Posted By:
Lord Lucan
in somewhere strange Jan 12, 2005
Think and Reason is offering $1,000,000 if you can prove that God exists. There are conditions attached. But they do say: "All you have to do is prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God exists. It is really that easy!"
Is there really this money sitting waiting?
Supposing I said I was God - and prove I exist (should be easy) - is the money mine?
"Modeling appears to be an extension of the same function as storytelling"
In much the same way that house-building is an extension of the act of putting rocks in piles. You might as well claim that mathematics is also just storytelling, since both frequently use pencils and paper.
Nearly all scientific hypotheses are expressed nowadays as mathematical models. The basis of the modern scientific method is falsifiability, which usually comes from making a testable prediction based on the current evidence and a speculative formal description of the effect to be tested. Hence a hypothesis will typically express an observable phenomenon in terms of a variable parameter that may or may not be controllable.
This is a model. It's not a story, or an expression of "inner" or "outer" realities, it is a simple, testable expression of a tentative scientific explanation of a set of phenomena.
And this is also frequently the weakness of scientific studies of religion/spirituality. The hypotheses that can be formed and tested are usually trivial or weak. In the recent example I linked to earlier, the hypothesis under test was that very religious people, who think of God as a real being, will use the same areas of the brain while praying that they do when talking to another individual. In other words, people who claim to think God is real often really do think God is real, and will talk (pray) to him like they would another real person.