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[Slip in the Stream]

The main problem I have is that faith is just belief without evidence. It's not rational to believe something without evidence, or to claim that the lack of evidence or the inability of finding evidence means it's rational to believe it because we should.

If you are talking about answers to prayer, science won't help you with that, either. to be able to verify confirmation bias, you need to have a standardized base line of what works and why, and what all of the possible elements are so that we can establish a control group and be able to directly identify exactly where Christians are blowing it out their ear. The problem with your wanting to check "true" claims, you need to have information and isolation of data that you absolutely do not have.

I don't understand how we cannot set up a control on prayer and see if it's useful. Can we pray to a random deity, and then count positive results? How did you personally test prayer? Personally, I didn't understand how talking to myself or thinking things within my brain could be transmitted out, understood by a supreme being(whatever that means), then used by the being to change the world(effecting events by exerting force). If you have any idea how any of those mechanisms work, please elucidate me.

However, it seems like prayer is simply confirmation bias. You believe a deity is out there listening, and then you look for events that confirm your bias. You ignore events that do not fit the bias.

The great thing about this idea is that it explains how you, a Christian, can find validation in prayer, and how a Muslim can find validation in prayer, or a Mormon, or person of any religion. Confirmation bias will always make it appear that the deity is there when they find positive events, and ignore negative events. (I just mean positive as something confirming the prayer).

Christian faith is--irrational because it just means believing without evidence.

The main issue with your Perseid meteor shower analogy is that meteors really exist. Does God? Do angels? Do demons?

You could tell me that a meteor shower happened last night and you saw some shooting stars and at the very least, I'd know it's possible and that it's possible you're telling me the truth. But if you said, oh yeah, I saw Dani on a Dragon flying 3000 feet over me and breathing fire - would it be rational for me to accept your claim? You're right, I can't go back to that spot and see the dragon. I can't use science in any way. But I can see if the claim fits the data that we have and it simply doesn't.

This tells us that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Miracles are just claims that some event happened and a deity was the cause of it. If that's so, there should be evidence. There should be a method to reproduce interaction by a deity. And there shouldn't be any possibility that confirmation bias is at play. When you say God is mysterious or that we can't know God's mind - you're just moving the goalposts and not being rational.

[jimwalton]

Your definition of faith is why you find faith inadequate. There are several different and legitimate ways to define faith, and they are all used in the Bible, depending on the context.

1. Faith is "complete trust or confidence in someone or something." This is a very common definition we use through our daily lives, when we trust a chair to hold us or a car to start when we turn a key. We are expected to have faith in God and in the Bible.

2. Faith is "belief in, trust in, and loyalty to God." This is obviously an explicitly religious definition involving knowledge, assent, and trust.

3. Faith is "a system of religious beliefs." This is what is meant when one speaks of "the Protestant faith" or "the Jewish faith".

I define faith as "making an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to warrant that assumption." In other words, faith is knowledge, pure and simple, but because it pertains to the future, we cannot be certain. When you turn the key, you can't be certain that your car will start, but you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to warrant the assumption. So also when you go to the mall, assuming it's still there. It's an act of faith, because you can't be certain the car will start or the mall will be there, even though there's every reason to believe it is still there.

You'll notice in the Bible that evidence precedes faith. God appears to Moses in a burning bush before he expect him to believe. He gave signs to take back to Pharaoh and the Israelite people, so they could see the signs before they were expected to believe. So also through the whole OT. In the NT, Jesus started off with turning water into wine, healing some people, casting out demons, and then he taught them about faith. And they couldn't possibly understand the resurrection until there was some evidence to go on.

My faith in God is a conscious choice because I find the evidence compelling. It's an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for me to make that assumption. When you read the Bible, people came to Jesus to be healed because they had heard about other people who had been healed. They had seen other people whom Jesus had healed. People had heard him teach. Their faith was based on evidence. Jesus kept giving them new information, and they gained new knowledge from it. Based on that knowledge, they acted with more faith. People came to him to make requests. See how it works? My belief in God is based on my knowledge of the credibility of those writings, the logic of the teaching, and the historical evidence behind it all. The resurrection, for instance, has evidences that give it credibility that motivate me to believe in it. My faith in the resurrection is an assumption of truth based on enough evidence that makes it reasonable to hold that assumption. The same is true for my belief in the existence of God, my belief that the Bible is God's word, and my understanding of how life works.

In other words, the one definition of faith that is NOT a biblical definition is yours, that faith is just belief without evidence.

As far as prayer, it's impossible to set up a control on prayer to see if it's useful. In the Bible, God never promises to answer every prayer, so we can't just pray and expect certain effects. Secondly, sometimes God answers prayer partially, or in a different way than what we suggested. So your "controlled situation" is rather meaningless. Another biblical situation is that sometimes the answers to prayer happen a year later, or even more. There's nothing about prayer that is a defined cause-and-effect relationship, and so it's outside of the reach of scientific control. Other things in life are like this, and some elements of psychology, and even political science (falsely so called) can be like this. Ultimately, people are not entirely predictable. Prayer is even more so: God is not predictable. He is sovereign and executes his will.

How do I personally test prayer? I don't. Prayer really isn't mostly about asking for things, but developing the relationship with God. And when I pray and do ask for things, it's with the full knowledge of the things I mentioned above: God may not grant it, the answer may look different than what I had in mind, or it may take a different form altogether. But that's OK, because often I notice that God's way was a far better way.

> I didn't understand how talking to myself or thinking things within my brain could be transmitted out, understood by a supreme being(whatever that means), then used by the being to change the world(effecting events by exerting force)

Since I believe in God, prayer is not just talking to myself, but to him. And if he truly is God, then him hearing me and responding is easy to conceive.

> confirmation bias

But prayer is certainly not confirmation bias, as I explained. There is no baseline to measure off of, and no specified cause-and-effect relationships to evaluate. The other part of it is we don't know how many people are praying for a certain thing and who isn't. We believe that God is always at work in the world in far more ways that we can see. How is "confirmation bias" even a workable theory in this case? It's far more likely that God is active in more ways than I see, not less. What you're calling "confirmation bias" may only be the tip of the iceberg of God's activity in the world.

Do I ignore events that don't fit the bias? Not at all. This is just a misunderstanding of what is going on with prayer. As I've mentioned, there are so many variables when it comes to prayer, it's far more complex than confirmation bias and ignoring contrary evidence.

> The main issue with your Perseid meteor shower analogy is that meteors really exist. Does God?

Actually, the evidence for the existence of God and the logical arguments for his existence are far stronger than the evidence against his existence and arguments against his existence. If anyone is honestly trying to infer the most reasonable conclusion, theism would win every time and by a large margin.

> This tells us that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This is just not so. It's not that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, but that all events, extraordinary or not, require a reliable source. It's not the outrageousness of the claims that conditions belief, but the soundness and dependability of the source that make them credible or not.

> Miracles are just claims that some event happened and a deity was the cause of it. If that's so, there should be evidence.

There was evidence, but it's not evidence that hangs around or leaves a trace, just like seeing a rainbow or having a stomach ache. It could be very real, but there is no evidence that hangs around or leaves a trace.

> When you say God is mysterious or that we can't know God's mind - you're just moving the goalposts and not being rational.

I never said that and wouldn't.