Scientific Conclusions

[_zeezrom]

Okay. Don't see a problem with that.

Really you think his example illustrates how the scientific method is supposed to or should work?

Marg,

Please note I did not hypothesize that God answered my prayer. I hypothesized that I would get a physiological reaction.

The next question might be:

Where did this reaction come from?

A. God
B. confirmation bias
C. Lunch
D. Etc

[_Fence Sitter]

"When can the incompetent be expected to overestimate themselves because of their lack of skill? Although our data do not speak to this issue directly, we believe the answer depends on the domain under consideration. Some domains, like those examined in this article, are those in which knowledge about the domain confers competence in the domain. Individuals with a great understanding of the rules of grammar or inferential logic, for example, are by definition skilled linguists and logicians. In such domains, lack of skill implies both the inability to perform competently as well as the inability to recognize competence, and thus a¥e also the domains in which the incompetent are likely to be unaware of their lack of skill.

In other domains, however, competence is not wholly dependent on knowledge or wisdom, but depends on other factors, such as physical skill. One need not look far to find individuals with an impressive understanding of the strategies and techniques of basketball, for instance, yet who could not "dunk" to save their lives.

(These people are called coaches.)"

Also known as the 'white and delight some curse".

Great post Honor.

[_MCB]

I have "scientifically concluded" that this thread lends further support to my "scientific theory" that offers my "scientific hypothesis" that all my MDB atheist friends were most likely created by a Creator with a great sense of humor.

:)

Peace,
Ceeboo

They are generally good people. Just mad at God. Have patience. God certainly has a lot.

[_marg]

Marg,

Please note I did not hypothesize that God answered my prayer. I hypothesized that I would get a physiological reaction.

The next question might be:

Where did this reaction come from?

A. God
B. confirmation bias
C. Lunch
D. Etc

Ok let's look at your post and address it.

Stak,

The usage of "corraborated" was new to me. I don't have much to say about it. All I know is you have a hypothesis, you do an experiment, you gather data, you analyze the data, you determine whether the data supports the hypothesis and therefore whether you can conclude it to be true. If the experiment does not support your hypothesis, you go back and see if your hypothisis needs to be adjusted and so forth.

Here is an example. I hypothesized that if I prayed to God asking if the Book of Mormon is true, historical scripture, I would begin to feel a mood change/bubbly feeling/goosebumbs within 5 minutes or so of my prayer. I recorded my feelings in my journal and then I analyzed the data. The data supported my conclusion.

The first paragraph you are talking about the scientific method, and your second paragraph was an example in which you attempted to apply it. So your hypothesis or question you are seeking to answer is "Is the Book of Mormon historically true?" That is a scientific question and how you seek a conclusion can be critically evaluated. Your evidence is completely subjective, that is it's not open to any sort of objective verification. On what basis can one objectively assume that your feelings/goosebumps/reaction from praying about this issue would or could lead to a reliable conclusion on whether the Book of Mormon is historically true? How reliable is the sort of evidence you've used and does it commensurate with the claim? Have you tested the reliability of trusting your physiological reaction as a means of ascertaining conclusions..by examining if that method works or not with some test open to verification? What else have you done or critically examined to determine if the Book of Mormon is reliably historically true?

So if I were to assess your evidence and how that evidence commensurates with your conclusion of and your reasoning to warrant your conclusion ..my assessment is your methodology evidence and reasoning does not objectively warrant your conclusion. You personally can believe it does, you can believe whatever you wish irrespective of good reasoning and evidence, but as a good critical thinker you should appreciate how unreliable your methodology and weak your evidence is to warrant your conclusion.

[Guest]

Marg,

You are right. I should have asked the question, will I get goosebumps when I pray?

[_EAllusion]

The paper didn't show that Stak, rather it showed that people with poor aptitude had inflated self-assessments relative to people with better aptitude. So someone in the bottom 10th percentile might think they were in the 60th while someone in the 40th might peg themselves for 50th. It was the degree to which they overestimated their relative ability that was the finding feature. The paper also showed that those in the highest ranks of aptitude tended to underestimate their relative performance. Someone in the 99th percentile might peg themselves for 80th. This does not mean that the poorly skilled were estimating themselves higher than the highly skilled were estimating themselves. It means that the incompetent were highly overconfident of where they ranked relative to their peers while the highly competent were moderately underconfident where they ranked relative to their peers.

The reasons for both these findings are quite different. In the case of the those who have inflated self-assessments, the problem is that having a skill is intimately related to having the ability to evaluate how strong someone is in that skill. In other words, you need to understand math to know how relatively good and bad people are at math. People who lack a cognitive skill are naturally going to lack the meta-cognitive skill to see this. So they overestimate where they are by pegging themselves around a little above average. Incompetence, in other words, robs people of the skill to see their own incompetence and gives them unwarranted confidence in their own abilities. In the infamous words of Kurt Vonnegut, "The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart." Paradoxically, when the researchers were able to improve the skills of the most incompetent, their self-assessments lowered as they were better able to appreciate their own lack of skill.

