Comment on [deleted]

• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Except it categorically isn’t. If you sit two people in a laboratory – an adherent to an Abrahamic religion and a “practitioner” of “magic” – neither will be able to perform a supernatural feat. We agree that far. But unless the “witch” wants to resort to special pleading that they can’t perform it under laboratory conditions for no good reason (the woo magic system presumably isn’t sentient and has no reason to care? or maybe they have really bad performance anxiety?), then it’s provably false. Even if they say something vague like “better luck” or “better health”, well we have statistics for a reason. Are you not powerful enough? Okay, well like, we’re measuring down to the attometer at this point. If you want to drink masala chai under an amber calcite chandelier of 100 candles drinking masala chai and listening to pagan-coded fantasy music, and you can consistently, measurably move a human hair 20 meters away, congratulations: you’ve still proven witchcraft is real.

  The Abrahamic God, meanwhile, is constructed to be unfalsifiable. It’d be subject to everything I just mentioned except that there are a million bullshit but unfalsifiable rationalizations why a sentient God wouldn’t respond to these prayers to let them be observed. Literally no matter how hard you try, a sentient third-party gets the final say.

  The difference between believing in a monotheistic God and believing in witchcraft is the difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing you made and placed those presents yourself. Of course neither is true and both are ridiculous: there is another entity putting those presents there, but it’s not magic, and by taking action in the real world, you can influence what those presents will be without magic.

  source

  • Feyd@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You’re making a completely pointless argument. Neither obviously false belief deserves respect and science isn’t required to understand that.

    source