Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
For those of you who were not born into/raised with some kind of religion, how did you find your way to it in your adulthood?
I'm a male lawyer in my mid-40s. I was raised by irreligious boomers (who have drifted into extreme anti-religion in their old age). My childhood experience of religion was essentially zero. I'm not a hard atheist or anti-religious, but I also don't feel a "god-shaped hole" where many people seem to try to shove some kind of belief system (including the Current Thing) in an attempt to fill it. It seems more like I'm lacking the socket where some kind of faith module would even go.
I do much outdoors (pondering hiking the PCT next year, which wouldn't be my first thru-hike) and enough time outside will have me thinking "this has to be intentional Creation to explain why it's so amazing in so many ways." But it's a big gap from there to "sin is real and Jesus Christ was the son of God and sent to cleanse me of my sins" (yes, I'm aware that gap is where faith comes in).
I have investigated some churches around me, but all feel very culturally Alien (discounting the ones that would clearly be a bad fit since their doctrine appears to be "We Support the Current Thing, but we do so with a sprinkling of Jesus"). Church websites alone are enough to give me that Alien feeling. It's like the "Women Lawyers" associations that are technically open to all (to avoid problems with anti-discrimination laws) and some men do join, but it would take a Hannibal Lecter gurney and straitjacket to get me there--it is so obviously Not My Place that I would never go voluntarily. I get that feeling from any church I've looked into, too. So I can't say of the options I have near me call me into trying to learn more.
I am cradle LDS but needed to find my way back to the church after an atheist period.
For me, the beginning was reading the Sequences and realizing the LDS church had extremely satisfying answers to every anti-religion argument they made. Our answers for theodicy, the Invisible Dragon in the Garage, the nature of consciousness, free will, etc. are all quite good imo, if you are starting from a rationalist-adjacent perspective.
But what really brought me back was simple, undeniable, tangible evidence. I decided to try to pray for something (freedom from an addiction I had) and the result was spectacular, far beyond anything I'd have expected. I then set about more formally testing prayer and related things and found consistent, similar results.
I think "sin is real" at least should be fairly self-evident. There are self-destructive behaviors which both make you feel worse as a person, and decrease your capacity. Making an effort to avoid them makes us both happier and more capable of accomplishing unrelated goals. One can (and I have) run a series of tests to confirm this.
As far as faith in Jesus, I don't think there are any knock-down philosophical arguments that prove Christianity more true than, say, Hinduism. But I do think there are practical tests that work. Prayer and fasting get results. God doesn't ask for totally blind faith (that would be silly) nor for us to rationally consider philosophy in a vacuum to determine the correct religion (something very few, if any, humans are capable of). He provides hard evidence to those looking and ready for it.
The fact that prayer is what brought you back is really strange to me. Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works? What about other statistical evidence, like people who live on coasts that have earthquakes tend to die more to tsunamis? Completely area-based, unless you make the argument that people who live on coasts are more sinful and thus encounter the wrath of God more often. How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out? Knowing that statistics has incredible predictive power is enough to dissuade me that prayer does anything at all.
Well, prayer is (among other things) making requests of God. When I say it works, I don't mean that you can ask God for just anything and it will always happen. But if you know what you can ask for, and ask in faith, then it will work.
Just like with any other test, every piece of evidence one way or another helps to refine your model of reality. If you pray for something and it doesn't happen, you should shunt probability from models of the world which predicted the request fulfilled, into models of the world that predict the opposite. This means both decreasing your overall probability estimate of God existing, as well as studying to figure out the character of God and the nature of prayer, and pushing some probability towards hypotheses of a different character of God who would not have fulfilled that request.
In other words, every prayer is an opportunity to learn more of God's character and what he wants of you, as well as gathering evidence of whether he exists in the first place. There are other tests too; I think the most reliable are tests of God's commandments. Pick one, make an effort to follow it, and if it's truly one of God's commandments the results will be good. God encourages these sorts of tests.
In regards to addiction, I believe in a God whose primary goal is to help us grow. He rarely denies us the opportunity to test ourselves. Addictions are really rough, but they're great training, and he'd much prefer to strengthen and change us (something he will not do without our cooperation) than remove the temptation. This model of God leads me to pray very differently from someone with a different model. I don't expect to see the addiction (or whatever it is) completely defeated on my behalf, but I do expect all sorts of revelation regarding how I can best go about fighting it, what my next step should be, etc. as well as direct help when I'm in a truly desperate situation.
