We are trying
to define a question that will allow us to do an experiment “on” God. We’ve had to take a detour and cover a few
issues, but it is time to go back to our “question.” In the last entry on this topic [here], we
ended with the following attempt:
“What would
Jesus have to do to prove to you that He is still alive, still God, still
active in people’s lives, and can be found by everyone who seeks Him?”
Although the
general concept of an “experiment” may still be valid, it is probably apparent
that this is not going to have many of the features that we might typically
associate with a scientific experiment.
One of the biggest differences is going to be the lack of reproducibility.
When we do an experiment in science, we are supposed to be able to
explain the methods with enough detail that someone else could reproduce our
experiment and should be able to confirm our results. Among the many problems we face in a
spiritual experiment is the extremely personal nature of the outcome
measure. Specifically, each person is
going to have a different answer to the question above and so it will be
impossible to duplicate the experiment to a great extent. We could explore trying to come up with a
common answer to the experimental question, but personally I think that is a
doomed effort. Just speaking from my own
experience, I know I’d answer that question differently just within my own
self. By that I mean that my young self would have answered it
differently than my current self, and
I doubt we’d be able to agree on a common solution! And that’s just a sample of one! No, I think we are stuck with the fact that
this is going to be an intensely personal
experiment. This limits the
generalizability of any one person’s results and presents some statistical difficulties
(from a scientific perspective). I’ll
probably have to address those later.
The end result, however, is that
you can’t answer the question for me, nor I for you. I think it is instructive to hear about the
experiences of others and, for some, simply hearing the experiences of others
is sufficient evidence. But, for many,
especially those with a scientific or research background, firsthand experience
is the only thing that will suffice. So,
we will have to press on, recognizing the limitations we face.
We also have to recognize that
God – in this case Jesus – has to agree to “play along” with this experiment. This introduces another significant difficulty
for us. We may not know whether there is
a God or not, but one thing we do know:
if there is a God, we certainly can’t read His mind! So what happens if our answer to the question
above is something that God doesn’t want to do?
Again, as with the repeatability issue, this makes our experiment depart
from a scientific experiment. We will
not be able to conclude that a negative result in our experiment proves that
God does not exist. I’m not even sure how you would design an
experiment to prove that God does not exist.
In reality, this is not uncommon in an experimental design, as often
there are cases where an experiment can only prove the positive hypothesis, but
cannot be used to prove the negative hypothesis. I will come back to that issue when I address
the statistics of this experiment. We
may not like these rules, but they are the rules nonetheless.
I just wanted to bring these issues
up before we move on. These are honest
difficulties and we can’t work around them.
However, there’s an even bigger difficulty regarding this experiment –
one that is intensely personal and drastically different than anything you
would ever face in a scientific experiment.
We’ll have to cover that in the next entry.
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