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 Smacks wrote:
[Saying that they categorically do not, is a perfectly rational conclusion based on the fact that no one has ever been able to prove they have powers under any kind of scrutiny.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

 insaniak wrote:

 Smacks wrote:
[Saying that they categorically do not, is a perfectly rational conclusion based on the fact that no one has ever been able to prove they have powers under any kind of scrutiny.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

This is true. I, however, am a "put your mouth where the money is" kind of guy. If you or someone you know believes they have psychic powers, take the Randi Challenge. Its worth a million friggin bucks! If I could do some crazy gak with my noggin, I'd be the first one to cash in!

 insaniak wrote:
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

At some point it starts to be. If there is an absence of proof (or even hints that proof might exist) despite vast amounts of effort invested into finding that proof then the most likely explanation is "nope, doesn't exist". It might not be 100% proof by the strictest dictionary definition of the word, but just like in a lot of other contexts it's reasonable to define "proof" as "evidence beyond any reasonable doubt".

Regardless, this seems to have missed the point somewhat. I didn't say I know people with genuine psychic ability. I said I know people who think they have that ability.

There is no scientific evidence of the existence of God. That doesn't mean that everyone who days they believe in God is lying. It just means they believe in something that has no empirical proof.

Same thing here. Smacks claimed to dislike psychics on the basis that they deliberately mislead people. My point was simply that this is a large claim to make, and from my personal experience is simply not true.

Whether out not you believe in psychic ability has no bearing on whether or not the people who claim to be psychic do.

 insaniak wrote:
Regardless, this seems to have missed the point somewhat. I didn't say I know people with genuine psychic ability. I said I know people who think they have that ability.

There is no scientific evidence of the existence of God. That doesn't mean that everyone who days they believe in God is lying. It just means they believe in something that has no empirical proof.

Same thing here. Smacks claimed to dislike psychics on the basis that they deliberately mislead people. My point was simply that this is a large claim to make, and from my personal experience is simply not true.

Whether out not you believe in psychic ability has no bearing on whether or not the people who claim to be psychic do.

For the record I already posted my agreement with this:

Nobody is disputing the fact that "psychic powers" do not exist. The issue is that you're assuming that everyone who claims to have them is engaging in deliberate fraud, when this clearly isn't true. There are obviously a lot of frauds out there, but there are also people who sincerely believe that their "powers" are real. And there are ways to talk about those people being wrong without calling them frauds or other forum-rule-violating names.

 insaniak wrote:
Regardless, this seems to have missed the point somewhat. I didn't say I know people with genuine psychic ability. I said I know people who think they have that ability.

There is no scientific evidence of the existence of God. That doesn't mean that everyone who days they believe in God is lying. It just means they believe in something that has no empirical proof.

Same thing here. Smacks claimed to dislike psychics on the basis that they deliberately mislead people. My point was simply that this is a large claim to make, and from my personal experience is simply not true.

Whether out not you believe in psychic ability has no bearing on whether or not the people who claim to be psychic do.

FWIW, I agree with you. I think there are people that are convinced (at least at a conscious level) that they do have psychich powers. I have met several such people who certainly seemed to have convinced themselves of such, and weren't trying to make a dime off of it.

 Smacks wrote:

 Hordini wrote:
my take on it is that scientific discovery can help to further one's understanding of the divine. If you believe that God created the universe, and gave humans the gift of a mind to think and reason with, then really, it's kind of your responsibility to think and reason and try to figure things out as much as you can. Theistic belief can help to explain the why, science can help to understand the how. That doesn't mean we always get everything right, but it certainly doesn't mean that we should shy away from things like science and thinking.

Well I think that is perfectly reasonable, science might even end up proving the existence of a god like creator one day (who knows?). I could agree with you 100% if we were just talking about believing in a god (any god). But Christians don't just believe in any god, they believe quite specific things about him, what he wants, how he operates, how we speak to him. This is the part that strains belief. The only basis for these aspects of belief is the bible. But why should the bible be any more true than the million other religious texts?

If there is something that science is clearly showing us to be true that you feel contradicts your interpretation of a text, perhaps it is time to revisit that text. Perhaps your original interpretation of that text was flawed.