My own freedom from addiction was certainly more than the null hypothesis (strict materialism) would predict but certainly not sufficient evidence alone. But the much more involved tests I set up later were more than satisfactory. Basically it involved testing out commandments, particularly commandments which distinguished between alternative likely models, and tracking the results. For example, we've been commanded to take care of our bodies, eat well, exercise, etc. but I would expect that to work regardless of whether it was a commandment or just a good idea. I would not expect prayer and/or fasting to work better than doing nothing or meditation, so those commandments are better for initial testing.
I know there is because I made some myself. If the tests had turned out the other way, though, I certainly wouldn't have believed any study saying otherwise (that prayer does in fact work).
If you really think that this is something that works empirically, it should be easy to design some studies that properly prove it. Has anyone done it? Or maybe there are too many confounding factors like true belief? If you fail to pray for something and it happens anyway, did God do it?
I'm perfectly happy to let Christians have their faith. I think it's healthy. But I really can't stand these kinds of outrageous claims about how prayer really works when it's been pretty clear that it does not work at all for years. If God only grants you specific, insignificant, entirely-taking-place-in-the-mental-realm prayers, can you say it's that useful, especially if something like stoicism grants you similar results? Is God pleased by secular stoicism? If we compared prayers made to God to prayers made to stoicism, what would the results look like?
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about at all. I saw (and see) entirely tangible results. My claim is specifically that if you pray for things, with a good understanding of who God is and what prayer actually is, you're likely to get those things. It's not limited to revelation or other mental changes.
Well, studies can't truly prove anything, ever. But I've seen plenty of relevant studies. Some tested whether crops which were prayed over did better than others, some tested whether people who were prayed for survived longer than others. Some have positive results, some negative (no effect) results. I'm not satisfied with any of them.
If you look at some of the popular commentary on these studies it is shockingly bad. Just look at the first study mentioned:
Basically the guy is saying "ok, evidence says prayer works, but maybe people in the control group were prayed for too, so it doesn't count." OK, but the experimental group was likely prayed for much more. It's like saying that a vitamin C supplement study (with a control that doesn't take the supplement) is impossible because the control group will still eat some vitamin C. No, that's not how studies work. The same calibre of commentary (easily dismissed by anyone with half a brain to think about these things) can be found everywhere. The studies themselves are not much better, and I think you can dismiss those that find positive results for prayer as easily as I can dismiss those that find negative results.
I could go on. Maybe a smarter person than me could define a good study. Maybe they already have and I haven't seen it yet. But in the meantime I think it's up to each person to figure this out for themselves. It's really not hard to do, as I did, a "controlled" study of the efficacy of prayer. Make a list of twenty things you want, good things that you think God wants you to have, come up with a rough estimate of how likely they are to happen, and pray for a randomized half of them. It doesn't take that long.
Yes? God works the same way reality itself does--we don't fully understand him or have perfect knowledge of every detail of his mind. I don't understand the objection here, is God not allowed to do anything unless we pray for it? I don't believe prayer is guaranteed to achieve results--for that to happen I'd need a perfect understanding of who God is, rather than a pretty good one. I just think it raises the odds, basically proportional to how good my understanding of God is (and reality, too).
For example, say my dad is depressed because my mom is on her deathbed. So I pray for her to live a bit longer so that my dad can have more time with her before she passes. But, say I don't know some crucial detail--maybe he'll be happier and more at peace in the long run if she passes now. Let's assume I have a correct model of God, too, and I'm asking in faith. This doesn't necessarily mean the prayer will be answered, simply because my model of reality is correct. God knows my heart, and my prayer (which is really about alleviating my dad's suffering) doesn't force him to ignore the spirit of my request.
Now, I've been down this road before, with other interlocutors. So I'm going to politely request, using enough lines that you're sure to not miss this part--
please
please
please
please
please
please
please
think through the implications of this before typing up a snarky response. Assume I've done the same. My only claim here is that prayer increases the odds of the thing you requested happening. I'm not saying it's guaranteed. I'm not saying you're stupid, bad, or wrong if you pray for something and it doesn't happen. Please assume I've actually put ten seconds into thinking through the implications of this.
Have you seriously tried to test it? It will take perhaps an hour to get started, and then five minutes a day for a few weeks. Provided you go into it with an open mind I'm confident you'll see results. Plenty of people put that much time into meditation on a whim.
Let's say that the study really did prove that prayer works.
