USA Today reports on the efforts of “prayer warriors” who have taken to the sky for the spiritual benefit of the people of Ohio.
CINCINNATI — Ten small single-engine airplanes circling over Ohio on Friday afternoon will be on a special mission. They’ll be taking part in PrayerFlight, airplanes filled with people praying for the health and welfare of the state’s 11 million residents. […]
The prayer warriors, from all religious affiliations, pray silently and aloud while aloft. They ask God to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation. […]
The second flight had eight planes with 26 people, including six youths from Teens for Christ, a ministry of teenagers from 22 high schools. This time the group prayed over seven Ohio counties.
Samantha Ciminillo, 18, of Lima, a member of Teens for Christ, took one of the December flights. It was her first airplane ride. “You see rows and rows of houses, and you know they are full of people you are praying for,” she said. […]
For now, Ciminillo is looking forward to Friday. “God works through the power of prayer,” she said. “I’m expecting big things to happen.”
Now, as a connoisseur of sophisticated theology, I am well aware that the vast majority of religious believers share a philosophically nuanced image of the divine, such as one might read about in the London Review of Books. God is viewed as a manifestation of immanent transcendence (some tension there, to be deliciously savored!), a precondition of the universe’s existence, standing outside our ordinary categories of substance and imagination. Happy times they are, as these typically devout folks chat away over dinner about the progress of our understanding from Tertullian to Levinas, relaxing over dessert with anecdotes about Ricoeur’s hermeneutic speculations.
But, in the interests of complete honesty, we must admit that there are still a few folks out there — one or two, scattered about the landscape — who indulge in a somewhat more literal vision of the traditional religious stories. People who believe that God is some kind of person, sitting up there in the sky, looking down on us and passing judgment. A being quite frightfully anthropomorphic, whose omniscience and omnipotence correspond roughly to those associated with the beard of Gandalf and the strength of Superman, respectively.
It’s a funny kind of philosophy, and I do wonder how carefully people examine their own beliefs. If a human being were to manifest the kind of need for constant worship and gratitude that this God exhibits, we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic). It’s a scary idea, that God has the power to exert great influence over what happens in our daily lives, but chooses to do so or not on the basis of a handful of people flying around in airplanes, praying their hearts out. (“Sorry, Kentucky; I’d love to help out, but the flightplan didn’t quite take the prayer team over your airspace.”) Subtle interventions to be sure; maybe this person’s cold won’t evolve into pneumonia, that one will get cancer but it won’t be very painful. And if it weren’t for the praying, those unsuspecting folks below would be out of luck; one imagines God doing a weary shrug, in a “Don’t look at me, I’m just enforcing the Cosmic Rules, which, yeah, I’m sort of responsible for in the first place, but still, rules are rules, you know?” kind of way.
And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.
Janet,
Consider the following hypotheticals:
1) A 40 year old father truly believes that God is speaking to him and telling him the devil inhabits his 8 year old daughter so he molests her and ultimately kills her by holding her head down in a toilet until she drowns.
2) A troubled undergraduate student in the 1970’s after ingesting LSD and fasting in the desert for six weeks believes he can defy gravity and attempts to prove it by leaping from the top of the 12 story library on campus.
3) The leader of the most powerful country in the world thinks that he has the divine right to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people because the god they worship isn’t Christian.
These are the types of scenarios that can be justified by what you describe as “other ways of knowing”.
Having never even met you, I am almost certain you are as mortified by these as most people. But when you open the door to these approaches, I cannot see how you can avoid such consequences.
Do I get goose bumps when I hear the Barber Adagio for Strings or for that matter George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today”…. Absolutely I do.
Do I need to provide a reductionist explanation for that response. No I don’t. I can enjoy the experience without analysis. But do I think the scientific method is the ultimate arbiter of what is objective reality and what is not… I do.
The “subjective” perspectives of QM and relativity are part of science and have been experimentally verified. That was not what I was referring to above. To state it more clearly. Let’s assume an alien civilization was observing the Rings of Saturn from well beyond our Solar System. During this observation, all human life on earth was extinguished by let’s say some extremely virulent version of the bird flu.
Would their observation of the Rings be altered by our demise? I think not.