In the case of those who under-estimate, the problem is quite different. People estimate the abilities of others in part by projecting their own knowledge onto other minds. People who are very skilled end up over-estimating everyone else and this causes them to underassess their own performance.

[_Sethbag]

Sometimes I can watch someone talk out their ass, and other times I’m compelled to say something, like I did with Sethbag. Out of the 8 or 9 different strategies for making an Ontological argument (using different logics and ideas), I really understand two, and maybe have a semi decent grasp on two others, leaving another 4 or 5 I don’t know much about, much less enough to honestly call it mental masturbation. Is Seth justified in making that comment? No, not at all, I genuinely enjoy studying ontological arguments, and I can’t even fathom how much I’d have to know before I could honestly say it’s mental masturbation; I doubt Seth even cares there is more than one style of argument.

I think it's just fine and dandy that you enjoy ontological arguments. I don't have a problem with that. I can see how they can be like a logic puzzle, and that a person could enjoy thinking about them, parsing them, coming to grips with the arguments, etc.

What I called mental masturbation was the idea that such argumentation actually has any bearing on whether a God really exists or not. I am also aware that there are different ontological arguments that are or have been made. I realize that the one I quoted was just one, the one by St. Anselm I believe.

Here's a quick quote from the wikipedia article on ontological arguments:

The exact criteria for the classification of ontological arguments are not widely agreed, but the arguments typically start with the definition of God and conclude with his necessary existence, using mostly or only a priori reasoning and little reference to empirical observation. [my emphasis]

Since ontological arguments start with a definition of God, they already fail. Such definitions of God are always invented by humans, since there are no observed, verifiable facts of the universe which include explicit definitions of God. They are begging the question, because they require the validity of a definition of God, when it has not been established that there is in fact anything to define, nor any reasonable explanation given why that definition must obtain.

Do you agree or disagree that the definitions on which ontological arguments hinge are simply assertions made by the developer of the argument? Would you disagree with my assertion that they therefor beg the question?

You can say honestly that the arguments don’t impress you, not convinced, or whatever, but mental masturbation? That’s him on a Hitchens-rhetoric high.

I really dig Hitchens, yes. But my rejection of the kind of thinking that will pull out an ontological argument as proof of God is based on the fact that humans' ability to create logical paradoxes for themselves has really no bearing on what really does, or does not exist in the universe.

You can reject all religions and all belief in God/the divine without recourse to emulating Hitchens, or reading a ton of books, or getting three PhDs, or whatever, you just have to be more modest in how you do it.

I think you've misunderstood me. My argument is a reaction against a particular type of apologetic approach. The approach I object to is typified by someone claiming that simple uneducated rubes like me have no reasonable basis for rejecting the likelihood of God, or the Bible, or whatever, because the real evidence or meaning or Truth about God really is in the Bible, or whatever other scripture, but one simply has to read it in the original ancient language, or spend years studying the source texts and learning about the cultural context in which it was written, or whatever.

My argument against this apologetic goes something like this: the more ancient languages it is argued that a person must know in order to stand a chance of learning and understanding the real Truth about God who really does exist, the less likely that argument is to be true. The more PhD level studies of the ancient culture which produced a given piece of scripture that supposedly contains the Truth about God that is required to tease out said truth, the less likely that argument is to be true.

Do you see the trend here?

What I'm arguing is not a form of anti-intellectualism. I am very pro-intellectualism. I value reading and learning and thinking very highly. What I'm arguing is that the more intellectually elitist and exclusive an approach to the truth about God is argued to be in order to learn said Truth, the less likely that argument is to be true.

I could be wrong about this. It's entirely possible that a God really does exist, who buried his/her/its Truth deep down in ancient writings, whose content and circumstances essentially guarantee that of the billions of human beings on Earth, only a few dozen, or even a few thousand can ever tease it out and learn the real deal. I simply think that's unlikely. Again, I could be wrong, just like I could be wrong in my belief that we're probably not all in the Matrix right now and just don't know it.

Ever notice how Tarski or Blixa are hesitant to take a hardline stance on a subject they are not intimately familiar with at that moment?

That's admirable. I've freely admitted that I am not qualified to engage in philosophical argument with you. I've admitted this numerous times. That's not the issue here though. The issue is that many of us believe that the best scientific evidence currently available disproves, or to head off the insufferably pedantic, renders highly improbable many of the claims of the faithful. Then you or MFB or whoever comes along and claims that all of this is simply wrong-headed, as science really can't have anything useful to say at all, because of various philosophical arguments which are great within the discipline of philosophy, but don't amount to much in the empirical world in which we (imagine?) we really live.