Yes, perhaps. But then perhaps the text is flawed. A text that seems to require extensive retconning and reinterpretation in order to fit the facts, is exactly what I would expect from a text that wasn't based on facts in the first place. If it was a scientific theory like the flat Earth, then it would just be considered debunked by now. We wouldn't have millions of people trying to reinterpret the word "flat" to try and keep it alive. If people want to treat this religious text differently because it is important to them, then I would say that those people have lost their objectivity, and with it their ability to reason properly.

If I am wrong, please correct me, but I get the feeling that you are assuming that at one point, every part of the Bible was intended to be read literally. The reality is, however, that there are portions of the Bible that were never intended to be read literally. A lot of the extreme Bibilical literalism that we see today is actually, historically speaking, rather new, and not in line with how many Christians throughout history have viewed the text.

The woman doing this video is an ignorant buffoon. She keeps reading sonething and then saying 'how do they know? They don't say, no one knows because it's just a guess'.

Actually if she read the exhibition more closely there are explanations there. And if she went home and read a book there would be more in depth explanations there too. The fact she doesn't know something does not mean that no one in the world knows. How big headed is that? Can't she appreciate that there are people who know and study more than her.

Then she dismisses it all as 100 year old science we are still teaching our children. Presumably she prefers a 2000 year old story book.

All that is in the first minute or two. I skipped on a bit and its mostly the same. She reads a line and immediately says 'how can they know that? They're just guessing and making it up'. She doesn't actually try to engage with the exhibition which actually looks very good.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
The woman doing this video is an ignorant buffoon. She keeps reading sonething and then saying 'how do they know? They don't say, no one knows because it's just a guess'.

Actually if she read the exhibition more closely there are explanations there. And if she went home and read a book there would be more in depth explanations there too. The fact she doesn't know something does not mean that no one in the world knows. How big headed is that? Can't she appreciate that there are people who know and study more than her.

Then she dismisses it all as 100 year old science we are still teaching our children. Presumably she prefers a 2000 year old story book.

All that is in the first minute or two. I skipped on a bit and its mostly the same. She reads a line and immediately says 'how can they know that? They're just guessing and making it up'. She doesn't actually try to engage with the exhibition which actually looks very good.

I don't think many people would disagree with you. It's pretty embarrassing to watch her, really.

 d-usa wrote:
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/Mobile/article.aspx?articleid=485161

I never know what to make of these things. Don't have access to better journals until I get back to school so I'm not able to research it better.

There was also a Harvard study (quite a large one IIIRC) where the people who knew they were being prayed for actually fared worst. It seems to be fairly random. Even in this study, the results are probably within the realms of chance. It's not very compelling.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Smacks wrote:
Well it isn't baseless.

Yes it is. Nobody is disputing the fact that "psychic powers" do not exist. The issue is that you're assuming that everyone who claims to have them is engaging in deliberate fraud

Well then there is no issue because I am not assuming that at all. Here is what I wrote:

"I think deep down these people know they are (at best) deluding themselves"

If you agree that psychic powers aren't real, then you must agree that someone who thinks they have them is deluding themselves. That is not baseless. I will admit that there is a bit of a contradiction in the idea of "knowing" you are deluding yourself, but it seems to me that it would be hard not to notice, and have some doubts. I said the worst of them were committing deliberate fraud and this is a fact, the television psychics even need a disclaimer for this reason. But I certainly do not assume all are frauds. Some are just delusional.

 insaniak wrote:
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Which is a more compelling argument when something is difficult to test (such as the flying spaghetti monster). Psychic powers, however, are easy to test, and have always been demonstrably untrue.

 Hordini wrote:
If I am wrong, please correct me, but I get the feeling that you are assuming that at one point, every part of the Bible was intended to be read literally. The reality is, however, that there are portions of the Bible that were never intended to be read literally. A lot of the extreme Bibilical literalism that we see today is actually, historically speaking, rather new, and not in line with how many Christians throughout history have viewed the text.

I don't really want to get sidetracked, so I will say that my main assumption is that the people who wrote the Bible (the old testament at least), had no special knowledge of god, and that it was created mostly from imagination (or more accurately borrowed from Sumerian mythology). Evidence for this is their apparent lack of knowledge regarding the Solar system and its formation. There is also no evidence for a global flood, and the populations and timelines for Human and animal populations and dispersion does not fit. Many stories also bear a striking similarity to other ancient myths that would probably be considered blasphemous (containing other gods).