Elliot
Hey Janet, are you part of the crew in Ohio? that would explain many things 😉
Think about it, to explain the universe we dont need an hypothetical *god*, if you wonder where is your taste for art or music coming from, I could give u a scientific explanation which you will probably reject, cus music or perception isnt *science* right? I’d be partially happy if at least you would invoke the ‘music of the spheres’ (not sure you’ll get that one though… 😉 )
Now, there are many things we yet dont understand, but that has happened in the past many times, and stubborn as we are, we havent given up on the idea that God is yet a comodity we prefer to discard. I could go on about more deeper questions about how is it the the world is logical, but that could drift us appart into a multiverse of shapes and tastes which I’m afraid you could missinterpret…After all, you could as well sustain an anthropic principle…
Dont get me wrong, humans will never *trully* understand what’s out there, but so what?, does it make any sense if there is something else we cant observe, nor play with? 🙂
Jap, we are liltle beings, and as little we can figure out about the world. We have done pretty well nonetheless, and the *extrapolation* philosophy it’s worked out quite well. Sure there wasnt anyobdy at the time of inflation, nor anyone has *really seen* an electron. However, we still can ultimately *observe* its effects whatever it was we decided to map into a set of mathematical objects and rules which allowed us to make some cool *predictions* (and postdictions). It is the minimalist hypothesis we stand up for.
Whatever that gives us the confortable sense of understanding and leaves us happy there is a sensible universe out there…
Like Poincare said once: If nature werent beautiful, it wouldnt be worth living nor studying it…
Oops, I introduced aesthetic into the equation…sorry 😉
The truly odd thing about this is that is amounts to a very mechanistic view of prayer — that these planes are something like crop-dusters, speading God’s grace on the good people of Ohio far more efficiently than would have been possible if the same amount of praying was done on the ground.
In this light it is ironic that some contributors to this thread have been arguing eloquently for “different ways of knowing”. So far as I can see the organizers of these flights actually have a remarkably materialist model of prayer — almost scientific, one might say, and at odds with the viewpoint expressed by the apologists (and I use the term in its technical) contributing to this thread.
Nice job, Sean. However, out of the 28 responses (at this time of writing) i find that you have the ear (or reading eye) of plenty who simply do not get it. To wit:
From Sam Gralla: “I always follow you, but sometimes I don’t believe you. For example, I don’t believe the last sentence.”
What is there to “believe”? That you disgaree with Sean’s final paragraph, or that Sean in fact wrote a paragraph that is consistent with what he thinks and has written earlier?
From Joe Buckley: “I must admit that you’ve left me “peevish”, so I’ll try to ask respectfully. Did you have to post this on Good Friday of all days?”
One day out of 365 ain’t bad. But your peave begs a larger question: what makes April 7 so special? Well, let’s just look a smattering of happenings over the last sufficiently long while:
It is also the anniversary of: Attila’s Hun’s plundering of Metz (451 AD), the invention of wooden matches by the English chemist John Walker in 1827, a forest fore that that reportedly burned 900 acres in San Luis Obispo, California in 1926, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for an Axis conference in Salzburg in 1943, Spain relinquishes her protectorate in Morocco in 1956, “Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds,” premieres in New York City in 1970, a Guttenberg bible sold for $2,000,000 in New York City in 1978, the 14th Nabisco Dinah Shore Golf Championship was won by Alice Miller in 1985, a fire kills 110 on a ferry in Norway, while 30 die in a ferry flip over in Burma, both in the same day in 1990, and Pakistan beat Sri Lanka to win Singer Cup in Singapore in 1996…I could go on, and on…
but the point should by now be sufficiently clear: just exactly who has dibs on any particular date? Hmmm?
From Neil B. : “One of the best works about God in that higher philosophical sense, was _The Mind of God_ by Paul Davies. He focused mostly on things like the anthropic principle, in the sense of it being interesting that our universe has just the right physical values for life to exist within a very narrow range. For those who escape to multiple universes, pehaps via modal realism: I hope you are aware of the irony of believing or even supposing such things, given:
(1.) Our near-complete lack of theoretical justification for any other universes with other properties, and
(2.) The history of logical positivism, which used operational definitions of empirical proof requirements against ideas of God etc. It would be rather hypocritical to toss aside such concepts just because it becomes “politically” convenient to use them now.”
