RE: Please give our mythology a try!

Except that their theologies quite often directly contradict each other. They cannot all be true.

Just stating your claim again doesn’t make it any stronger. It’s still false. I gave reasons why it’s false before. I’ll try to make them clearer this time.

Something you’ll hear frequently in debates like this is the statement that “correlation doesn’t imply causation”. This is true. However, the reverse is not. Causation does imply correlation. What that means is that if the statement “A causes B” is intelligible at all, then it means that occurrences of B are correlated with occurrences of A.

We say, “smoking causes lung cancer”, and we mean that the chance of getting cancer is significantly increased by smoking. More specifically we mean that occurrences of lung cancer are correlated with smoking.

For the statement “prayers are answered” to be meaningful at all, it must mean that prayers cause events in the world. It needn’t be direct. If you pray, and your god hears, and it directly causes the chain, then the prayer can also be said to have caused the change.

But for this idea of “correlation” to be made meaningful, you have to look at both occurrences and non-occurrences of both A and B.

For any prayer intended to qualify for the Pew study’s question, the prayed-for event has a definite probability of occurring. To (meaningfully) say that the prayer was answered is to say that the chance of the event occurring is higher after the prayer than it would have been if the prayer weren’t made.

That’s a testable hypothesis, and it’s one that’s been tested quite a few times, such as the Mayo Clinic study I mentioned. What the tests show is that prayer has no observable effect on outcomes. Pray or don’t pray, it makes no difference in the real world.

If a million people were to find ten coins each and throw them in the air, about a thousand of them would see their coins come up all heads. If those thousand then sincerely prayed for it to happen again and threw the coins again, odds are pretty good that it will happen for one of them, purely by chance.

Now, if it happened again for ten of them, and we could reliably repeat the experiment and have it routinely happen that about a thousand got all heads on the first try, and about ten of those thousand got all heads on the second try after praying, and we also could show that skipping the prayer between the tosses meant that only about one of the thousand who got all heads on the first time got it again on the second, then you have some evidence for the claim that the prayer was affecting the outcome. But we know that simply doesn’t happen—casinos make an enormous income based on it.

So, the claim “prayers are answered” cannot be used as evidence in favor of the existence of any gods for the simple fact that prayers are not answered in any meaningful way.

This an argument from a false analogy.

Spiritual sensations are not like the sense of taste, which has a physical basis. We can observe measured correlations between claims of taste between different observers and they correlate with specific external stimuli. Sugar is sweet, lemon is sour.

In fact, we can synthesize compounds that are chemically similar to sugar in specific ways and they, too, taste sweet. There are other compounds that binds to the taste buds in a way that confuses the receptors for “sweet” foods so that they’re triggered instead by “sour” foods.

The whole process is purely physical. There’s nothing “magical” about it.

The “spiritual sense” you’re proposing has no such foundation. You cannot point to the organ with which you sense these things. You cannot show evidence that any mechanism exists which would allow this sense to operate.

If the claims that this “spiritual sense” nevertheless functions, in spite of these obvious limitations, is true, then we should be able to do repeatable tests that result in meaningful measurements. But, every time we try, the “spiritual sense” fails.

It’s no good to say “it works, even though you don’t understand it”, because we do have an entirely plausible explanation for the phenomenon that’s completely consistent with the rest of scientific knowledge: it ain’t real.

We do understand it. It’s the ones claiming they have these paranormal experiences who don’t.

That radically overstates the supposed similarity. Since the overwhelming majority of these people are conditioned from birth to believe that such a “divine force or entity” with exactly those properties exists, it’s unlikely it would take anything more than stimulating a sense of euphoria together with a sense of certainty to trigger an experience with those properties.

There’s a strong correlation between the subject’s mythological heritage and the details of the experience. The evidence seems to suggest nothing more than that they’re experiencing particular emotions and filling in the details from their own imaginations.

Not so. After all, we have a great deal of experience suggesting that sound does, in fact, exist. As with taste, we understand the mechanisms that produce sounds and allow us to sense them.

So, philosophical conundrums aside, if a tree falls over in a forest, and nobody is around to hear, we can say with a great deal of confidence that the vibrations one normally senses as sound were still present.

On the other hand, you’ve no meaningful evidence whatsoever that a hypothetical analogous “spiritual vibration” exists.

People routinely have parts of the brain activated outside of their control. Sometimes the causes are obvious, like the arousal response on seeing someone you find sexually attractive, or even a photograph of them. Sometimes, they’re more difficult to find, as with epileptic seizures. Often, we still don’t know the cause, as the brain is a very complicated machine.

The fact that they’re experiencing something isn’t at issue here, it’s your proposed explanation for it that I’m rejecting. It demands that too many other secure scientific theories be overturned, and there’s simply not enough evidence for it.

It takes very little evidence for me to believe that these experiences have a mundane cause because I already have a great deal of evidence that other, similar mental experiences have mundane causes. I have zero evidence of any other kinds of causes, so what you’ve got is a wild conjecture that’s not even worth the effort to test.

So, you must advocate recreational drug use, much like Timothy Leary, then. After all, they result in “experiences” that you can’t readily differentiate from these supposed “spiritual” ones, except that they don’t always conform to your mythology.