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Notes -
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
And:
The atheist/religious believer inferential gap is always huge, and especially difficult to bridge in rationalist forums. As someone who went from a materialist to one of the faithful, let's see if I can explain why statements like:
tend to rub me the wrong way. More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.
What most rationalists (with the noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense. Many modern philosophers argue that any description of life itself can't be formulated via materialism means, without resorting to an appeal to some higher organizational, metaphysical structure.
Historically the scientific materialist worldview has of course revealed much about the natural world, primarily through demythologizing our place in it. Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.
While a ScientistTM may just scoff at the importance of meaning or purpose and say "Who cares, my science still gives me Truth," well, unfortunately that assertion is becoming more and more false by the day. L.P. Koch gives a decent summary in The Death of Science, but you can read about the phenomenon of our scientific apparatus falling apart all over the place. You've got the joke field of 'consciousness studies', the deep issues in quantum physics, the shocking revelation that our cosmic model is completely wrong via the James Webb space telescope, et cetera. Or just look at the fiasco of the Covid-19 response.
All of this to say, when people nowadays talk about religion having a comeback, what they often mean on a deeper level is that the Enlightenment myth, first posed by Descartes, is failing. Starting with the existentialists in the mid-20th century, this understanding is now percolated through to the masses with the help of the Internet and other mass communication technology. It's increasingly clear that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the 19th century, again while granting us great power, is a framework that only goes so far; crucially this framework does not and cannot touch on the deeper questions of human meaning, other than giving us a destructive, nihilistic hedonism.
Ultimately the rationalist Enlightenment has been a Faustian bargain for humanity - we've gained unfathomable power over the natural world compared to our ancestors, but we have lost our souls in the process.
Look I just want levels of evidence to match levels of claims.
If any belief system says “we have the power to meaningfully affect material reality” then let’s see the evidence.
For example, where’s the indisputable evidence faith healing works? Plenty of religions claim that one still today. Also the power of prayer to affect outcomes is very common.
Those are very testable propositions.
And yet.
Or, what exactly is a soul anyway? Not material, not energy, some strange third thing. Can’t quite measure it, but it’s definitely there because the scriptures tell us so.
How much of a given holy book is literal vs. figurative? How do we know? Who’s in charge anyway?
Not even the believers come to some strong consensus about the particulars of theology, let alone present sufficient evidence for an actual skeptic.
I’m not going to trust any ideology about “meaning and purpose” if it can’t address basic epistemological issues any small child should be able to point out. We can sort out our emotional issues without resorting to what sounds good.
I’ve been a devout believer and was told we had the Truth and that it could obviously withstand scrutiny. But really it relied upon strong emotions, group ties and peer pressure, motivated reasoning, and just so stories to protect faith from scrutiny.
If there is some higher power, it ought to have higher standards than the religions I’ve seen.
What’s really funny is plenty of Christians will take the opposite line you have and claim credit for the Enlightenment. And plenty of us will call secular ideologies we don’t like—say communism and wokeism—political religions.
Better men than myself have gone up against the edifice of materialist science, spent whole careers showing strong effects and getting nowhere, like Rupert Sheldrake and plenty of others. I don't trust the scientific apparatus to test things like prayer in a valid way, and the replication crisis, Covid, and other issues, to my mind, have born out that skepticism.
I'll also leave a link to this article on angels and demons I quoted below.
If faith healing actually worked it would be easy to prove. That you would shy away from it confirms the weakness of your position.
Some religious people will even say things like god won’t respond to tests or took back the holy relic because otherwise we wouldn’t need faith.
Whining about the replication crisis getting in the way of proving the Power of God is such a funny cope that is classic Motte.
If religion were so potent then heretics like me should be getting blown out of the water with evidence and/or burned by heavenly fire, like back in the biblical days.
Faith healing would only be easy to prove if it wasn't a miracle: as in, if it was a natural process that repeats itself given the necessary conditions. But nobody claims it's that: the claim is that God directly intervenes. Think about what would happen if you tried to test it: you watch as a faith healer prays to God to heal someone. If nothing happens the faith healer can always say that God chose not to heal her: and if she gets better, the skeptic can always say that she would have gotten better anyway! There are countless testimonies of miraculous healing out there. Even journal articles backed by medical evidence: but the skeptic can always say that something else must have caused it.
The classic response here is “why does god hate amputees?”
“Miracle” is a red herring. Can an actual effect be observed even if the mechanism isn’t understood?
If a claimed effect can’t ever be separated out from other causes then it sounds made up.
“Testimonies” of a phenomenon are a starting point for investigation, not strong evidence by themselves. The paper you linked to is about one lady.
If the power of god via the laying on of hands or prayer is so unreliable that it can’t be distinguished from other causes then that’s normally something we would judge to be made up. Faith healers will go on TV and touch people but no one’s showing studies over time where say, inexplicably, those people have a 35% better chance of outcomes relative to average. Or say Christian hospitals consistently outperforming secular ones. Or Muslim surgeons outperforming secular ones.
Robust studies showing consistent effects would signal there was something going on, even if we couldn’t directly detect the mechanism.
If the power was real and as effective as adherents claim the evidence would not be so shy about being observed. Biblically, the power of god gets demonstrated quite strongly but we can’t seem to get that to happen nowadays. The simplest explanation consistent with human behavior and the laws of physics is that it was just made up.
“I do a wishful thinking and sometimes magic happens that can’t be measured/observed by others” is not a strong approach to reality regardless of whether it’s associated with religion or not.
The user above you cited a specific “miracle,” restoration of eyesight, and you cited a lack of a different category of miracle, regrowth of a removed limb. You wouldn’t claim Viagra doesn’t work because boners could have other causes but it doesn’t make bald people grow hair.
Even disregarding the categorical error, there’s another point to be made. Instead of claiming your null result negates and dismisses the documentation of a positive result as a single anecdote instead of data, come up with a different falsifiable hypothesis rather than jumping to the null hypothesis. If there is a fully material way to restore macular degeneration, the world needs to know it to relieve much suffering.
It seems that in the cited restoration of sight, the person knew they were being prayed for. We also know that yogis can perform incredible feats of biofeedback manipulation through meditative states and/or self-hypnosis. The accounts of Jesus at least once have Him saying, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Perhaps there is a method of hypnosis which can cure certain types of blindness. Come up with an experiment to falsify that hypothesis, changing no factors from the cited anecdote.
It’s not a categorical error to:
The null hypothesis is that lots of health outcomes happen for reasons we don’t understand the murky details of, because the human body is simultaneously wondrous and a dumpster fire, and there’s no reason to go claiming miracles from god when a positive outcome happens. That’s just picking hits and ignoring misses.
If faith healing happened commonly, as many claim it does, then there ought to be a way to show that systematically. Not one offs.
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