A. The anthropic principle is completely counter to cause-and-effect. Religious folks would find this result horrid (if they managed for a moment to be able to think about it reasonably). In fact, most physicists laugh at the anthropic principle as an idea that has zero explanatory power.
B. There is no end to theoretical justifications for what you are pleased to identify as “other universes with other properties”. A theory can address any question the author likes. In science, we like the idea that ideas that are bad or inconsistent with what we observe in nature are discarded. Not so with religious folk.
C. Its rather easy to toss aside any concepts, such as you have provided, that are easily identified as trash.
and again from Neil B.:
“I remember a Nova episode way back around 1980, called “The Green Machine”, about plants. They did an experiment in which a fellow prayed to one enclosed box of plants, and not to a control group. The former did better. Just saying, that’s what I saw…”
So you “see” something performed on a tele program and immediately embrace it as an “observation” worthy of its long tradition in science. Hmmm…
From Janet Leslie Blumberg: “If Elliott simply claimed that science is the only way to describe the workings of the physical world (which it is — well, except for art and music and photography and…). But then Elliott equates that fact with the claim that science is the only way to know “objective reality.” There’s the problem.”
Excuse me? Since when has it been authoritatively ordained that “art, music and photography” are not at heart scientific??? These are aspects of human discourse that are intimately involved with communication, and as such, must necessarily have a rational handle on mutual understanding – and THAT is intrinsically associated with everyone’s responsibitlity to “measure” what it is that they have seen or heard. That’s SCIENCE, first course, as soon as we leave the womb.
What makes you think that music, for example, is not scientific? Oh, I see…its that peskily popular commercialized lousy-poetry wallpaper-pattern stuff that so many equate with the word “music”. Did you know that you can actually obtain INFORMATION from decent music??? Do you know what a “ear-worm” is??? If you did, you would understand the intimate connection between true art and true science.
From Gavin Polhemus: (who also said, “It’s been a few months since I made a fool of myself on this board, so I’ll risk it again.”) “None the less, I think that something like the existence of a personally involved deity, like the one cited by the prayer fliers, is well within the scope of scientific investigation.”
Consider this: if a “personally involved deity”, who putatively has unlimited power over our affairs, has, in fact, any purchase on what dreck and discord we find about ourselves, then any NORMAL thinking person would reject such an incompetent as an insult to humanity. BUT, if such a perfection of being actually existed, how could any of us non-perfect humans possibly pretend to “know” the existence of such a being, let alone know the intentions such a being might have? It’s quite clear from the rhetoric spouting from the religious contingent throughout the world (WHATEVER the religion) that these people claim to have knowledge that can only be afforded to perfection: evidently, no self-analysis in search of error, mistake or underestimation is required as long as one has GOD on one’s side. This is the gist of the problem: some people like to listen to evidence from nature that is reproducible (they are “scientifically-minded”) and others like to listen to people who have followed a millenia-long tradition of hoodwinking con-artistry. Nobody thinks they aren’t good at it.
Richard E. : “The truly odd thing about this is that i[t] amounts to a very mechanistic view of prayer — that these planes are something like crop-dusters, speading God’s grace on the good people of Ohio far more efficiently than would have been possible if the same amount of praying was done on the ground.”
The difference between a “mechanistic” and a “non-mechanistic” view of prayer is, in the complete absense of any evidence that would shine any light on this ridiculous question whatsoever, completely ZERO.
On the other hand, to those like Sean, Terry, Coin, Spyder, Mark, Jeff (for humor), Mollishka, Eliot and Garbage and some others: Bravo!
Zeus’ Headache,
I stated
In the interest of brevity, I did not bother to observe what I thought was obvious: that ample scientific evidence has accumulated contradicting that existence. I should have been more clear.
No answer to Wolfgang’s question? To repeat:
Sean,
if you believe that “things don’t happen for a reason” (and I would to some extent agree with you) then why do you really care about the “complicated conglomerations of particles”, which USAtoday identified as people praying in airplanes, when all they did was “obeying the laws of Nature” ?
“The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.”
