"No deadline is given" for scientific discovery generally. Setting arbitrary or even "informed" deadlines on discovery is consenting to miss out on the greatest breakthroughs, including flight, computing, space travel, empirical medicine in so many ways, and what we call "AI". These were all pooh-poohed by "experts". People aren't unspecific. You can meet or otherwise get to know your neighbor without knowing in advance what he looks like or . "Get to know my neighbor" is concrete enough as to be realizable without a prohibitively restrictive definition.

"but won't lower himself to tell us what we should expect and when" - It would never occur to an unwilling experimenter to ask Him for a deadline and to set an expectation if He wants to give you one. Discriminative errors occur all the time in scientific experimentation due to lack of resolution or other perceptive power. This does not falsify the existence or nature of what is being sought. "Something will happen that proves theory X, but we won't tell you what, nor when." Again, this is the nature of discovery and proof generally. Those who say otherwise don't science.

"one could argue it's similar to the messages we sent to extraterrestrial entities on the Voyager probes" - A very valid point. Nearly a billion dollars of investment and the hopes of an entire civilization behind it says we're not wrong for trying to explore the unknown, including believing that something good will happen as we try to acquaint ourselves with any hitherto unknown beings out there.

@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.

@OwenReynolds They have. Millions of souls are in flight today. The world shutting their eyes to it does not change that this is an objective fact. As for the first known physical flight, there were many experiments that culminated in a discovery. There was not an infallible deadline to learn its truth. Many emotionally subjectivized it out of mind.

Nicely done. One small suggestion: you list three escape hatches that the author has included to invalidate any experiments that don't go their way. For the first two you write them at bold at the beginning of a line (and then proceed to explain them), but the third is buried in the middle of a line. Restructuring that sentence to put the short description at the beginning of the line would make it easier for readers who just want to know, "What are the three escape hatches?" to find that information and read more about the ones they are curious about.

@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

@aaaaasaysreinstateMonica I am talking about both experiment and discovery. There's nothing confusing about that. A person can follow precise mathematical models and still make the wings out of lead or make another similarly fatal, unspecified error. I see no connection to a claim about holding a piece of ice.

@AustinHemmelgarn All inquiry is exploratory research when the person conducting the experiment is not convinced of the validity of a truth claim or an experimental protocol from the start. He is free to bail anytime he wants. But that also means he's bailing on the reward. But yes, the experiment is reproducible. The only argument that it isn't scientific is people getting cold feet.

@OwenReynolds All proof is personal. A refusal to look is a refusal to conduct a personal experiment tailored for discovery even when a protocol already exists. Experience or observation is always still a requirement for verification. General discovery and individual discovery are analogous.

@pygosceles Any scientific experiment has to have two potential results: supporting the claim it's meant to defend, or falsifying the claim it's meant to defend. Speaking purely hypothetically, what would qualify with this experiment as the latter? That is to say, given the open-ended time frame you've ascribed to the positive result as potentially happening at any point, what would a negative result look like?

@pygosceles Except the definition of a valid experiment is one where it can pass or fail. As this answer says clearly, the construction of this non-experiment makes it impossible to fail. So it's not an experiment - and it's certainly not "tailored for discovery", because it's set in bad faith. And there's no compulsion on anyone to follow something set in bad faith.

@Idran Karl Popper advanced the idea that erroneously equated falsifiability with testability. However, all of the hard sciences contradict this. Philosophy itself contradicts this. It ignores the reality that a true claim need not be falsifiable in order to be verifiable. There exists no test anywhere that can falsify that human beings can fly. Are you aware of such a test? See this answer for a truth table: philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/105780/32547 If I give you a claim, and you can verify it, does it even matter than you cannot falsify it?

@Graham Where? According to whom? Citation, please! By this purported definition, the proposition that human beings can fly is "not scientifically testable" and "is not a valid experiment" because no one has ever come up with a test that would prove a negative result. It is not falsifiable, but it is verifiable, and it has been verified millions of times. Unfalsifiability doesn't stop a claim from being scientific. We've grown too accustomed to repeating Karl Popper's fib as gospel truth. If something can be in bad faith in science, is there such a thing as good faith in science?

@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.

@Idran This is a good question. The existence of other gods (or their status as deities) is falsifiable through the discovery of the true God, which precludes false ones since God cannot lie. All claims do have a fail state if one happens to know the contrary. There are more methods for acquiring knowledge of truth than an exhaustive search of an infinite space. Normally when we talk of falsifiability we mean it with respect to a given method of determining truth.

@pygosceles That only works if the Christian God is the only divine entity ascribed an inability to lie. But even leaving aside other branches of Abrahamic religion entirely, Proteus, servant of Poseidon, is also ascribed that property. If I performed the Skeptic's Prayer towards Proteus, at what point would that experiment be considered failed?

@Idran Not necessarily an answer, but regarding the pursuit of pagan deities (from a Christian perspective), this question might be relevant.