While the stories might be interesting and even informative, I see nothing that suggests they have any divine origin, and plenty which suggests they definitely do not (or it has at very least become distorted beyond all useful recognition).

 Smacks wrote:
If you agree the psychic powers aren't real, then you must agree that someone who thinks they have them is deluding themselves. That is not baseless.

It's baseless because your initial assumption (that psychic powers aren't real) has no basis other than your own belief.

Psychic powers, however, are easy to test, and have always been demonstrably untrue.

Which certainly might mean that they don't exist.

It might also just mean that we've been doing the wrong tests. Or doing them on the wrong people.


Testing whether or not a cookie has choc chips is also an easy test. If I perform that test on a million gingernuts, does that mean that choc chic cookies mustn't be real?

 insaniak wrote:
It's baseless because your initial assumption (that psychic powers aren't real) has no basis other than your own belief.

No that is incorrect. Just because it is not possible to disprove psychic abilities with 100% certainty (or anything else for that matter) does not mean an argument against them is 'baseless'. The argument against psychic abilities existing is strong. The argument for them is based only on anecdotal evidence and superstition.

Also the burden of proof is not on me. It is on the people who are making these extraordinary claims. Since none of them have ever been able to demonstrate their abilities in a controlled environment, despite hundreds of years of opportunity. It is difficult to take them seriously. Refusing to believe wild unsubstantiated claims is a rational response based in logic and reason (especially when it comes to something as worn out as psychic powers).

To quote some hitchhikers guide "it has been signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." They do not exist.

Unless you have some 'new' evidence to put forward (which you don't), I suggest we move on.

 insaniak wrote:

 Smacks wrote:
[Saying that they categorically do not, is a perfectly rational conclusion based on the fact that no one has ever been able to prove they have powers under any kind of scrutiny.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

smacks doenst understand, that every single theory we have today that is now proven, was once unprovable.

electrons, microorganisms, ect, were all things were dismissed as crazy lunatic theories that were unprovable at the time.

right now, there is as much proof for collective unconscious information sharing (which could be proof that some people can see forward/back in time, which is a scientific possibility, though as of now unproven) as there is proof that someone with male genitals/genes/ect is a woman because they feel/think/say they are.




not to mention, despite the offensive stereotype that "religious people dont do science", many of our best achievements in science were done by people of one religion or another.

Einstein is smarter then smacks, he believed whole heartedly in god and science, as did many of the great thinkers of our time.

religion after, was just the first attempt to understand ourselves and the world we live it, while it may have fallen behind in being a scientific description of the world we live in, religions are still very good at theories on ourselves IE "do unto others what you want done to you" is still a correct moral statement., dont steal, dont cheat, dont lie, and so on.

 easysauce wrote:
every single theory we have today that is now proven, was once unprovable.

Well that's debatable seeing as they somehow found credibility anyway. And sorry, but that does not give you carte blanche to parade any and all unprovable nonsense as the more credible sounding "waiting to be proved". For every scientific theory we have today there are about a million nonsense ideas that never panned out.

Einstein is smarter then smacks, he believed whole heartedly in god and science, as did many of the great thinkers of our time.

And both are smarter than you. You don't seem to understand the difference between believing in a god and believing in the biblical god. Einstein's views on religion were complex, he rejected many common notions about god, and frequently referred to himself as agnostic. Baring in mind he was born 135 years ago in quite a different time. In any case, dragging Einstein into this is a fairly weak way to prop up your argument. Einstein wasn't infallible, nor was he an expert on god, or privy to any special information about god that we are not. His personal views though interesting are irrelevant.

EDIT:

 easysauce wrote:
dismissed as crazy lunatic theories

This is worth pausing for thought on. It's not like psychics haven't been given a chance. James Randi spent decades investigating psychic claims, and offered huge sums of money to anyone who could display psychic abilities. He is not alone. The idea of psychic powers was not 'dismissed' they were given every opportunity, and were shown to be crazy lunatic theories anyway. Psychic abilities and payer are not "unprovable" they should be fairly easy to prove if they actually worked. The proof is in the pudding.