I like it that way too. Categories like good and evil are completely human constructed and vary in time and space (in the historical/cultural sense). But since these categories, along with the categories of “science” and “religion” are also all in our head, then shouldn’t we first spend some time defining what we really mean when we throw such words around.
I disagree with some in this discussion who have seemed to imply that science is somehow outside of or beyond culture. This too feels to me like an antiquated belief that scientists really don’t need to subscribe to. A more useful way to view science is as but one patch in the great tapestry of cultural forms. This is not to denigrate science, but simply to point out it’s similarity religion and other belief systems. Of course, science has many unique aspects, chief among them being it’s institutionalization of revolution.
I’ve taken a stab at defining science and religion, but what do ya’ll think?
Arun and Wolfgang, I fail to see the connection between whether I should care about things and the existence of some external cosmic purpose. I do care about things, as a matter of empirical fact; my cares might change with circumstance, but they don’t rely on God to tell me what to care about.
Janet (responding all the way back to #7) — I’m totally with you in regretting the disdain shown for awe and wonder by your young science major. Most working scientists are full of amazement and wonder at the workings of the universe. They generally believe that understanding the mechanisms behind the natural world adds to your appreciation of its beauty. College students can sometimes get carried away in their enthusiasms, you know.
More generally: sure, there are different ways of looking at the world. Rigorous training in a specific discipline doubtless colors one’s favorite ways of conceptualizing what they experience, and one’s conceptual predispositions doubtless influence what kind of discipline they go into. But when it comes to deciding whether some specific proposition is right or wrong, I don’t (or shouldn’t) really care about the personal predelictions that drove someone to believe in that proposition; I should judge it on its own merits.
In particular, I’m happy to admit that there are plenty of ways of looking at the world other than the scientific. “Was Hamlet crazy, or just play-acting?” is not a scientific question, nor is “Is the death penalty moral?”, although both are interesting questions.
So, when people say they believe in God, either they mean to make some specific claim about the workings of the universe, or they don’t. The entire point of the above post was to highlight the fact that, while academics and theologians and so forth like to think about God in a more philosophically nuanced way, the overwhelming majority of actual believers are much more literal about it. They really believe in some being that made the universe and intervenes in it to occasionally violate the laws of nature. That’s a view that has every right to be critiqued on conventional scientific grounds.
If you want to believe in God in some other way, that’s fine, but you would have to spell out exactly what that way is before I could tell you what I think. God turns out to be quite the moving target, once you move out of guy-with-a-beard territory. Personally, I find that the concept is completely unnecessary and unhelpful on all of the levels of which I am familiar. It’s just baggage from a less sophisticated era, and high time we moved on.
Sean,
Repeat- why should the behavior of complicated agglomerations of particles obeying the laws of nature cause you botheration?
We all know as a matter of empirical fact that it does bother you – e.g., this blog posting. The question is why?
-Arun
Again, in fewer words: why shouldn’t it?
So were these a bunch of prayerful people, who thought they needed to get closer to God to establish a stronger, clearer connection for their communications to him; or, were they a bunch of people who love to fly in airplanes (or were happy to get a chance to go on their first airplane ride), who were just looking for another excuse to go fly around?
ways of knowing
I don’t like that term. Gavin Polhemus, aesthetics is about beauty, not truth; therefore it is not about knowledge at all. As for J.L. Blumberg’s “other ways of knowing,” she never seems to list any other ways of knowing, or explain why we should respect them as valid. My impression is that the term is used to claim unearned respect for outmoded and invalid forms of epistemology which should be discarded as unreliable.
Janet Leslie Blumberg’s posts perfectly illustrate the disconnect between the rarefied air of academic theologians and the swamp gas of religion on the ground. The former is foreign to the latter. In the part of Ohio where I live — a rural Ohio county graced by a 7th-Day Adventist district headquarters, a Church of the Four-Square Gospel seminary, and more fundamentalist churches than you can shake a stick at — what Janet wrote is not only incomprehensible, if it were understood it would be regarded as uppity heresy. The Bible as interpreted by fundamentlist preachers is what counts here.
It’s the latter kind of religiousity that’s the enemy of the Enlightenment, the purveyor of anti-science trash, and the root of the kind of evil of which Dawkins and Harris write. It’s the kind of religiousity that pushes the teaching of a Moonie’s trash science in Ohio public schools and leads to a local conservative Christian radio host claiming that scientists routinely prostitute their profession to keep the grant money flowing (a near quotation). C’mon out here, Janet, and speak at the Billy Graham Crusade scheduled for next fall in my county.
