Elemenope, and Ty,

Oh, yeah? Who says?

Grok?

This: "Since things that are written do not convey epistemological authority of any sort upon the writer.

Ever. "

The fact that you don't know this means you're delusional.

I would tend to think that Ty's book grants him about as much epistemological authority as an ecology paper published two decades ago grants you.

Since things that are written do not convey epistemological authority of any sort upon the writer.

Ever.

Ty,

So, that would be, no?

God has some serious issues with the USA. He was willing to show some grace, to encourage some saints, but in biblical theology, He does not take most nations seriously. I no longer pray for this nation. Strains my sense of justice.

Read Psalm 2. Be nice to have some leaders that would cause it all to come down peacefully, like Russia did.

"Would it have epistemological authority?"

The fact that you don't see how idiotic this sentence is just shows that you're delusional.

Since you count Nixon's resignation as a successful answer to your prayer to remove the unrighteous from the White House, I assume you count these three assholes getting promoted at the White House around the same time as evidence that god is f*cking with you.

Ty,

What best seller would that be? Would it have epistemological authority?

BTW, what do you know about psychological projection?

I wrote what is now a national bestseller. Based on being the most successful author on this site, I claim the authority to call your arguments completely full of shit.

See? Baseless authority grabs are fun!

Elemenope,

Yeah, the problem with past uses of the Bayesian argument is that they only use already existing data. But, to use it scientifically, one has to predict something rarely or never before found, like Nixon and Agnew both resigning (or some such very rare exodus). Like the Dickcissel population, for the first time since measurements began, stops it's decline in numbers. Like, Condor nests found and reported. And the managers get their act together. And, all that was back in 1980. I have been very busy since!

Try it, you'll like it!

Referencing the same sources repeatedly is a sign of a weak paper. I tend to aim for a different citation for every twenty words of script or so. If your argument is strong, it's not difficult to find half a dozen reliable research papers to support each point you make. On the other hand, if your argument is weak, you cite the same papers over and over and over again.

@Grok:
No, we will not be going there, because the entire body of theology doesn't even measure up to the level of elementary. The whole stinking pile of it is nothing but trash and drivel. It has been refuted and shamed thousands of times by knowledgeable and reasonable people. Any further discussion on those grounds represents an unjustifiable waste of time and bandwidth.

Unlike the number of citing articles, which at least have some correlation with the significance of a paper in it's specific field, the number of time a particular reference is mentioned within one paper (or even the average time it mentioned in all the paper citing it so we don't deal with an anecdotal data point) is a completely meaningless value. I never said that there is anything wrong with the use of Bayesian models or with your ecological work, however the way you been using it to prove your theology is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

The vast majority of philosophers think of the Bayesian and other probabilistic attempts at theistic proof as just a prettied up version of the teleological argument (with the same fatal weaknesses). The only ones who, in my experience, differ are the ones who are already predisposed to believe it before encountering the argument.

Theory_of_I

Happy to walk you through some elementary theology, if you'd like. Hard to understand free will without reference to the war going on between God and the devil. Hasty judgements are not always a good idea.

If interested, let me know, and we can start a thread.

Have you applied this technique to the regrowth of amputated or missing limbs?

Yoav,

Good on you. I meant that my paper was cited by the science article the most. But, in any case, now we know that it has been cited 201 times, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Like I say, confirmation that my use if H-D science, long known, little used in ecology, worked.

Elemenope,

Sorry to be annoying. Old habit of mine, that is leaving reluctantly.

But your post was great! Through it I found Swinburne's calculation that the Bayesian probability of the resurrection was 97%!

It appears that we are coming here to Schopenhauer's third stage:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer

(As I first heard the quote, the third stage was, "we knew it all along!")

And, as you note, it turns out that there are lots of philosophers on this band wagon. And here I was, thinking I was the only one!

Custador, this remark

"Again: The method you used is designed to model beliefs. It is not designed to make predictions about the physical world."

makes no sense to me. It is designed to estimate the depth of belief, based on predicted evidence from the physical world. The beliefs are of value only insofar as they successfully predict what is going to happen in the physical world, so they can be used in applied science. And, in appraising evidence, the prior plausibility of the evidence must be measured, which is best done with evidence that was deduced or predicted, from the belief. We did the prayer. We predicted Nixon and Agnew would be removed from office. They were removed from office, in extremely unlikely circumstances. The plausibility of our beliefs, given the confirmation of our prediction, increases. Eventually, the belief gets so strong that we invest heavily is an applied science venture, and, say, destroy communism, or reverse population declines in Dickcissels or Condors.

