HOW "GOD" WORKS by Marshall Brain

• Human beings have to make decisions about the truth of information constantly.
• Statistically speaking, if you live in the United States, there is a 75 percent chance that you are a Christian believer. Seventy-five percent of adults living in the United States today—an overwhelming majority—claim to be Christian and to believe in God and Jesus Christ.
• A 75 percent majority represents an unprecedented level of agreement and approval.
• If something from the world of alternative medicine were to show compelling evidence that it is effective, it stops being categorized as alternative medicine and becomes evidence-based, scientifically proven medicine.
• For reasons that are not completely clear yet, human beings sometimes report feeling better simply through the effects of having someone care for them.
• An anecdotal story about the experiences of one friend is absolutely meaningless.
• Critical thinking is a response to a rather bizarre and unexpected fact about the way human beings naturally think. It turns out that typical human beings, left to their own untrained devices, are not very good thinkers at all. In fact, the average human being who is not provided with any training in critical thinking skills may, potentially, be terrible at logical, precise thinking.
• Critical thinking is logical thinking that is free from biases, fallacies, misinterpretations, fears, and superstitions. As such, critical thinking leads people toward the truth when answering any particular question or when understanding the way the world really works.
• Double-blind testing is one tool in the critical thinking toolbox.
• The average human brain appears to have a natural affinity for superstitions unless it is trained to recognize, understand, and disregard them.
• People tend to put a great deal of faith in stories that are personally told to them by people they trust.
• In reality, the effects of homeopathy are completely, provably imaginary.
• More than half of adults in America believe that the Bible is literally true
• The claims for the effectiveness of prayer in the Bible contradict the reality that we see in the real world here on Earth. Therefore, the claims are false.
• A critical thinker simply looks at the evidence and understands what it indicates.
• Christians and other believers are especially susceptible to something called the post hoc fallacy.
• When the post hoc fallacy combines with confirmation bias, where only positive correlation is noted, a person who suffers from the post hoc fallacy acquires a completely erroneous view of what is happening in the real world.
• Just because you do X and then Y happens (correlation), that does not mean that X causes Y to happen (causation). Causation must be proven scientifically.
• Just because something happened following a prayer, it does not mean that the prayer caused it to happen.
• The problem with groups of human beings is that, if they are not critical thinkers, they tend to create echo chambers amongst their members.
• Given that prayer is such an important part of the definition of God, the fact that prayer is not working tells us something essential about God.
• If prayer actually works, there are a number of things we would expect to see happening, on a statistical basis, in the real world.
• The facts are simple and straightforward. When critical thinkers apply modern statistical methods and use them to understand if prayer works, there is no valid evidence that it does.
• Amputated limbs are never restored through prayer.
• Every answered prayer of intercession is nothing more than a coincidence.
• every prayer fails when the possibility of coincidence has been eliminated
• This is a simple fact about human beings: Our expectations tend to influence our behavior.
• The ability to recognize scams is an important skill for any critical thinker, and it’s also important for consumers in the marketplace.
• The thing to understand is that Yes/No/Wait is always true.
• no matter what you do or who you pray to. No matter what a person prays to, “Yes,” “No,” and “Wait” are the only three possibilities. Therefore, like the sunrise, it’s guaranteed to happen.
• If you insist that prayer works, then simply pray for something impossible and watch it not happen. You have proven conclusively that prayer does not work.
• God is declared to be omniscient. But if God is omniscient, then there clearly is no reason to pray, because God already knows what you want and need.
• a God who is hidden cannot answer prayers without exposing Himself.
• When Jesus talks about the power of prayer in the Bible, none of what he says is true.
• Prayer’s effects have never been demonstrated in any valid statistical sense.
• Belief in prayer is a superstition.
• Lacking any evidence, the default position of any critical thinker is to assume that God is in fact imaginary.
• The God defined by the Bible answers prayers. A person who wants to claim that God exists but does not answer prayers is inventing an entirely new god-concept that stands completely separate from the God of the Bible.
• A person who goes around redefining God on a whim is a person who is inventing imaginary beings.
• IF POSITIVE CLAIMS ARE MADE, IT’S POSSIBLE TO PROVE WHETHER THOSE CLAIMS ARE REAL OR IMAGINARY.
• To create certainty, we perform many different kinds of experiments, gather lots of data, and create an interlocking web of evidence that all points to the same conclusion.
• Why is the Bible so divergent from reality? The myths in the Bible have no basis in reality because the people writing the myths had no scientific knowledge, nor any access to omniscience.
• There is the huge ego boost and reassurance that comes from the belief that the all-powerful creator of the universe is on your side.
• In logic there is a principle called the Law of Noncontradiction that is one of the three Classic Laws of Thought. The Law of Noncontradiction, according to Aristotle, says that “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.”
• A being who set out to murder nearly every living thing on an entire planet is evil, plain and simple.
• A critical thinker looks at evidence, then evaluates it.
• How do we know that something is real in our universe? It is very simple: There must be evidence demonstrating it to be real.
• One of the hallmarks of religious delusion is a refusal by believers to process straightforward evidence and reach logical conclusions from that evidence.
• If God were imaginary, we would expect to see events happen at exactly the same statistical rates to believers and nonbelievers after controlling for confounding factors.
• Any animal is an intricate multicellular chemical machine, nothing more.
• One reason that Christians buy into the idea of souls and heaven is because most started hearing about the soul as toddlers and they never think about the concept rationally after that.
• Things like anecdotal evidence, confirmation bias, cherry-picking, the post hoc fallacy, doublethink, groupthink, the regression fallacy, and the placebo effect combine together to create a powerful and convincing illusion for people who don’t think critically.
• The God of the Bible is unethical, immoral, evil, and often nonsensical.
• The chosen beliefs of a religious believer are extremely persistent and usually immune to evidence, discussion, common sense, questioning, rational thinking, etc., despite the fact that the believer can so easily see the irrationality in other religions.
• As a general rule, human beings are not very good at thinking unless they’re trained to be critical thinkers.
• As human beings, we have to come to grips with the fact that evolution has imprinted our brains with a strong tendency toward super-irrationality in certain areas.
• Decisions should be based on empirical evidence, experimental results, and critical thinking that indicates the best course of action rather than anecdotes, emotional whim, dogma, or political party lines.
• It’s telling that Christians in developed nations of the world reject misogyny and slavery even though the Bible fully supports both.
• The fact is, human thinking is the source of all ethical behavior, for everyone.