Ha! Zeus is both cruel and funny… excellent!
How about different “modes of perception” instead of “ways of knowing”? “Knowing” implies there is a basic truth which we can either know or not know, and nice cold hard facts are generally within the realm of science, which is what I think some of the folks here are objecting to. But the term “perception” allows for more subjective ways of accessing the world around us (e.g., through art and music). As for, “Was Hamlet crazy, or just play-acting?,” there is a well-defined answer; Shakespeare knew it and since he didn’t bother telling the rest of us, we’ll just argue ad nauseum over what it is. Whether or not morality, then, falls under the purvue of “science” is a question of whether or not there is an inherent sense of right and wrong to the universe (i.e., regardless of whether or not there are humans wandering around on Earth trying to decipher it).
Did Jesus reincarnate flew over Augusta today? Zach Johnson seems to think so.
Wonder whom Jesus would have chosen if other contenders prayed as much as Zach did? Would he still choose randomly one over the others? Doesn’t he want to be more egalitarian and bring euphoria to every player? Either the concept of the ‘tournament’ dies or Jesus evolves into Chance.
“The pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.”
-Ian McEwan, Saturday
RE: #28 Richard E.
> … So far as I can see the organizers of these flights actually have a remarkably materialist model of prayer …
This whole airplanes-for-Jesus bit reminds me of a scene in “Jesus Camp”. The preacher and her assistants were preparing the camp to open. They walked through the chapel, up and down the rows, running their hands over the pews praying for protection. They touched the computer and prayed that PowerPoint wouldn’t crash.
This struck me as some kind of odd Christo-Pagan witchcraft. Do they think that their touch (or airspace proximity) somehow enhances God’s power to answer prayers? If they really believe in an omniscient god, who would presumably know the addresses, names, and favorite pizza toppings of every person in Ohio, and an omnipotent god, who could answer any prayer, then do they not believe that they could sit in Bangkok and effectively pray for the residents of Ohio?
I think somebody wanted some flying hours, and found a way to get some tax-exempt fools to foot the bill.
I have spotted a worrying trend. The frequency of faith-related posts around here does not seem to be Poisson. In fact, I estimate — very conservatively of course — that the rate of such posts has been increasing, and is consistent with a hyperbolic model having an asymptote at t_0 = 2008-04-01 01:00:00.17 UTC +/- 3 days (stat) +/- 11 days (syst).
(Most of the systematic error is due to my background model, which is a 3rd order polynomial. With some effort I may be able to improve this.)
Now, the extrapolation of this model leads to a result that is clearly unphysical, so something in the nature of a crisis or turning point must surely intervene. Perhaps WordPress will crash, or — as I judge more likely — Sean will convert to Zen Buddhism and apply to join the Shaolin Temple in order to study the application of martial arts in the context of geometrodynamics. Whilst he is pursuing this lifestyle, the opportunity to blog will necessarily be curtailed.
Of course, the later part is admittedly speculative, so please take it with a grain of salt.
I have to reiterate that I think Prof. Blumberg is almost completely wrong here. Her view is reminescent of the “science is just another religion” argument, which I think misrepresents what science actually is. Of course there is necessarily a human element in science. But her assertions are merely her opinions: I could say there is no big conundrum about God and that her comments about otherness are absurd.
In response to Jason Dick, #12,
Here are a couple of interesting articles which answers your comment. They may or may not be satisfying or helpful.
This first one is entitled “If God is all good, why does he allow pain, suffering and evil to exist in the world?” http://fmmh.ycdsb.ca/teachers/F00027452/F00027453/gr9fqgoodevl.html
http://fmmh.ycdsb.ca/teachers/F00027452/F00027453/prov1.html
I was at a particular physicist’s talk and he said something like “We can’t observe individual quarks, but we know they exist because the theory of QCD does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and so in that respect, quarks must exist. Likewise, if string theory also does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and the multiverse concept still persists in string theory, then we should regard the multiverse as existing as well, even though, like quarks, we can’t directly observe them.” So this kind of disturbs me. I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up. Perhaps because I read somewhere in this thread about science being another religion, or whatever. Anyway, it reminded me of this talk. The question I had was how do we know we can’t formulate a theory that works just as well but that does not contain the baggage of things completely outside our universe (like other universes) which we can’t even observe? What is the connection (if any) between a “belief” in the existence of these other universes based on a successful scientific theory, and a belief in the existence of things “outside” our universe (like a heaven or hell), based on something completely different from scientific arguments which also cannot be observed?
