Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Top Ten Suggestions For Performing Better Miracles:

I was pursuing the Atheist blogroll at lunch the other day when I found the Top Ten Suggestions for Performing Better Miracles

Via Atheism: Proving the negative

1) The claim that a violation of the laws of nature has occurred should not be evaluated or investigated by committed, zealous believers. Humans have an uncanny knack for finding what they are looking for. The virtue of double blind testing procedures in science is that they help us prevent undue influence by wishful thinking, conflicts of interest, hedging, confirmation bias, and sloppy thinking. Many people claim that there are miracles happening on a regular basis now. It would be a relatively easy matter to have an independent panel of objective evaluators, doctors in the case of a healing miracle, examine just the evidence before and after an alleged healing without any leading or suggestive information about what they are looking for. Just show them the X rays, or the diagnoses, or the CAT scans before and after someone is alleged to have been healed of a brain tumor, for example.

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