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The history of humanity is filled with superstitious beliefs, many of which have gone out of style, or are extremely niche.
People believing dumb things, religious or not, is a universal.
In contrast, no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works. Some religions believe their priests have the Power of God, but they can't seem to demonstrate it.
There's the same documentation problem for UFOs and Bigfoot: high resolution cameras are in everyone's pocket for a decade+ now and yet we don't see increasing evidence.
Can you link me to your past examination of medical investigations of alleged miracles demonstrating where they break down?
As I've pointed out to other people on here, we know that certain aircraft (like the NGAD demonstrator) have flown but have never had a high-resolution picture taken and publicized. Do you also disbelieve in the NGAD, or do you concede that it's possible for aircraft to fly without being detected by cell phone cameras? If the latter, why are you making this argument as pertains to UFOs? (I think it's a better argument as regards Bigfoot.)
You asking for me to provide debunkings of claimed medical miracles is an great example of backwards thinking on how to go about evaluating claims of supernatural occurrences.
Weird shit happens all the time, but that doesn't mean it's a miraculous event from the Power of God. No study has ever demonstrated miracle healings working. There's a million dollar prize by James Randi for a demonstration of any occult power under laboratory conditions. There are tons of religious hospitals, why don't they have a track record of better outcomes than the secular ones? Anyone who could actually demonstrate a new power of healing or prediction or weather control would become immensely famous and presumably very wealthy. And yet no one can pull it off under strict scientific standards. Telling.
People used to take pictures of UFOs. They weren't really aliens. People still claim to have alien encounters and see ghosts and all that kind of thing. Yet the evidence never seems to get better. The most recent brand of UFO hype is over military systems detecting strange objects, which often turn out to be balloons and artifacts of the cameras.
If aliens were such advanced fucking space creatures capable of spaceflight then presumably they'd be even more impossible to detect than NGAD if they so chose. (Also NGAD stuff purposely tries to avoid airspace where casual observation would occur and has never been known to try to abduct someone. Note that some portion of UFO claims were in fact US military aircraft, so it's really ironic you bring that up.)
Constant streams of major claims backed by shitty evidence is good evidence of shitty claims due to human foibles, not that there's really something there. If there were something really there, at some point we'd expect strong evidence to emerge. People are certainly highly motivated to look.
What I am actually asking for you to do is demonstrate that you've actually looked into the question at all. There's nothing wrong with not looking into miracles (I haven't, not really something I am all that invested in) and I certainly don't expect you to just to win an argument on the Internet, life's short. But "no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works" suggests that you speak from a position of personal knowledge. If what you meant was "I've never heard of any religious believer saying X, Y, Z," then that's a different claim, and that's fine. But if you've actually looked into the question extensively and documented your findings, I might be interested in reading your conclusions. If you haven't looked into the question, why are you making the argument? It seems to me that arguments from ignorance only incentivize not knowing anything, and while arguing about Nietzsche on Twitter is funny, it's not really an ideal epistemic environment.
I agree with this.
What exactly qualifies as "miraculous healings"? Do studies showing that prayer seems to expedite healing count? Spontaneous remission of cancer? Regrown arm?
No there is not, but you should also understand the difference between alleged miracles and occult power.
Are you unfamiliar with the research showing the positive connection between spirituality and good health outcomes?
Miracles are not the same thing as superpowers. The debunking of a claim to be able to work miracles cannot prove that miracles do not occur (and, similarly, proof of a miracle would not be evidence of superpowers.)
Yes, UFOs =! aliens. In fact, many of the leading "UFOlogists" think that UFOs aren't really aliens.
What's your objective metric for this claim?
Yes, I am aware. In fact a certain portion of the UFO phenomena may be cultivated by the US government precisely to hide advanced aircraft.
Then why did you make this argument at all?
This is also true of next-generation aircraft.
If you simply aim the level of epistemic rigor you have here at investigating claims of religion, the paranormal, aliens, or anything else supernatural you'll find I'm right.
I've looked into this question plenty. I was born into and raised in a religion that believed in the priesthood power, including healings and intercessory prayer.
None of it's true. If it were, we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation.
You can go read The Demon Haunted World for a thorough grounding in how to go about debunking this kind of thing.
The Catholics do try pretty hard to rigorously document miracles, but naturally non-Catholics don't tend to find them all that convincing.
If I had found you were right (at least, to casually dismiss UFO reports on the basis that they weren't being photographed by cell phones), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I can believe that you examined in person the specific belief set you were exposed to a child! But your firsthand testimony may not by itself suffice to persuade third parties. And from a purely rational standpoint this is the correct perspective to take; simply because I have never seen a solar eclipse does not mean that they do not exist.
(Fortunately, I actually have seen an eclipse; it's an example.)
I have not read it, but I'm sure Sagan, in The Demon Haunted World, discussed how humans are hardly impartial observers, particularly when they have some sort of vested interest in a thing - and Sagan, it seems to me, definitely was not in a position to be an impartial observer on the UFO question.
Now, to give Sagan (who told Congress "I think a moderate support of investigations of UFO’s might very well have some scientific paydirt") credit, I suspect he probably had a much more nuanced view of UFOs than many skeptics, and it's quite possible that his views weren't influenced by his personal stakes in the matter.
Perhaps non-Catholics are not the most disinterested parties either, although (as a non-Catholic) when I've looked into some of their miracles rather casually I've found some of them to be rather difficult to dismiss.
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