If there is "no evidence" for evolution...

[pitabread]

What you get with your journals like Nature, National Geographic, New Scientist and Scientific American is the unspoken rule that only materialist explanations are allowed.

How would one scientifically test the supernatural?

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

How would one scientifically test the supernatural?

Have you ever prayed and experienced a miraculous answer?

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

@pitabread

Let me tell you something that helped me think about "faith". I wrote this almost as a 'note to self' a little while ago.

"I was wondering the other day about artificial intelligence and where it all might head. The idea took me down an unexpected turn you might find interesting...

I imagined a science fiction scenario where quite unexpectedly in a future version of Halo on the X-Box 5 a computer generated character suddenly became self aware. This blue skinned computer generated alien suddenly found it was able to explore its world, gather resources needful for its survival, avoid conflict and even enjoy the views. In its own inexplicable way it has the idea 'I think, therefore I am!'

But where is our blue soldier? Simply composed of finely engineered machine code stored on a powerful machine, only re-activated when the console is switched on. This digital life is the only one our brave new artificial form knows. Soon he starts to ask questions of his environment. He finds his world is finite, obeys some predictable laws and in his own way he sets about becoming a scientist, measuring, documenting and understanding everything he can, within his reach. One figure he can't properly understand in the green human figure who sometimes appears, guns blazing. Occasionally he seems like an unstoppable foe, other times an easy target. His behaviour is quite erratic and different to everything else in his world. The way he fights follows none of the complex algorithms of the blue alien inhabitants. It is all quite inexplicable!

I became a Christian at an early age, so for me it felt very natural to see a world where God 'did things'. It was only years later that I came across atheists and humanists. It was later still that I was able to empathise with their view of the world in a way that I could articulate how those people would hold a perspective of a bitter struggle between science and religion. In a world of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and even Scoobie-Doo, there is never any room for truth beyond the things we can predictably measure or fully understand.

In the same way our blue alien could conclude that despite the behaviour of that one strange human in his world, the idea of the 'beyond' was meaningless. It can't be touched, reached or even imagined. In short, our newly emerged intelligence could quickly become in his own small way, a scientific materialist. If he did, he would be wrong!

Pushing the example a little further, perhaps using a chat function, the blue alien and the human could lay down their weapons and get to know one another. Our new AI life could find out about a world beyond his, a bedroom, snacks, parents. Some of this would be beyond our blue friends comprehension but that alone would not mean it was untrue, just that it sat outside the frame of its experience.

If you don't know Jesus, but suspect there might be something different about him, why don't you do the brave thing and ask him to make himself known to you. I know in writing this that the whole idea may push lots of buttons to the scientific mind. Let me challenge you with this - if God is real he is well able to reach into your world and communicate with you.

Thomas, after Jesus had risen from the dead was unconvinced by reports from others. A natural realist, he famously said that "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." People call him doubting Thomas but from another perspective he was also just being honest. He let it be known what kind of evidence he would need to in order to have faith.

Jesus met him where he was at and provided him with more than enough to convince him. In the same way, even if you full of skepticism and disappointment with religious systems, if you come to Jesus himself, full of doubts and questions, he can meet you where you're at.

The first step is just to come as you are. He's waiting for you to start the conversation."

 

[USincognito]

@USincognito

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...ion-year-old-dinosaur-protein-milestone-paper

Please use the quote function. It's more likely to give a notification than the tagging system.

And I'm quite familiar with some of the tiny, preserved bits and pieces that Dr. Schweitzer has been able to recover. She has never recovered DNA however and thus your claim to have read an article like " DNA found in Dinosaur Bones" is false.

 

[USincognito]

What you get with your journals like Nature, National Geographic, New Scientist and Scientific American is the unspoken rule that only materialist explanations are allowed.

Of the outlets you listed, only Nature is a journal. The rest of them are magazines. And of course only "materialist" explanations are allowed in journals and science magazines. They are reporting on science after all, and science is restricted to methological naturalism. In fact science cannot be done without restricting it to MN.

In addition, funding of science follows the same pattern. Have you ever wished to apply for a study grant based on creationist interpretations?

Whenever I see this issue raised it sounds more like an appeal to conspiracy than a germane point. As bugeyedcreepy pointed out, the money follows the successful research. For the most part (see my example) actual science produces results while Creationism doesn't. Here's an interesting example. Dr. Jacques Bienveniste was able to get a DARPA grant to study transmitting medicine over radio waves (his hypothesis was based on homeopathy type "water memory"). He got the grant because his work, while flawed and bogus, actually produced results.

The same cannot be said for Creationism.