@Idran You have simply punted on the question though. There are purported deities that we know to be mutually exclusive. If one of them be true, then the others at odds are false. If you obtain true knowledge of the situation, then the "if" dissolves itself. The experiment would fail when you realize that your peers and acquaintances who prayed to the God of Abraham received the blessings of knowledge and happiness while you did not. So it always goes. Each of us chooses which plants to water. Those that are good grow and eventually displace those that are not good.

@armand I am not confusing anything. The two overlap. I am a professional scientist and replicating an already published result with a documented procedure can take an unknown, even unbounded amount of time and resources, due to various omissions. There is also value in learning. The fact that someone else knows something does not mean you have the same appreciation for it and that is precisely what this specific protocol is about. We are, because of our biases, prone to question even what we see and hear. Seeing is not believing; I think we all can understand that clearly enough.

@armand Or are you suggesting that verification or learning of someone else's result is possible without personal experimentation and effort?

@OwenReynolds It occurs to me to ask whether you think the claim that someone else has discovered something means that the opportunity or necessity of discovery has therefore entirely ended, and the process of personal discovery entailed through individual experimentation and discovery can therefore safely be left out? If one person knows something, does it follow that all people know it? Are all things as visible or as easily accepted by all as an airplane lifting of the ground?

@pygosceles well I'm a 3 times Nobel Prize and Purple Heart recipient. That's the magic of the internet: every anonymous poster has great credentials. Your argument is everything that counts, and it makes no sense. If you do science with experimental protocols that don't have rigorously defined and documented expectations about their results, I hope I never get to do science with you.

@armand And yet somehow people tend to put stock in anonymous and outsourced credentials when they happen to align with one's prior biases. I have learned many things that an ordinary "scientist" taught to conform to the biases would miss out on because he is taught to accept a canned answer instead of a true one. There is little that is less creative than the stifling attitude that we have got things all figured out "because science", and no one is allowed to disagree, no matter how glaring the errors that confront us daily.

@pygosceles: Frankly, you sound more like an engineer than a scientist.

@pygosceles The problem this experiment has is that it cannot, by design, verify anything. You're obsessing over time - OK, how about results? By your own criteria, I could claim to have achieved powered flight by throwing a rock off a cliff, because "something happened". What happens is that the rock falls, as rocks do, but it happens. Therefore I can claim my experiment to achieve powered flight is a success. This is precisely to the letter what the OP claims. If you were a professional scientist or engineer, you'd see that.

@Kevin As an engineer of some standing, I can very confidently say they don't! We care even more than scientists about experimental protocols, because unlike scientists we have to make something actually work in the real world. So we're really good at spotting people making claims that aren't supported by evidence. The OP's "experiment" doesn't cut it. If pygosceles was one of my juniors, they'd be learning better than apparently they have about how to spot fakes like this.

There is a natural expiration date of the experiment or timeline if you like and that is before Death comes.

@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?

@Idran This is an excellent point. If the method for "proving" one god (let's call it god A) exists can be used to "prove" a competing god (god B) exists, it's not a reliable method.

@pygosceles I personally am a Christian, and I arrived at my Christianity through a process similar to the one described. But it was a very much not a scientific process. I believe that the feelings that lead me to faith are provided by God. But if pressed, I could not honestly deny that there may be confirmation bias at play. I certainly lack anything objective that I could show to a skeptic. I have faith, but fundamentally, it is faith, not proof or science.

@Kevin I am both. I do wonder what gives you the impression of an engineering mentality or what you would characterize as such.

@stackoverblown Deadline for our effort, yes. But I think it is also generally acknowledged that that event will also demonstrate to even the most unbelieving and skeptical mind whether there is life after death, or in other words it is the deadline for investing in the idea of eternity before we are already there.

@pygosceles I did not state anywhere that a god competes with itself. I said if a method can be used by one person to "confirm" the god they believe in, but the same method can be used by a different person to "confirm" a different god (the two of which could be exclusive and competing propositions), it's not a good method.

Here's an example. If Alice prays every single day for good health, saying "god, I don't know if you exist, but all I want is good health," and lives to be 105 with no health problems throughout her life, she could say she has a good reason to believe in that god.

If Bob prays every single day to Eric the god-eating penguin, and says "Eric, I don't know if you exist, but I want you to eat any god who would try to intervene in my life," and he reaches his deathbed having no evidence of a god ever intervening in his life, he could say he has a good reason to believe in Eric the god-eating penguin.

[Alice's god] and [Eric the god-eating penguin] are two competing and exclusive propositions. Both of them used the same /method/ to reach their conclusion. Both conclusions cannot be right. A method that can reach competing conclusions is not a good method.

The following questions might be relevant to the ongoing discussion:

"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?

How do you know Alice's god is "the god"? There certainly wasn't enough in my example to indicate any attributes or properties of the god she cast the skeptic's prayer toward.