It is science. It is designed to find and affirm ideas that make a difference in the physical world. Ideas we are so sure are true, that we are willing to invest in them.

So, Revyloution, I take it you are not going to research this correctly, and write that book? Rats.

I have access to his paper and as far as I can tell by giving it a quick skim, and without being an ecologist, it look like a perfectly good scientific paper but, as have been pointed repeatedly, completely irrelevant for the issue at hand. While the number of times a paper is cited is not always an accurate measure for it's importance groktruth made a testable statement that his paper is the most frequently cited of the papers cited in the paper he linked to, as it turns out this is not the case. His paper is cited 201 times while citation #1 on this paper (chosen because it was at the beginning of the list) is cited 481 times. I didn't check any of the other citations.

@Grok: "I define free will as whatever is behind our courts and legal system. This avoids the deeper questions, since it is a fact that we have such courts and such a sense of responsibility. Something makes us do that. Whatever it is, that is what I mean by free will. We also have the words, "choose" and "choice." We have a very poor idea, actually, what those words mean, in our conscious understanding. But, intuitively, we have an understanding that allows us to use the words with a sense of communicating and being understood. When we talk to ourselves, and proclaim to ourselves and others that we choose something, our whole nervous system adjusts to make that more real. Most philosophers agree that the ability to imagine different choices, and to make one, certainly seems something we do freely."

On the preposterous biblical notion of free will:
A god that would create a people and infuse them with the innate will to do the most abominable harm to each other, knowing that is inevitably what they will do, and then deny that it is responsible for their suffering is at once the origin and the greatest extreme of evil. This is a god that deserves nothing but loathing and hatred.

Further, in any secular legal system, he who instigates a crime is guilty of that crime at the highest level.

Done!

Enjoy, feel free to print and frame if you like.

http://qkme.me/35j99p

HAHAHA That was great. Someone needs to make a 'scumbag' meme for this guy. Top says "Claims to be a published scientist" and the bottom says 'When asked for citations, gives link to Wikipedia"

That cracked my arse up. It's been over 20 years since college, but I imagine you would get a failing grade on any paper that used Wikipedia as a source. Boy, you all have more patience than I do. I've had my laugh at Grok.

Besides, there is absolutely nothing more annoying than a totally irrelevant authority claim. If Einstein had made these same claims, they would be taken with the same skeptical eye.

EDIT: And, just throwing it out there, hypothetico-deductive science is the *oldest* generally accepted description of the scientific method (the one, in fact, they tend to teach to grade school students as "the scientific method"), dating back to Whewell in the early 19th century. Bayes' Theorem is likewise quite elderly (mid 18th century). Funnily enough, using Bayesian methods to attempt to prove the existence and/or activity of God dates to just after Bayes' death in the late 18th century. The argument itself is usually credited to Richard Price, who himself credited it to Bayes' unpublished posthumous notes.

So, unless you are a time traveler, none of this is new *or* original.

Again: The method you used is designed to model beliefs. It is not designed to make predictions about the physical world. If by "showing off" you mean "not grasping that there are quite a lot of scientifically literate people here who all have one eyebrow cranked higher than the other every time you refer to this thing", then yes, you're "showing off".

I guess I am showing off! But, it does confirm, to me at least, that my experiment with "state of the art science" was a success. And, that using fruit as a measure, my claim as a trustworthy authority is confirmed. In case anyone cares.

Yes. You keep leaning on this unrelated citation as if it's in any way meaningful to the topic at hand. I noticed. I'm also disinclined to pay for an article from a publication that doesn't even give me the option of using my Athens log-in to view an article.

Custodor,

Now, there may be some here who believe that it makes sense to understand theology before they try to critique it. And, to get an opinion as to state of the art science from someone (this for Ty) as successful as I am.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6040/301.full

I am citation 10, which you may note, is the most frquently cited of all. But two of the authors were students of mine. I am actually more proud of that than the citations, which may have been included just because they were my students. But, you can follow other citations of the reference. The paper iteslf was cited by the head of Research at the Nature Conservancy as the best paper in two decades. Got written up in The Week!