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

I did a regular BSc in Biology and Biochemistry, specialising in evolution, tropical medicine and cell biology in my final year. The "Darwin to Dawkins" part was my literary flourish. Talking technical / down to me really won't work (I'm sure that was not your intention though ;-)

lol! As much as I wasn't talking down to you, these questions are meant to sort out wheat from chaff, so I'd be interested to get your take on them all the same. If you do understand it and still somehow believe in a young earth and miracle creation despite all of the old universe evidence, then you are most certainly an outlier, but it does happen I guess. Still, I'd be interested to hear your responses, not that I would know any more than you, that being the case but I'm genuinely interested to hear your take on it and how it could possibly fit into your worldview.

Take your own view, choose to emphasise the significance of some evidences over others if you like. In the end, we each decide who or what to put our trust in.

In Science, don't we have to account for ALL of the evidence, not just the bits we like? Therefore if reality is to give us meaningful results, there should, in principle, be no verifiable facts that contradict each other**. We would be amiss if we didn't take all evidence on board when coming to a conclusion.

Have you ever prayed and experienced a miraculous answer?

How did you confirm it to be a miracle? How do you get independent verification?

** ....Damn you, stoopid quantum mechanics....!

 

[pitabread]

Have you ever prayed and experienced a miraculous answer?

Nope.

Besides, that doesn't answer my question which was how would you scientifically test the supernatural? Are you proposing a scientific experiment around prayer?

 

[pitabread]

Let me challenge you with this - if God is real he is well able to reach into your world and communicate with you.

Sure, I'll buy that. But if they don't communicate, does that mean they are not real?

Furthermore, how would you distinguish supernatural communication with the voices in one's head? If at the end of the day the answer is that one just has to have "faith", I don't believe that's good enough. Especially not when it comes to distinguishing between the entirety of the world's belief systems.

The way I approach this is this: if there really is an all-powerful supernatural deity that was both interested in my belief and capable of demonstrating it, then they would already know what it would take to convince me. The fact that they haven't suggests they either aren't interested or don't exist in the first place. Ergo, there is no sense on dwelling on it.

 

[xianghua]

You never read an article about DNA being found in dinosaur bones.

so what is the upper limit for finding DNA in a fossil?

 

[PsychoSarah]

Have you ever prayed and experienced a miraculous answer?

I have prayed countless times, and never gotten an answer, miraculous or otherwise.

 

[PsychoSarah]

so what is the upper limit for finding DNA in a fossil?

1 million years; by that point, DNA degrades so much as to be useless. Even DNA samples a few thousand years old are partially degraded, which is why Neanderthal DNA was sequenced by using more than a dozen individual fossils that were preserved in an unusual way thanks to the marrow being consumed before they fossilized.

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

I have prayed countless times, and never gotten an answer, miraculous or otherwise.

This is something I experienced personally. Make of it what you choose...

This happened to me some years ago. I'm not going to press the point, but I leave it with you. You decide for yourself if the power of "my belief" / placebo etc made this happen.

My brother had a girlfriend when he was about 17 who had some very severe back trouble. She had a twisted spine and was given till her mid 20s before she would wind up in a wheelchair. She lived a few hours away from us and had come to visit with her friend for the weekend. That particular weekend Jim Sepulvida was sharing his experiences at an auditorum near to us and we had all wanted to hear him speak so we went.

Just to mention, this was 25 years ago and Jim is no longer with us but I found a YouTube video of his testimony.

Anyway, at the end of the meeting, he went into a time of praying for the sick. Various people had gone up to the front but she didn't. There was a pause and Jim stopped, saying that the Lord was telling him there were five women there with back trouble.

Four came forward...

Jim stopped and said there was still a woman with back trouble that needed to come forward. She told me afterwards she thought at that moment 'I'm 17 - that means I'm a girl - it's not me'

Jim paused, then said 'OK, will the GIRL with back trouble please come forward!'

She did.

No-one touched her and she was certainly not a regular at 'that' sort of church, but as Jim prayed for her she fell backwards and looked like she was fast asleep!!! When she came to after a little while, she was smiling from ear to ear and ran up the steps to us, then round the hall again... When she had calmed down a bit she told us that she had felt the love and presence of God as she lay there and had the physical sensation of her spine being knocked into line!

Returning the doctors she had a series of tests and was pronounced inexplicably healed.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

This is something I experienced personally. Make of it what you choose...

This happened to me some years ago. I'm not going to press the point, but I leave it with you. You decide for yourself if the power of "my belief" / placebo etc made this happen.

My brother had a girlfriend when he was about 17 who had some very severe back trouble. She had a twisted spine and was given till her mid 20s before she would wind up in a wheelchair. She lived a few hours away from us and had come to visit with her friend for the weekend. That particular weekend Jim Sepulvida was sharing his experiences at an auditorum near to us and we had all wanted to hear him speak so we went.

Just to mention, this was 25 years ago and Jim is no longer with us but I found a YouTube video of his testimony.

Anyway, at the end of the meeting, he went into a time of praying for the sick. Various people had gone up to the front but she didn't. There was a pause and Jim stopped, saying that the Lord was telling him there were five women there with back trouble.