People who think they have psychic abilities are either knowingly deceptive or are delusional.

Psychics prey on the vulnerable and are no better than any other con artist.

As soon as somebody starts asking for money to give you comfort/tell you what you want to hear alarm bells should be ringing. "Your relative from beyond the grave says hello", "Those money worries will go away". Unless I can walk up to a psychic and they do a blind reading on me I will continue to hold this belief and take the conclusions of the various tests that have been done over the years, and the frauds exposed, to be true.

Giving them some kind of faux credibility on knowingly shaky ground is pretty sickening in my mind. I'm not sure whether it's because you think it's an easy jump to disprove psychics to your particular religion. Surely psychics have nothing today with major religions? Honest question.

http://www.alternet.org/science-hating-homeschool-mom-sued-defamation-ongoing-library-porn-flap?page=0%2C0


proper nutjob.

The best bit would have to be when she said Dragons disprove evolution and prove that humans lived with dinosaurs.

 Hive Fleet Cerberus wrote:
The best bit would have to be when she said Dragons disprove evolution and prove that humans lived with dinosaurs.

Me, personally, I enjoyed the bit where she said that she enjoys real fossils- in reference to an obvious cast (the Dunkelosteus).

 Hive Fleet Cerberus wrote:
The best bit would have to be when she said Dragons disprove evolution and prove that humans lived with dinosaurs.

She said that? Where?

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Hive Fleet Cerberus wrote:
The best bit would have to be when she said Dragons disprove evolution and prove that humans lived with dinosaurs.

She said that? Where?

It is towards the end of the video. Though in her defense the skull she is talking about really does look like a dragon!
Though it's still really stupid because the dragons in films obviously aren't based on real dragons anyway. The artists use smaller lizards as a reference.

Oh.....I didnt see that.....I didnt watch it that long

I finnally watched all of it.
her:..a dragon.
me: 0_0

 KingCracker wrote:

Spoiler:

 jasper76 wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
Still leaning towards a bane for jasper76...

'Tis the Season after all, amirite?!?

Any points back for this???

Going a bit off topic but......

What is the movie in there where the woman is fighting Germans? And throws an Axe into the nice gentlemans chest?

Suckerpunch

Watched parts of the video, and it is amusing at points, it clearly is proof that evolution does not exist, such stupidity cannot be naturally evolved, or she must be an alien!

 jasper76 wrote:
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that prayer, or knowing you are prayed for, would have a stress relieving effect on those who believe in its efficacy...hell, I think just knowing that people are thinking about you and care about you would have a healing effect. Being sick is quite worrisome!

Here are the results of the STEP project run by the Templeton Foundation;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy_of_prayer

https://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf


TLDR; Prayers didn't help at all. A slightly negative effect was seen in people who knew they were prayed for.

Steelmage99 wrote:

 jasper76 wrote:
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that prayer, or knowing you are prayed for, would have a stress relieving effect on those who believe in its efficacy...hell, I think just knowing that people are thinking about you and care about you would have a healing effect. Being sick is quite worrisome!

Here are the results of the STEP project run by the Templeton Foundation;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy_of_prayer

https://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf


TLDR; Prayers didn't help at all. A slightly negative effect was seen in people who knew they were prayed for.

Ah, well...I was just wondering if preyer would act like meditation and have a calming effect that helped the body heal, and that other people's prayer might act in a way like Get Well cards or flowers, raising the person's spirits and what not, and having a positive effect. I wasn't ever talking about anything supernatural (the term itself is an oxymoron if I've ever seen one).

 jasper76 wrote:

Steelmage99 wrote:

 jasper76 wrote:
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that prayer, or knowing you are prayed for, would have a stress relieving effect on those who believe in its efficacy...hell, I think just knowing that people are thinking about you and care about you would have a healing effect. Being sick is quite worrisome!

Here are the results of the STEP project run by the Templeton Foundation;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy_of_prayer

https://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf


TLDR; Prayers didn't help at all. A slightly negative effect was seen in people who knew they were prayed for.

