I’m a firm believer in divine miracles, though I must confess I’d like to see an amputee grow another limb.

If you are incredulous about certain kinds of divine miracles happening, why do you believe in them? Could God not do it? Wouldn’t he do it? Does it have something to do with limb regrowth being easily testable?

Your second point makes sense, but I refer you to yunshui’s second comment, which was spot on, IMO.

Divine healing is not something I think that can necessarily be put in a test tube. This god who you’d like to see perform a miracle is does not have an on-off switch. He is the Soverign Lord. I don’t presume to speak for him, but a divine healing is not always his will. Were all going to die someday. Even Lazurus, who Christ raised from the dead, if you believe that, died and is now gone.

This seems like a cop out I know but I permits freedom of choice to believe or not believe.

Hmm, I’m not sure that in the face of uncertainty people consciously choose to believe or not. Is that even possible? Could you choose to believe in Quetzalcoatl for a day?

In any case, why does the crucial factor in being saved have to be belief? Why not following His Word, doing good works or so on? God could come out of “hiding” and make his existence obvious to everyone equally (not just a few people He favours). Only then could they make a completely informed choice, with all the facts laid out. Not a random guess or something based on where you live and the religion of your parents, but a genuine, free choice.

Imagine if we had to vote for anonymous politicians who wouldn’t tell us their policies or even which end of the political spectrum they were on. In one sense our choices would be “free”, but they’d also be close to random. We might vote for candidate A because the rest of our family did or because of a gut feeling that it sounded good, but that is certainly an empoverished version of democracy.

We couldn’t really claim that the public had voted for joining the European Union or whatever, because they were only guessing at what they might get.

On the other hand, even if God did come out of hiding and say to everyone, “Love me or die”, it wouldn’t be much of a choice. To say that a believer had freely chosen this would be like a mugger defending himself by saying, “I told him – ‘Yer money or yer life’ and he freely handed over his wallet, guv!”. Adam Lee puts this well in divine blackmail.

I will try and think of a way of look at this scientifically

Thanks Jonathan, I feel there ought to be some kind of test we could agree on, which as Badger3k points out should work for any true religion without prejudice to any one in particular.

For a bit more on Faith Healing, James Randi has a nice book out (probably out of print, IIRC), and I know that the Infidel Guy Show had at least one show devoted to Faith Healing. Point of Inquiry may also have had one or more, but I’m not sure.

“The very nature of the testing of a diety may be fundamentally floored if the deity does not wish to be discovered or tested.”

Now that’s a good point – or it would be if we weren’t constantly being told by Christians that this particular deity wants a personal relationship with each and every one of us. A friend whom I’d never met, who never returned my phone calls, never updated his Facebook status, never wrote, e-mailed or made any other attempt to contact me or even let me know he was real would be a rubbish friend. If you’re now saying that God deliberately obfuscates his existence, then I call bullshit on the entire Christian message – he doesn’t want a relationship with his creation, and it becomes immaterial whether he does or does not exist.

The point I was trying to make, was that miracles by their nature must not be common other wise they are no longer miraculous. As an example imagine if all the world prayers for sunny days were answered it would never rain. Also what about conflicting and damaging requests. This seems like a cop out I know but I permits freedom of choice to believe or not believe. Imagine the loss of life and problems if God avenged just every blasphemy alone.

The problem with scientifc testing on God/deity is the very assumption that God is predictable and constant. These are rather large assumption. Putting it another way, imagine you were an all powerful deity and some of creatures descided to put you aurothity to the test. On their assumption that your not real. The reaction would I imagine be that of ignoring the foolish creatures at best, revenge at worst smit smit smit

The testing of dynamic relationships scientifically is very tricky… but not impossible. A simple double blind test are not effective, appropiate where the trial subject is all powerful and can descide to change behaviour or indeed muliple behiours (given diety status). Just imagine trying to predict what your friend might do or say in a given situation and you start to get at idea of the size of the problem.

The very nature of the testing of a diety may be fundamentally floored if the deity does not wish to be discovered or tested.

I will try and think of a way of look at this scientificaly

Jonathan,
Thanks for dropping by. Yes indeed it was your comment I was writing about – I sent you a message through Facebook, but I probably should’ve emailed you as well.

if during a game of chess I let you take back a poor move, we can still carry on playing if you can change all the rules all the time the game would be pointless.

If I understand your analogy correctly, then my point is that at the moment we don’t have any rules. When someone declares they’ve won their opponent says, “Won what?”. We’d need to agree on the rules before we started any game or test.

Tell me if I’m getting the wrong end of the stick here.

Are you perhaps saying that even if you showed me an amputated leg regrowing fully in front of my eyes, I still wouldn’t believe? That I’d simply find a way to shift the goalposts so I didn’t have to change my mind?

That’s why with this post I’ve tried to think through the possibilities and make them public for scrutiny. My intention is that my criteria for evidence set out above could never be satisfied by plain chance, only by a miracle. Otherwise, if something merely improbable happened the plain chance explanation would seem the more likely explanation than the miracle.

could have been chance though :-)

if during a game of chess I let you take back a poor move, we can still carry on playing if you can change all the rules all the time the game would be pointless. just a thought

Unfortunately, this will never happen. Not just because God isn’t real, but because charlatans like Popoff and the rest of his slimy ilk will never submit to proper scientific testing. The theatrical experience is a necessary part of the con – without the appropriate level of audience hysteria, they could never pull it off.