Yet, in a universe this vast, it is off-handedly deemed impossible that the “most outrageous” things of all could happen: the existence of a Creator…

I cover this elsewhere. See:

The God Impossible

Naturalism Is Not an Axiom

The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism

Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist

Things have to be possible before they can have any measurable probability. You are thus confusing epistemic with physical probabilities. That we can know something given the evidence is an epistemic probability (the probability we are right to believe something exists or happens at all). But that something happened is a physical probability (which follows only from physical facts).

Hence you have to show the facts exist the combination of which would produce the outcome, and that the probability of that outcome is within cosmic possibility (e.g. whole rabbits quantum mechanically appearing on your desk are not; but electrons quantum mechanically teleporting through a nanoscopic barrier is). If you could do that for God or anything other than the natural coincidences I document then you’d have a case. But you can’t. Because there is no sufficient evidence for God and the supernatural as there is for natural physical coincidences.

We are expected to believe in coincidence, even though, scientifically, there is no way to measure it, account for it, rule it out, validate it, count it, etc.

I said the opposite of that. I said we have to ascertain the epistemic probability of a thing before believing it. In other words, belief must be based on evidence.

It’s as if you can speak something into existence, and I’m supposed to believe it to be so…but you won’t allow for the possibility of God doing the same thing.

Both statements are illogical. The possibility of God is not supported by the evidence. The possibility of random natural accidents is extensively proved by evidence. Note the difference. I’m not the one speaking things into existence. You are. All my claims are based on evidence. None of yours are. You might want to rethink that.

Honestly, I read this LONG article (because I figured I owed you one, and you had linked to this post elsewhere, for my edification), and I just think this is funny. Even funnier that somebody else said:

“I can’t help wondering whether there’s any subject that you don’t think you offer the definitive opinion on.”

You just come back so dogmatic, like you don’t even sense the hint that you come across as all-knowing, and always right. It’s off-putting, but then it makes me laugh. This whole big article is an assertion meant to explain away the “miraculous” and “supernatural” by instead having us believe there is such a thing as coincidence. Now, the article will admit that:
(1) “Succinctly put, the law of truly large numbers states: With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.”

Yet, in a universe this vast, it is off-handedly deemed impossible that the “most outrageous” things of all could happen: the existence of a Creator, a heaven, a hell, a spiritual plain that is invisible to our instruments & natural senses, that God became flesh, performed miracles, and resurrected from the grave, that this Creator/Saviour is sovereign in the affairs of his creation, that he works in ways that are foreign to our understanding. We are expected to swallow the concept of coincidence and currently imperceptible causation, in lieu of exercising faith in the divine system of things. And that-which we-currently-cannot-perceive-but-is-nevertheless-causation is not allowed to comprise the miraculous or divine…that is deemed “irrational”.

(2) “At the moment, we have no measure of the size of this body of occurrences. Similarly, we have no general way to allow for misrepresentation, mistaken or deliberate, that may lead to many reports of coincidences that never occurred.”

We are expected to believe in coincidence, even though, scientifically, there is no way to measure it, account for it, rule it out, validate it, count it, etc. This belief is deemed rational. Isn’t that an exercise of faith? And if such prodigious minds as these exercise faith in that which they can neither explain, perceive, nor measure, why then do we look so condescendingly upon others who place their faith in God?

I am not positing this as an explanation for the inexplicable, rather, I am sitting here reading all of this psychobabble & guesswork and it’s as clear as day (to me) that people who reject God are still at a loss to explain that which they have deemed to be impossible–the evidence of the unseen. They just prattle on ad nauseum, scratching away at the “exterior” of something which they refuse to study as it should be studied (and therefore cannot understand). They prefer to guess & call it fact, confuse knowledge with understanding.

It’s like a deaf person, standing outside an arena, trying to convince people (as they exit from a concert) what they didn’t hear and didn’t experience. It’s lunacy. These “expert sources” are too proud to admit their own inability to perceive, and it’s just laughable. Yet it makes me immensely sad…I can take no pleasure in the deafness of others, when music is so beautiful & powerful to experience.

3) “This is the biggest math error most people make: they think amazing coincidences can’t be accidental. Well, guess what. Tons are.”

