Studies have been done on the effect of (other people's) prayers in curing a patient. They've all shown no effect, but let's say the experiment had shown convincingly that prayers of the followers of a specific religion result in major improvements to the patients' health.
Would you still say the question was meaningless? If not, how can a question be meaningless if it depends on the result of an experiment?
It's still jumping to an unrealistic conclusion. Interesting, for sure - but it'd just mean better scientific explanation is required, otherwise it's the very definition of superstition.
What you ask is whether the question remains meaningless when confronted by strong evidence towards the existence of a godlike supernatural being that answers to prayers of a given group.
I guess the question will remain meaningless until such evidence is uncovered.
I guess the question will remain meaningless until such evidence is uncovered
I doubt people who think the question is meaningless will be looking for answers. This is one reason such "evidence" may never be available.
Another reason (a stronger one, in my opinion) is that this question is purely a matter of belief and therefore outside of the realm of science. Which may be another explanation why some people refuse to consider the question.
If it's outside the realm of science, it's no longer a question. The believer already has an answer. In fact, any answer that makes the believer happy will do, for it cannot be neither proved nor disproved.
Science folks my return to the question in the future, when there is a hypothesis to test. Right now, it can't. Trying to answer a question by throwing reason out the window cannot be called trying very hard...
Yes. "Does the act of prayer have beneficial psychological effects?" and "does God exist?" are two different questions, and I do not presume any dependence of the latter on the former.
Besides, I don't see how being dependent upon the results of an experiment has any bearing on the meaning of the question. The data collected in the experiment may be empirically valid, but the connection between the data and the question is inherently rational, not empirical, and you must already have a set of presumptive axioms in order to connect the concrete data to the abstract question.
I don't see how the concept of meaning can be discussed in general terms at all. It seems to inhere in the relationship between a person and the ideas he considers.
I've certainly encountered other people who behave and speak in ways that indicate that they attribute a great deal of meaning to this question (often ironically because they insist on asserting an empirical basis for their faith), so I would not presume to speak for them.
(BTW, note that I'm being pedantic in this thread in order to discuss this topic with a high degree of precision. I'm not trying to create a semantics rathole, honest. But oftentimes clarifying the semantics is necessary to have a productive conversation.)
"2+2 is 5" is a mathematical statement. Mathematics is different from the rest of science in that it is not an experimental science, so that a (theoretical) statement does not need an experimental confirmation, just a (theoretical) proof.
Isn't the question only meaningless if the answer is No? Assuming you're talking about the traditional Judeo-Christian God, then you would certainly be missing out on a lot of good (both in this life and the next) if the answer is Yes.
When I say "the question is meaningless", I'm saying that the question doesn't identify a gap in useful knowledge of the world. It might be a purely definitional question for which the answer boils down to a tautology, or it may identify a trick of logic that appears to be knowledge but is not, e.g. a paradox, or it might simply be nonsense.
I say the question "does God exist?" is meaningless because:
(a) it is a simple Boolean yes/no question, but its is asking about the relationship between two incredibly abstract concepts: "God" and "existence". To address the question, these concepts must be defined in precise terms; but being abstract, there is no suitably objective metric to measure their precision against. Therefore, in practice, any logically consistent answer to this question will be a tautology.
(b) the validity of religion is not actually dependent upon the answer to this question; the concept of "faith" precludes the necessity of empirical validation. If you are religious, you may consider it important to believe in God, but this is not the same thing as it being important that God objectively exist.
(c) formalities of thought aside, my underlying metric is how useful answering the question is, not how true it is, and I do not see useful value in answering the question. Asking the question, on the other hand, opens the door to interesting conversations like this one, which give us an opportunity to analyze, exercise and improve our thought processes, which is why I'm participating in the discussion so extensively. :)
a.k.a. Pascal’s Wager: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager . It’s rather broken as a theological argument, if only for the fact that who’s to say you’re choosing the right religion if you do decide to go down the spirituality route?
I'm not suggesting that logic would lead you to adopt any certain religion. I'm just saying the question itself isn't meaningless, because it's answer is actually pretty important (not that we can know for sure what the answer is).
It's more like: We don't know whether it's true or false, and we will never know it.. so why bother losing time with this question anyway? (I don't say that is my point, I just wanted to clarify a bit the "only matter if it's no".
That's a valid explanation. When I hear someone call a question meaningless, I immediately think that it must not matter what its answer is, not that the answer (presumably) can't be known.
That's a big assumption. From another perspective, if one does not believe that any god (should it exist) intervenes in human affairs, then the question of whether it does exist would be not as interesting.
I think that you could fairly be described as an agnostic, then.