Ah, well...I was just wondering if preyer would act like meditation and have a calming effect that helped the body heal, and that other people's prayer might act in a way like Get Well cards or flowers, raising the person's spirits and what not, and having a positive effect. I wasn't ever talking about anything supernatural (the term itself is an oxymoron if I've ever seen one).

Yeah, it seemed to have a (slight) effect in the opposite direction.
One could hypothesize that the knowledge of "things being in the hands of a greater power" made people "fight" less for themselves.

I agree with you on the concept of "supernatural".
Words like "supernatural", "magic" or "miracle" are vague and worthless terms.

 Hordini wrote:

 Smacks wrote:

 Hordini wrote:
my take on it is that scientific discovery can help to further one's understanding of the divine. If you believe that God created the universe, and gave humans the gift of a mind to think and reason with, then really, it's kind of your responsibility to think and reason and try to figure things out as much as you can. Theistic belief can help to explain the why, science can help to understand the how. That doesn't mean we always get everything right, but it certainly doesn't mean that we should shy away from things like science and thinking.

Well I think that is perfectly reasonable, science might even end up proving the existence of a god like creator one day (who knows?). I could agree with you 100% if we were just talking about believing in a god (any god). But Christians don't just believe in any god, they believe quite specific things about him, what he wants, how he operates, how we speak to him. This is the part that strains belief. The only basis for these aspects of belief is the bible. But why should the bible be any more true than the million other religious texts?

If there is something that science is clearly showing us to be true that you feel contradicts your interpretation of a text, perhaps it is time to revisit that text. Perhaps your original interpretation of that text was flawed.

Yes, perhaps. But then perhaps the text is flawed. A text that seems to require extensive retconning and reinterpretation in order to fit the facts, is exactly what I would expect from a text that wasn't based on facts in the first place. If it was a scientific theory like the flat Earth, then it would just be considered debunked by now. We wouldn't have millions of people trying to reinterpret the word "flat" to try and keep it alive. If people want to treat this religious text differently because it is important to them, then I would say that those people have lost their objectivity, and with it their ability to reason properly.

If I am wrong, please correct me, but I get the feeling that you are assuming that at one point, every part of the Bible was intended to be read literally. The reality is, however, that there are portions of the Bible that were never intended to be read literally. A lot of the extreme Bibilical literalism that we see today is actually, historically speaking, rather new, and not in line with how many Christians throughout history have viewed the text.

The bible does not contain reliable information. Then everything in it is dismissible unless supported by third parties...

Interesting article on the subject:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/you-cant-educate-people-into-believing-in-evolution/382983/?single_page=true

"No creationist wakes up in the morning and says, 'I have really strong opinions about whether Archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds,'" he said.* "Who are we as people? That’s the question that they think evolution is answering. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be an animal?"

In other words, the cliche of pitting science against religion is a category error, to a certain extent: Evolutionary biology provides certain insights into the mechanisms of how human life has formed and changed over time, but it can't provide insight into the meaning behind those changes. Yet the meaning part is often what matters in vitriolic "debates" about the origins of life.

“The psychological need to see purpose, that is really interesting," said Jeffrey Hardin, a professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, at the Faith Angle Forum in Miami on Tuesday. “Many Christians consider Neo-Darwinian theory to be dysteleological, or lacking in purpose." Hardin is himself an evangelical Christian; he often speaks with church communities about evolution in his work with the BioLogos Foundation. In these conversations, he said, many evangelicals point to statements like that of paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, who wrote in his 1967 book, The Meaning of Evolution, "Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned." When this is echoed by outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Hardin said, "Evangelicals look at it and go, ‘I can’t accept that, and therefore I cannot accept thinking at all about evolutionary biology.'"

Article wrote:Interesting article on the subject:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/you-cant-educate-people-into-believing-in-evolution/382983/?single_page=true

Hardin said, "Evangelicals look at it and go, ‘I can’t accept that, and therefore I cannot accept thinking at all about evolutionary biology.'"

Steelmage99 wrote:

Article wrote:Interesting article on the subject:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/you-cant-educate-people-into-believing-in-evolution/382983/?single_page=true

Hardin said, "Evangelicals look at it and go, ‘I can’t accept that, and therefore I cannot accept thinking at all about evolutionary biology.'"

I think you missed an important point there...