Am 20.01.2014 04:35, schrieb Patrick Elliott:
> On 1/19/2014 11:12 AM, clipka wrote:
>> Am 19.01.2014 18:09, schrieb Patrick Elliott:
>>
>>> I don't. See, the problem is, if you define god as some "ineffable
>>> something, we can't describe.", then you are correct, and that is
>>> invariably the "fallback" position of believers (since they can always,
>>> later, bait and switch back to the one they really do talk about all the
>>> time). However, any "defined" version, like.. the most common form of
>>> the Christian version, which performs miracles, reacts to prayers, etc.,
>>> and thus has a tangible impact, of some kind, has "testable" attributes.
>>
>> No, it doesn't - because the Bible /explicitly/ denies this testability,
>> saying we can't / shall not put God to the test. (And then there's
>> plenty of scripture that can be interpreted to implicitly affirm this.)
>>
> Well, no, in point of fact, only when it was "convenient" for..
> presumably the latest bunch of priests, dealing with some uppity
> parishioners, who wanted evidence, did it say that. There was some bit,
> I don't remember which part, where the guy did everything short of
> asking god to personal come down and buff his shoes, and god, quite
> happily, did them all, as "proof" that he really was god. Typically,
> believers pick the silly bit later, which says you shouldn't go around
> testing him, and gloss over the other earlier bit, where he was
> perfectly fine with it.

Well, what evidence do we have regarding the question of whether God can 
be tested for?

We have one piece of evidence identicating that we cannot.
We have one piece of evidence identicating that we can.

That's two pieces of evidence, certainly far too few to draw any 
reliable conclusions from them as to whether or not God can be tested 
for; the prudent thing to do would be to assume that we indeed cannot, 
and not bother trying. But let us just pretend that we're happy with the 
sample size - then we must conclude that there is only a 50% chance that 
God can be tested for (give or take approximately 50%, but we're 
ignoring that bit).

In other words, even if we could actually come up with an otherwise 
infallible test for the existence of God, we do have this 50% 
probability of error, leaving us no more than 50% confidence in our test 
result.

Worse yet: This systematic error in testing for the existance of God 
must be assumed to be of such a nature that it not only applies to any 
/individual/ test (which would still leave us with the possibility to 
just repeat our test often enough to increase our confidence), but to 
any /series/ of tests, and even any collection of entirely /different/ 
tests.

Thus, no matter how hard we try, how often we repeat our experiments, 
and how many different experiments we come up with - nothing will ever 
be able to give us a confidence of more than 50% in the result of all 
our testing.

That's not /anywhere/ close to the 95% confidence typically required in 
science for the label "statistically significant".


Thus:

- Presuming that there are less than 20 pieces of scripture in total 
making any explicit statements or providing anecdotal evidence about 
whether God can be put to the test or not, and

- Given that there is at least one piece of scripture explicitly saying 
that he cannot,

- We cannot ever, under any circumstances, conclusively test any 
predictions made by the hypothesis of the existence of the biblical God, 
disqualifying it as a scientific theory.


q.e.d.

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