“I remember a Nova episode way back around 1980, called “The Green Machine”, about plants. They did an experiment in which a fellow prayed to one enclosed box of plants, and not to a control group. The former did better. Just saying, that’s what I saw…”
They should have done a double-blind experiment with a bunch of plants. Then they could have had a controlled scientific experiment with published results, instead of just an anecdote on tv.
What was that great quote from Richard Feynman? It was something like, “Science is a kind of way of not fooling yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.”
I think that sums up the difference, in my view, between science and “other ways of knowing.” Sorry I don’t have the exact quote.
Given that this is nominally a physics blog, I think we should consider some of the interesting physical questions that occur in the context of this post.
I’m particularly interested in understanding the physical nature of the interaction called “prayer”, and why praying in airplanes might be more effective than ordinary ground-based prayer.
Of course, prayer could be considered a 3-body interaction among the person praying, the person or object being prayed for, and the deity. The first physical question would be: Can this be simplified to being a pair of 2-body interactions — presumably, pray-er to deity and pray-ee to deity? If so, then presumably the airborne pray-ers believe that they are moving themselves closer to the deity (so much for omnipresence) in order to increase the strength of the interaction. Of course, we don’t know quite how distant this sky-god is — if the interaction were some kind of inverse-square, the extra mile or two shouldn’t make too much difference, *unless* the gravitational potential of the Earth makes a big difference.
I don’t know, this is starting to get pretty complicated. I think it might be useful to ask these airborne “prayer warriors” to share the physical models that they’re using to predict that prayer will be more effective when airborne. Somebody ought to be able to get a paper out of this…
They are Christian, though, so perhaps we could start with the New Testament to see what it says about the best location for prayer… “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” (Matt 6:5-6)
Oh. Never mind.
Zeus’ Headache, you indulged in some clumsy thinking and misrepresented my views in various ways. The purposive formulation (there are different ways to look at it, it’s not a “the”) anthropic principle is supposed to be about why a single example, the universe, is the way it is. Of course it doesn’t have explanatory power, it’s not that sort of thing, it’s an after the fact interpretation. We aren’t going to have bunches of universes to play with, for experiments one way or the other. Also, you did not provide any of the suppose theoretical justifications for other universes, nor deal with the core empirical issue. You misunderstood my point about logical positivism, because (even if poorly worded) I wasn’t referring to the idea of God being discarded, but meant that it was hypocritical to discard the *logical positivism* once LP wasn’t on the “right side” of the argument any more. You did not deal with the implications of LP for multiple universes, or even how LP got away with being used against “undesirable” concepts even while being unable to deal with operationally meaningless phrases like “things continue to exist even while not being observed.” As for theories that are bad or inconsistent being discarded, well, the idea of the universe being conditionally existent contradicts nothing (unlike young-earth creationism, etc.) It is an interpretative take on what we already know.
BTW, a philosopher who thinks the universe is not existentially self-suficient is not practicing “religion”, which comes from a tradition of revelations or a founders’ vision, but is practicing philosophy (perhaps you forget the irony that the presentation of philosopy of science about how science should be done is itself philosophy, and not science.)
FInally, you misrepresented my take on the plants and prayer episode. All I said was, that’s what I saw on the show. I didn’t endorse any interpretation of it, or characterized it, clearly saying I was just passing on a simple “observation” *of mine* in the simple sense, not meaning the experiment itself. Hence, your pretense “So you “see” something performed on a tele program and immediately embrace it as an “observation” worthy of its long tradition in science. Hmmm…” was a clumsy canard, not based on any thing about the way I reported it. So far, you come across as an Ann Coulter style scientism dittohead, of the same sort who thinks that liberals are communists, etc., just substituing other targets instead in another context.