into the rest of this (where you go off on a silly tangent instead of addressing the actual point):
That's just stupid
John Platko! Bafflingly stupid! Of course you can bloody count things.
If we imagined a simple scenario such as the subjects all pray to a different god for their entire skin to turn a certain shade of blue within the next 24 hours and remain so for three days. Then it would be childs-play to, after 24 hours count how many of each group have turned blue, and how many have not. And the 'fact' that the cause of that change was 'supernatural' as far as I can see wouldn't make it anymore difficult to do so. According to what you said you seem to think it would, and that makes no sense to me.
John Platko wrote:We went all through this in an earlier thread. Hackenslash linked to a medical attempted study of the effect of prayer. I showed how it was junk science, etc. etc.. I suppose I could find a link to that thread if you insist.
Red herring time. Who suggested a damn thing about the particular methodology of one particular study?! This was about your contention that the results of supernatural intervention can't even be measured, not flaws in methodology.
John Platko wrote:The basic problems with such a study are:
1) It is impossible to control who gets prayed for and who does not. Prayer is not like a pill where you can control who gets one and who doesn't.
Which has ZERO bearing on what was being discussed here, as you were not talking about a particular study, nor about who would be prayed for or not. In fact my examples were about people praying for something themselves (like a pony). And the simple ability to count the "hits and misses". Which
was done in that study, with negative results - which is of course where the apologetics come in.
What you claimed was a general point, and as such this in nothing but a red herring, given that what you said implied that even if such a thing could be controlled it would still be impossible to count.
John Platko wrote:2) There's no reason to believe that prayers, if they are answered, are answered in any kind on predictable and/or repeatable way. And even if they are, there's no reason to believe that a scientific study would have access to all the variables required for an accurate prediction.
More irrelevance!
Your contention was about the ability to count the results, not what the results could mean or how the cold be interpreted.
On the topic of the study however: Your claim here is still ridiculous, because like so many you can't seem to be bothered to grasp what the study was testing for in the first place: The study was a test of a claim; that a certain action has a certain predictable result, that praying to god X in this particular way get these certain results (like the claim that if one prays in this way one will get what they pray for). Now; you (and all of those apologists) can blather on about how "that's not how prayer works!" and "you shouldn't expect results like that" blah blah blah. But that is entirely beside the point, as the study was about testing for those results, nothing more, nothing less.
It's like if a study gets negative results in a study to see if pouring cold water onto sheets of paper makes it catch on fire, and people complaining that the study was flawed because combustion doesn't work like that!
The reason MOST people got so upset of course is because they got it into their heads,
contrary to all of the facts, that the negative result had something to do with the actual
existence of their cherished believed in god. With my analogy one could imagine some people getting all upset because deep down they think the negative result is a challenge to their belief in the existence of fire or something daft like that.
It's because some people have a strong persecution complex about certain cherished beliefs (the cherishing of those beliefs and the persecution complex and excessive defensiveness of the beliefs being largely indoctrinated into them I strongly suspect) resulting in them leaping to interpretations of those beliefs being under attack regardless of the facts of the situation.
John Platko wrote:3) If such a study could be done and the cause effect relationship of prayer to healing could be modeled then it would have been a classification error to consider healing caused by prayer supernatural.
What the Hel are you on about?!
Again this has nothing to do with
your own contention.
No; what positive results would show (and you can bet your arse apologists and 'believers' would be jumping up and down trumpeting it all over the place if it had!) is a correlation between the actions (prayers) and the results (whatever was being prayed for.) And that would provide grounds for further studies being warranted. There is always a cost/benefit measure to such things; there is little point in studying something until there is some indication that there is something there to study.
Those future studies might involve:
1. More studies to confirm, or otherwise, that the correlation actually exists.
2. Studies to try to determine what the causation(s) might be. Including studies to try to verify/discount particular possible causes.
I agree that "the supernatural" could never be the ('scientifically') discovered cause, because that term is far too nebulous, and only ever used as some kind of vague placeholder for claims of the mysterious unknown. The only results could be something discovered as the cause, which even if found to be "The god known as X did it" would not be classified as supernatural, or the cause would remain unknown, from which apologists would engage in their usual 'god of the gaps' bullshit and claim that their cherished 'supernatural' thingy was the oh so mysterious cause.
John Platko wrote:That's insane! It's like saying that even if the intercessory prayer to move a mountain (an example the Christian Bible gives) worked, and a mountain was actually moved; it would be impossible for anyone to notice themselves that it had moved, or photographic evidence etc.(although apparently it would be possible to have eyewitness testimony and stories that it had). That is quite frankly nuts! But it is what you basically just said.
Suffice it to say that if repeated scientific empirical experiments demonstrated that intercessory prayer could move mountains then such a cause effect relationship would be deemed natural. One need not visually see the actually forces to scientifically know they do, i.e. gravity, etc..
So now are you saying that scientific experiments on the effectiveness of prayer are
not by their very nature, pseudo-scientific. But that leaping to conclusions of "natural" or 'supernatural"
beyond the results of the studies is?!
{Sigh} if you can't even be bothered to address responses to your own claims properly then you are just wasting everyone's time, including your own.
by 
Gravity was explained? I didn't get the memo. I mean, I know a fair bit about how gravity works, but the real deep reason why there's gravity at all and how it fits in with everything else eludes me. Too bad hackenslash isn't around, he might be able to explain it.
and enjoy the show.
(Not to be confused with doing science to fix supernatural classification errors.)