Okay. What kind of wording was used during the prayer? How many people prayed for the subject? Did they pray a long, individual prayer, a short, individual prayer, or multiple prayers throughout the days? Does length of time spent praying increase the statistical likeliness that the prayer works? Do acts of faith (fasting, attending worship, displaying faith artwork) improve the outcome? Does Biblical conduct (charity, honoring the Sabbath, honoring one's parents) improve the outcome? Does the intensity of the prayer (praying for one's child recovering from cancer as opposed to praying for one's stubbed toe to stop hurting) affect the outcome? Are people in the faith more likely to have a support group that helps them relieve stress?
Do you see that there are an impossible amount of factors involved in such a study? I guarantee the study was not so rigorous as to specifically probe every single aspect that I've listed here. Even if you asked them, you wouldn't get straight answers. People forget, people don't understand their own minds or why they think certain things or do certain acts.
This is the same problem we ran into last week with the gender dysphoria thing. It's impossible to look inside someone's mind. Do you tally your successes to failures? For how long? Are they correlated at all with the other upswings of your life?
In my youth, I thought that when I was worried sick about my dog, calling for it to come back over and over, praying desperately for it to come back, that it was certainly a miracle when it did, in fact, come back. The problem is that there is no evidence for this whatsoever. There is no way to run two exactly matching sets of reality, one where I prayed that my dog came back, and one where I did not pray that my dog came back. For such a trivial matter, it is easy to say that my calling had more effect than prayer. What about for not-so-trivial matters? The feeling that a miracle happened would be even greater, but it would have no more basis than my dog anecdote. I felt spiritually uplifted by that event, just as I guarantee a girl who mistakenly thought she was a boy would feel great relief at wearing boys' clothing and being called by a masculine name. But feelings are not proof of anything. We are not scientific beings. We are animals, a big ball of emotions, tightly wound at times.
I can tell you I prayed for a troubled girl once every night, and despite my devotion, despite pledging I would never ask for anything more besides if this wish was granted, she ended up shooting herself due to chronic abuse that I had no idea about. It was after some years of sustained nightly praying that her soul did not go to Hell that I realized the utter stupidity of such a venture.
Well, look, I don't put any faith in the study at all. I only brought it up to critique what I see as both typical, and extremely lackluster, commentary around that kind of study (and by extension, the quality of the studies themselves). Like I said, I'm sure either of us could absolutely tear it apart.
But these objections you've listed really aren't great. Just as quantum physics adds up to normalcy, all these factors add up to a statistically significant difference between the experimental group and the control. If it works, that's an enormously important thing to know about the world, and it would be worth first replicating, then attempting to control for each of these factors in turn.
Yes, for a few weeks. I would have gone much longer but the results were extremely definitive quickly, to such an extent that continuing the test felt quite disrespectful. I recognize this means that the test really isn't worth much as far as evidence goes to anyone other than myself--I can only ask you to try to replicate it.
Well this is why I made a list of things I wanted, estimated their outcome probabilities, chose half at random, prayed for them, and then compared my average error in that group to my average error in the group of outcomes I didn't pray for.
Human reasoning isn't perfect but I do think it's capable of overcoming this sort of error with enough study. The dog will probably come back eventually, so if you want to use [dog comes back] as your test of prayer then it probably needs to be focused on timing. How long does the dog normally take to come back? How long did it take to come back when you prayed for it? A few of my desired outcomes were this sort of test (though a bit less trivial). I certainly agree that the feelings themselves aren't good evidence.
I'm very sorry. I think this absolutely should reduce your faith in God. But it should take most of that probability mass from theories of God, and reality, that most strongly predicted otherwise. In this case, I'd say a lot of that probability mass should be taken from the theory that being alive was actually good for her--that what you were praying for is actually what you would have wanted with full knowledge of all the details.
It's pretty trite to say "she's in a better place now" but I truly do believe she is--with family members who care for her a lot more and a lot better than it sounds like her living family did. You were praying against that outcome, and God didn't answer your prayer.
I'm not asking you to--I wouldn't expect anyone to take my results on faith. In fact, not only would I not believe my own results if someone else told them to me, but I often don't believe they happened myself, and it takes a fair bit of convincing to remind myself they actually did happen.
Ha. Haha.
I have sometimes thought that someone being dead means that you will never worry about them again, because their story has ended; they are right where you left them, and you will always know where they are, what their status is.
Offense taken, all the same. What an absolutely awful way to view life. I suppose everyone who is dead is better off dead, otherwise they wouldn't be dead, right? Not to mention the conclusion that perhaps the suicidal ought to take their own lives since their earthly ones suck so bad.
Regardless, I wish you the best in your theories, though I will continue to doubt them.
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