Discussion on answer by armand: Is the Skeptic's Prayer a legitimate scientific experiment?

@pygosceles You're confounding, IMHO, experiment with discovery. For flight, there was one experiment with pedals and flapping, then eventually one with an engine and wings designed for lift. Results were easily observed in 1 minute, even by skeptics. Kreeft&Tecalli are free to discover an experiment which actually works.

@pygosceles You're presupposing the results, and yet I have peers and acquaintances who have prayed to beings other than the Christian God who have received blessings of knowledge and happiness. I have Christian friends, Jewish friends, Muslim friends, Buddhist friends, Pagan friends, Shinto friends, and they are all happy. Each of them has performed their own version of the Skeptic's Prayer in one way or another, and each of them has come away with the same positive results that you claim is unique to Christianity. Is there an a priori reason I should only trust the results of the Christians?

@pygosceles I want you to ask this question of yourself. I don't need or even care about how you'd answer it to me. Just sit with it. Here's the question: why do you hold the things you don't believe (or the things that contradict what you already do believe), to a higher standard of evidence/justification than the things you already believe? If you are confident in the things you hold to be true, the most rigorous skepticism won't threaten it, and will only further confirm it.

@microondas Plus the circular logic of "The skeptic's prayer is scientific because it is true science". With shades of "no true Scotsman" being implicitly thrown at us.

Your 2+2=4-or-5 example is PERFECT. If Alice says 2+2=4, and Bob says 2+2=5, and they arrived there with the same method, we can use another method to determine which one is correct. NOW, what method can we use to determine which of their conclusions is correct regarding their skeptic's prayer?

It does not impugn your faith to say that the Skeptic's Prayer is unscientific. It does not invalidate your belief, because your belief doesn't need scientific proof to be valid. You yourself have already pointed out that not all truths have to be empirically supported. So why are you so concerned with this particular example being an example of empirical support?

@microondas I'm a big fan of "Eric the God eating penguin". And would agree - the rules for good experimental design is that the experiment should distinguish between outcomes. The sceptics prayer fails to distinguish between "Actions that happen by chance alone and are attributed to this experiment", "Actions as the result of a god", and, the placebo side, "Actions preformed differently by the experimenter as the result of seeking a god"

"Alice expressed belief in god who is god": that's your external assessment. From Alice's and Bob's points of view, they each placed the same faith and prayed the same way and received the same (or at least roughly equivalent) evidence. Same method, each getting a positive (ie. affirmative) result, but BOTH of their results cannot concurrently be the case. So is there a method to determine which one is correct?

@pygosceles But each individual experiment did have a deadline within which results could be observed (namely, the point in time at which the conditions hypothesized to allow flight occurred was the deadline for each experiment). And this isn’t exploratory research as you seem to suggest, it’s an argument for a reproducible experiment to confirm a supposedly known fact.

@pygosceles we talk about experiment here, not discovery. If you create a wing following precise mathematical model - you will be able to fly the plane in no time. "If you hold piece of ice it will melt in less than a minute" type of experiment

@pygosceles If I apply the Skeptic's Prayer to a religion other than Christianity, by your logic, would that process be similarly unfalsifiable? There would similarly be no fail state, and all your points about not giving God a timetable would apply equally to other divine beings were they to instead exist.