Or not. You know your members better than I do.

Guys, I really have to interject here: Grok is proving over and over again that you cannot educate pork - You can only cure it. The guy is either mentally ill, mentally deficient, or choosing to be obtuse. I can't see any benefit in continuing to prod this guy with a stick and expect a different response from the airy-fairy bollocks he keeps repeating.

Yoav,

Good! You get it. It's a love story, and the Object of the search is looking for love. He is clear that, in His world, "love believes all things," and that those who do not choose love need not apply for His life. And, of course, this is state of the art science, since to do science, one must make predictions from hypotheses, which is accomplished by "believing" the hypothesis temporarily for the sake of testing. In the act of temporarily believing the hypothesis, one is able to deduce it's consequences, make predictions from it, that can be tested! Then, carrying on the temporary belief, one goes out and gets the data!

Yes, LRA, confirmation bias is a problem, nicely handled by statistics, controls when possible, experiments, blind and double blind experiments especially, and, in the end, replications. In bibilical theology, some prayers will get answered, and others will not. ("you ask, but do not receive," "because of the littleness of your faith") This was Prince's point. By carefully studying the biblical theology, he found what were the essential conditions for answered prayer, tried them out, got answers, and passed that on, in good scientific style. In the history of reported prayers to get rid of leaders, the corporate day of prayer and fasting I described meets those conditions. And, it worked. In my 50 years of studying this, I have not heard of any reports of the prayers you describe following these guidelines, and failing. But, I could be wrong. You might check in with the group, Intercessors for America, to confirm your claim.

As for the tithing "Prove Me now in this," experiment, again, there are no reports that I know of of anyone trying this, and failing to get the promised result. This fact will encourage anyone wanting to be personally persuaded to try the experiment themselves. That includes anyone wanting to remove the possibility of confirmation bias by using replication. This will be easily dismissed by those who choose to remain skeptical. This is as predicted by the biblical theology. The sincere truth lovers will hold the hypothesis of confirmation bias lightly, and will test it by replicating the experiment. The others will go off clinging to it as their excuse to stay in skepticism. Everyone gets to exercise their free will, and remains responsible for the outcome.

Revyloution,

You ask for citations about the notion that free will is the "on" switch to humans effectively functioning as epistemic machines.

Here are some relevant sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial

http://thewinonline.com/videos/ten-choices-resilience-choice-1-denial-vs-reality

http://parenethical.com/phil140sp11/2011/05/09/borderline-personality-disorder-denial-vs-acceptance-and-the-choice-of-therapy/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Freedom

I will confess, however, that I spent 5 years working with people in denial in rehabs, around experts who had trained for this work. That choice was at the heart of the effective or ineffective epistemic functioning of the afflicted individuals was a given in their therapies. After five years watching them work, I found their idea confirmed. I never found, or looked for any other primary source for the thought, until you asked, and what I have given is the result of a brief internet search.

I went on to develope my own therapy, which was to verbalize the choice in an "I choose ..." statement, "I choose life.", "I choose the way of truth.", "I choose love and justice, playing by the rules.", sort of statements. Talking oneself into sanity. The idea of making a choice, and empowering that choice with self-talk, I got from the successful rehab experiences. I only tweaked the details, with my more precise scientific phrasing. Of course, this was always combined with counsel and meditation time, or reflection. The troubled person needed some time to say what they were taught to say, and then to ask themselves, in a quiet moment, "Really? What am I saying here? Do I really mean it?" In the end, I start everyone off now with "I choose to be decisive, a strong willed person." Then life over death, and truth over denial.

BTW, I define free will as whatever is behind our courts and legal system. This avoids the deeper questions, since it is a fact that we have such courts and such a sense of responsibility. Something makes us do that. Whatever it is, that is what I mean by free will. We also have the words, "choose" and "choice." We have a very poor idea, actually, what those words mean, in our conscious understanding. But, intuitively, we have an understanding that allows us to use the words with a sense of communicating and being understood. When we talk to ourselves, and proclaim to ourselves and others that we choose something, our whole nervous system adjusts to make that more real. Most philosophers agree that the ability to imagine different choices, and to make one, certainly seems something we do freely.

Research it, and write a book for all of us!