Again, this is laughable. It’s as if you can speak something into existence, and I’m supposed to believe it to be so…but you won’t allow for the possibility of God doing the same thing. The biggest error YOU have made: you fail to give proper attribution for the actions of the Creator of the Universe. You make up something you call an “accident” to take his place. You speak something into existence in an effort to prove that things cannot have been spoken into existence. I’m just supposed to accept that contradiction and then applaud your massive collective intellects.

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind…”

-Romans 1:18-23

I normally don’t type out extended passages of the Bible in a comment section; a mere reference where interested folks can find it and look at it for themselves usually suffices, IMO. But this was one time where it was all summed up so perfectly and so on-topic, I couldn’t say it any better myself…so I typed it up for your consideration.

There’s your rational debate.
This passage just informed you that:
A) The fact that sin has consequences is an evidence of God’s wrath (and, therefore, of God’s existence).
B) It points to your own conscience as another witness to this truth–how does right & wrong even get invented, much less passed on to succeeding generations? (Yeah, I know you’ve written a book on that…) In a world that supposedly descended from the survival of the fittest, neither conscience nor morality makes any sense. It cannot evolve. It must be divinely “injected” into humanity.
C) Lastly, it calls creation itself to the witness stand to testify for the intelligence behind its own existence.
D) Then–most importantly–the passage explains why I can perceive God and you cannot. You have chosen to be handicapped & I have chosen to be His. You exalt your own wisdom and honor yourselves. I try in every way to acknowledge & point to the glory of the incorruptible God and be a student of His wisdom.

Each of us looks at the other as a sort of fool. We each put our faith in different “experts”. Yours guess about what happened in the past and attempt to extrapolate predictions for the future. Mine tells me what I missed and what I have to look forward to. Either you have the answers or God does.
You can’t disprove the existence of God, so…
“You need to brush up on how probability works.”

That’s my point. When these guys refuse to be tested again, that’s how we know they ran a con. You can’t get scientific results with only one test with only one subject and only one control. That would never pass peer review at any real journal anywhere. And when they are tested by real tests, they fail. This happens all the time. It’s why we laugh these studies off.

There is a clear difference between the two studies; one of them was performed by a mentalist and the other was performed by two homeless and drunk guys who were probably “just trying to get lucky and hoped that he and his buddy could guess enough cards to get them enough easy money to get off the streets…”

Furthermore, in this simple test, the drunk guys did not get a single card correct. 0 out of 52. But in the study I presented to you, the results were different; the “mentalist” was able to produce images very similar to those prepared for him.

Even the author of the article you presented to me stated that “while statistically possible (although very unlikely) to pass a preliminary test by luck alone the second more rigorous test would expose any guesswork and show the subject as a failure.”

That’s right. It is very unlikely. And I should note that the mentalist managed to achieve something even more unlikely, since his task was not to predict some limited cards, but rather any image that was prepared for him. So, the unlikelihood is more evident here.

Finally, I question the conclusion that we should simply ignore these perplexing results just because the test has not been repeated. You have the burden to explain how the ‘mentalist’ fooled the researchers in this experiment.

Dude. International Journal of Yoga? That’s a bogus journal. Its impact factor is barely above 1. And the study’s control size was far too small to produce statistically significant results. These kinds of bogus studies have been numerous and always fail replication tests. We’ve been through this so many times before. There is a reason these guys never won the million dollar James Randi prize: their methods never pass real peer review, and can never produce real results.

Their own conclusion reveals the scam:

Nonetheless, one has to be cautious while interpreting the study findings due to the following limitations: i) ideally, it would have been methodologically more rigorous if Mr. Gerard had replicated the successful telepathic task with similar brain activation during another session of fMRI on a different occasion. As Mr. Gerard had reported some inexplicable discomfort in the few days following the fMRI, this could not be done; Ii) examination of just one control subject is another limiting factor.

As the famous Joe Nickel would point out, the fact that the supposed telepath couldn’t reproduce the results on a different day, and made up an excuse to avoid being tested, gives away the game: they knew they’d get caught if they tried to replicate their scam. The fact that there was only one control subject and only one test subject likewise renders the entire sturdy scientifically useless. Both failures any real peer reviewers would have nixed this study for.