Four came forward...

Jim stopped and said there was still a woman with back trouble that needed to come forward. She told me afterwards she thought at that moment 'I'm 17 - that means I'm a girl - it's not me'

Jim paused, then said 'OK, will the GIRL with back trouble please come forward!'

She did.

No-one touched her and she was certainly not a regular at 'that' sort of church, but as Jim prayed for her she fell backwards and looked like she was fast asleep!!! When she came to after a little while, she was smiling from ear to ear and ran up the steps to us, then round the hall again... When she had calmed down a bit she told us that she had felt the love and presence of God as she lay there and had the physical sensation of her spine being knocked into line!

Returning the doctors she had a series of tests and was pronounced inexplicably healed.

Really sounds like a baseless story, nothing more.

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

Really sounds like a baseless story, nothing more.

Well - I was there and I really don't gain anything by trying to persuade you that this was what happened ;-)

I loved this quote by C.S Lewis...

“People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation [of God's reality]. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat” (Surprised by Joy, ch. XIV).

 

[pitabread]

Returning the doctors she had a series of tests and was pronounced inexplicably healed.

The problem with "faith healing" stories is several-fold:

1) They're invariably anecdotal. There is no way to know if the above story is even true. Real testing of faith healing would involve a properly controlled clinical conditions with properly documented results.

2) Even in a case where a person did claim to be miraculously healed, there is no way to truly determine the source of the healing. After all, the human body is capable of self-repair. How would one distinguish between the body self-healing versus an outside supernatural force? This is also where the question of "why doesn't God heal amputees?" seems pertinent to ask. Not to mention acknowledging the placebo effect.

3) Confirmation bias is blatant. Lots of people pray for faith healing and *don't* receive it. The failures are ignored.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Well - I was there and I really don't gain anything by trying to persuade you that this was what happened ;-)

I loved this quote by C.S Lewis...

“People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation [of God's reality]. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat” (Surprised by Joy, ch. XIV).

That's still not evidence. That's just your claim, nothing more, nothing less. If you wanted anyone to accept what you claimed to have seen, then something like video evidence or photographic evidence would be best.

 

[pitabread]

If you wanted anyone to accept what you claimed to have seen, then something like video evidence or photographic evidence would be best.

Even those can easily be faked in this day and age. To really demonstrate the veracity of the above claim, you'd need it to be done under controlled, experimental conditions monitored and documented by an independent body. And then ideally confirmed by other independent, controlled experiments.

Basically, how science is done.

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

That's still not evidence. That's just your claim, nothing more, nothing less. If you wanted anyone to accept what you claimed to have seen, then something like video evidence or photographic evidence would be best.

I honestly don't need to. I just wanted to give you a snapshot of one of many events that have shaped me and where the material and supernatural have crossed paths. I once saw a local deaf man go to a little meeting and at the end, when everyone was heading off he received his hearing after a short time of prayer. My mum was healed of an internal digestion issue called something like a Hiatus Hernia when I was a kid. I'm not going to bombard you all with this and in some ways, why would you take my word for it?

Backing right up, the debate is perhaps better framed as naturalism as truth vs naturalism + supernaturalism as truth.

It seems to me that there is a mental block for many when it comes to realising that if there is a reality beyond the reaches of our senses and measurements, it is not automatically just "religious". "Beyond" might be a better word? Just because we cant, in our own ability reach God in no way means that God lacks the ability to reach us.

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

Even those can easily be faked in this day and age. To really demonstrate the veracity of the above claim, you'd need it to be done under controlled, experimental conditions monitored and documented by an independent body. And then ideally confirmed by other independent, controlled experiments.

Basically, how science is done.

Perhaps that might if God were a physical force rather than a person?

I could say something inflammatory to you, but as you are a person, I would be unable to predict your response ;-)

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

I honestly don't need to. I just wanted to give you a snapshot of one of many events that have shaped me and where the material and supernatural have crossed paths. I once saw a local deaf man go to a little meeting and at the end, when everyone was heading off he received his hearing after a short time of prayer. My mum was healed of an internal digestion issue called something like a Hiatus Hernia when I was a kid. I'm not going to bombard you all with this and in some ways, why would you take my word for it?

Backing right up, the debate is perhaps better framed as naturalism as truth vs naturalism + supernaturalism as truth.

It seems to me that there is a mental block for many when it comes to realising that if there is a reality beyond the reaches of our senses and measurements, it is not automatically just "religious". "Beyond" might be a better word? Just because we cant, in our own ability reach God in no way means that God lacks the ability to reach us.

But if you want any of us to believe what you're saying, then you have to give us evidence. Everything you are saying is nothing but "And I say so" posts. Why should I take your word for it if you're trying to convince those who don't believe that God is real that He is real?