Ruv Draba
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I don't think that Occam's razor does any such thing.Well, I see what you're saying, but let me take one example, that of prayer working. [...]
you can believe that God, in some broad sense, exists, or two, you can come up with a convoluted but not impossible explanation involving some theory about psi and it only working for people who prayer when they use it.
It that case, Occam's razor points to the existence of God, not the psi explanation. If all this stuff were true, I, as an atheist, would be forced to start believing in God.
As a scientist, I'd be interested in the extent of the phenomenon. Does it matter whom you pray to? Does it matter what you pray for? Does it matter where, when or how you pray, or who does it? Which ailments are more tractable to prayer? What other natural phenomena are affected? How does prayer plus therapy compare to prayer or therapy alone? Which therapies are more effective with prayer? Which prayers work best with which therapies?
Should prayer become a reliable therapy, it could easily be seen as an entirely physical therapy like medicine, exercise and hygeine. Since 'faith' itself is hard to evaluate, it would be very hard to show that only 'faithful' prayer works, say. So we might have atheists in churches performing religious rites just because they think it's a physical phenomenon.
Before we posited an intelligent, invisible, silent third party over the other side of some imaginary curtain we would have to do some extraordinary testing to show that the intelligence was separate from that of the supplicant's. And then we'd have to see whether it was one intelligence or many, and how long its attention-span was, and try to test motive and extent of ability and a whole bunch of things.
And even then after all that, the word 'God' wouldn't be the simplest explanation though I agree that it might be a popular one. The simplest explanation is the one that explains just the phenomena we observe, and doesn't presume on phenomena we can't.
But that's all hypothetical because nothing like that has come close to happening. We know that therapies work or don't regardless of your mystical tradition, and that mystic rites are no better at improving health outcomes than pets, gardening or moderate consumption of red wine is. And I've never seen a definition of 'faith' that could be evaluated objectively.
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