And lo and behold, when [a] telepath [like] in this study [gets] tested under real conditions, he [is] proved a fraud.

For instance, there are successful tests that real scientists developed and found that some phenomena can’t be explained by physical processes. I’ll give you an example.

Here is an important one: “In 2008, psychiatrist Ganesan Venkatasubramanian and his colleagues conducted a brain-imaging study in which they prepared images for a mentalist (someone who is purportedly telepathic) and a control subject. The mentalist was able to produce an image very similar to the one prepared for him, whereas the control subject was not. These investigators have demonstrated that when the mentalist was successful, the right parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) was activated, whereas it was not activated in the other person. Instead, the left inferior frontal gyrus was activated. This finding was similar to a prior study too.”

Source: The Biology of Telepathy – PsychologyToday

You can see the original article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144613/

In your book (Sense and Goodness Without God – Not Much Place for the Paranormal) you wrote the following: “It should be apparent by now that Metaphysical Naturalism holds little place for the paranormal, things unnatural or supernatural: gods, ghosts, psychic powers, faith healing, you name it. Anything involving sentient beings and powers beyond nature (as in not grounded or formed naturally, or existing prior to or independently of nature), and anything purely mental (like true mind-over-matter or purely mental attributes, like a disembodied desire), anything like that excludes naturalism.”

How do you solve that?

But there is no “debate” about the subject of this post you can be referring to. Everything I write here is from peer reviewed and expert sources, or follows therefrom. And no rational debate exists about any of it.

Unless you mean the miraculists et al. In which case, yeah, they have no rational debate to offer on this subject.

And that is my aim. I hope to hit that target as often as I can. And when I miss, I correct or revise.

Wrong math. The probability of finding two men falsely accused of rape in any random sample of men is not the frequency of false rape claims. So, maybe you could get the correct math problem on the board first?

But you also might want to look up the gambler’s fallacy. Anyone who thinks rolling a six after a six is less likely than rolling the first six, doesn’t know how probability works. And the conjunction still has to be put in ratio to the other conjunction (e.g. rolling a one after a one, for example; i.e. a conjunction of actual rapists is also less likely than a conjunction of falsely accused people, so again, you need the ratio of the two conjunction rates).

But also, you have to start from real data. Avicenna’s claim appears to have been fabricated by himself. So that leaves you with two cases, not three.

Then when we look at those two cases, another disappears: there has never been a false rape accusation againt PZ Myers. It was a threat of a possible future accusation of sexual harassment (not rape), and the woman who threatened was caught and confessed.

So now you are down to just one actual false rape accusation. Which occurred when the accused was a minor. And was disproved by physical evidence.

In other words, you have committed the exact same mistake as Christian apologist Francis Beckwith did with the Exploding Church.

And of course, MRAs are now keen on fabricating false rape claims against us, so as to prove they exist. So we can no longer rely on the general rate of false claims. Having an organized motive to fabricate claims against a specific group of people, will hugely increase the rate of false rape claims in that sub-group.

As for the risk of sexual assault at conferences (not just atheist ones; the risk exists at all conferences of all kinds), you definitely should factor that into your decision making (as to attendance or cautions upon attendance). Because it happens. It is probably declining because of better policies and policing and awareness. But I move in a circle of several thousand people who all communicate in the same network about attending conferences in the atheist circuit. If the risk is 1 in 100 over a lifetime of conference going, then I can be expected to know dozens of assault victims and their stories. Just as it must also be the case that dozens of sociopaths have attended those conferences…because that actually is the rate of sociopathy in the general populace.

Plan your life accordingly.

Ah, that’s what he means. Thanks for catching that.

Yes, indeed, that is true, with respect to my aims. I hope to hit that target as often as I can.

But perhaps this is feeble praise, since it means I found it admirably understandable? (Except for how you can use statistics, even Bayesian style statistics, to resolve Gettier problems in science when they involve very large scale phenomena. Many things, like the existence of an objective reality, don’t even seem to permit meaningful calculations of probability.)

And it’s admirably concise too. Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not To Be Wrong takes many more words.