And if it's not you trying to undercut the value of scientific evidence in evaluating scriptural claims, it's Aristotle Smith or someone else coming along and saying ok, well you're right there was no Flood, but if you read the Old Testament in its original Hebrew, and then studied the cultural context of the time in which it was written, you'd see that such and such a word actually had some nuanced meanings that render it unclear exactly what was being claimed. Or if you studied ancient Middle Eastern culture as much as I had, you'd realize the ancient bronze-age goat farmers never intended their writings to be taken as literal history, and you have to delve in and get a PhD in Near Eastern Studies to have a ghost of a chance of teasing out of the Old Testament the real Truth about God that he allowed to be buried deep within these stories, because he loves us all and wants us to know of Him, in his infinite mercy.

I would characterize my objection as a wielding of Occam's Razor: the higher the educational hurdles set up by God in order to have a chance at correctly understanding what's been written about him, the less likely those explanations are to be correct. The more ancient languages asserted as necessary for this understanding, the less likely those assertions are to be correct. The more philosophy of science (as opposed to actual science) one must master in order to properly contextualize what we can and cannot test or evaluate about scriptural claims, the less likely it is that these requirements are true. And so on.

I’m trying to think of a study (hook me up here EA) that showed the more confident a person was in their skills were less competent than those who were less confident.
So, there you have it.

I'm familiar with the Dunning-Kruger study, and other related ideas. I don't think that's what we're talking about here. I am not overestimating my grasp of the philosophy of science here - on the contrary, I readily concede I'm sorely deficient, especially compared to you. I'm also not overestimating my grasp of ancient Hebrew culture - again, I would have to defer to someone like Aristotle Smith who has done a lot more reading on the topic than I have.

I am merely arguing that a loving and merciful God, the claimed Father of tens of billions of human beings, would probably not A) require and wish us all to know the Truth about him, and B) bury that truth in layers so thick and convoluted that PhDs in philosophy or ancient Near Eastern Studies would be required to get to the bottom of it, because that would exclude almost everyone who ever has lived on Earth, both past and present, defeating the stated goal of said God in A).

[_EAllusion]

Since ontological arguments start with a definition of God, they already fail. Such definitions of God are always invented by humans, since there are no observed, verifiable facts of the universe which include explicit definitions of God. They are begging the question, because they require the validity of a definition of God, when it has not been established that there is in fact anything to define, nor any reasonable explanation given why that definition must obtain.

Do you agree or disagree that the definitions on which ontological arguments hinge are simply assertions made by the developer of the argument? Would you disagree with my assertion that they therefor beg the question?

That's a horrible objection to the ontological argument. It's Ok to not know what is wrong with ontological arguments and still reject them, but what you don't want to do is this kind of thing. Think about this for a second: If it were this obvious, don't you think responses to it would lead with it?

I am merely arguing that a loving and merciful God, the claimed Father of tens of billions of human beings, would probably not A) require and wish us all to know the Truth about him, and B) bury that truth in layers so thick and convoluted that PhDs in philosophy or ancient Near Eastern Studies would be required to get to the bottom of it, because that would exclude almost everyone who ever has lived on Earth, both past and present, defeating the stated goal of said God in A).

This is a variation from an argument from non-belief that I like. Basically, if someone proposes that God exists, God cares very much that people believe in him, and one should only believe that which is reasonable to believe, it would not be the case that belief in God can only be warranted through reasoning that is too esoteric and complicated for vast swathes of humanity to apprehend unless there were some overriding reasons for doing so. There are no good reasons for reasonable belief in God to be so concealed, ergo this God does not exist.

The theist is then forced to not only argue that one is justified in believing God, but that this argument is easily accessible to any mind. It's one of the reasons why I think arguments to religious experience are the strongest sort of arguments for God.

This is all fine and dandy, but it is missing Stak's point about humility and investigation.

[_Sethbag]

EA, may I ask you to expand on why my objection to ontological arguments is horrible? I'm not arguing with you, I'm asking you because you have some insight into this that I lack, and I'd like to know what it is. If an ontological argument hinges on a given definition of God, I would (apparently naïvely) think it was important that this definition be grounded in something more than naked assertion.

Also, I do think there is some irony in Stak telling others they need to work on their humility.

[_EAllusion]

EA, may I ask you to expand on why my objection to ontological arguments is horrible? I'm not arguing with you, I'm asking you because you have some insight into this that I lack, and I'd like to know what it is. If an ontological argument hinges on a given definition of God, I would (apparently naïvely) think it was important that this definition be grounded in something more than naked assertion.

Begging the question is trivially assuming in your premises that which you seek to establish. Starting an argument with by hypothetically positing a being with a given set of traits does not do this. What you are doing is assuming that an argument for something's existence can only be derived a posteriori, probably because you take that for granted. That's what's driving your thinking. What ontological arguments do is say that an object defined in a particular way (God in this case) logically must exist if you think about it correctly. It's an a priori argument. But there's nothing inherently question-begging in doing something like that. It's not a naked assertion to simply imagine some object and logical derivation isn't naked assertion.

I'd further point out that even when you do something like science, you have in your mind the abstract imagined object defined with certain traits that you are testing against observational consequences. You don't assert that it exists simply by positing it. You do something to derive it.