what's the most intellectually heavy book you've read?

So again there are studies that show some degree of evidence that prayer does lead to a greater chance of healing. But these studies contain procedural or statistical flaws that prevent them from achieving acceptance in the scientific community. This perhaps should not come as any great surprise. If in fact faith healing was provable to any large degree there would no doubt be an enormous mountain of evidence by now that would be able to pass even the most stringent scientific standards. That overwhelming evidence, as we have seen, simply isn't there.

Skeptical organizations have actually offered large sums of money and immense notoriety to anyone who can demonstrate, under strictly controlled conditions, any form of supernatural ability. This also includes such non-religious claims as psychic ability or dowsing. As yet, despite many attempts, no one has collected a single prize. While this does not disprove that such abilities exist, it does caste a degree of doubt on such claims.

All of the major religions we will examine in this book are filled with examples of such miracles in their pages. The vast majority of religious people throughout the world believe that God does intervene in the lives of human beings for divine purposes. Many people feel that God has directly intervened in their own lives. So we must acknowledge that some degree of anecdotal evidence does exist in abundance that leans some support to the claims of divine intervention. However, the level of verifiable evidence is simply not high enough to convince the scientific community that there is no naturalistic explanation for these claims.

Some theological theories come readily to mind to explain the inability of any religion to demonstrate supernatural power. Perhaps God refuses to demonstrate supernatural intervention when it is demanded. This could be true whether the asker is a believer or a disbeliever. Perhaps divine intervention occurs, but is so infrequent or subtle that it is simply not distinguishable from the normal, entirely natural occurrences in the lives of the six billion humans on the planet. In any case, if we go solely by the evidence, divine intervention must be taken as a matter of faith. Whether we believe or not is no doubt heavily dependent on what we were taught as children and on what personal experiences with God we have or haven't had. We cannot reasonably demand faith in divine intervention by others, nor can we categorically declare that such things are impossible. As in many things in life, it is ultimately up to the individual to decide for themselves.

We can't of course rule out the possibility of faith healing anymore than we can rule out the existence of ghosts. Both of these widely held views can lay claim to massive levels of anecdotal evidence, but lack the physical evidence and repeatability to satisfy the rigorous demands of the skeptical scientific community. We must conclude, to some degree at least, that these various claims to divine intervention are very much a matter of faith to accept

Largo >>
The two most common mistakes about consciousness are to suppose that it can be analyzed behavioristically or computationally. The Turing test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test);; disposes us to make precisely these two mistakes, the mistake of behaviorism and the mistake of computationalism. It leads us to suppose that for a system to be conscious, it is both necessary and sufficient that it has the right computer program or set of programs with the right inputs and outputs. We need only to state this position clearly to see that it must be mistaken.

Property by Jesse Dukeminier

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