The Power of Prayer.

[Navigator]

That's why you need to be able to test any insights you gain this way against reality before putting any trust in them.

Well that answers the question I asked:

The Claim: Prayer assisted my hitchhiking for 3-4 months without luggage or money.
The Argument why this worked: 'we vastly underestimate the frequency of coincidence.' (ie prayer did not help feed and shelter me etc. - it was coincidence.)

The trust issue:

Lets say that you decide to test my claim regarding prayer and without luggage or money, set out on the road hitchhiking.
Your aim is to show that you can reproduce the same without any prayer involved.
After 3 days of sleeping under bridges and not having had enough to eat, you call a halt to the experiment.​

The question:
Q: What would that tell you about your belief regarding how we vastly underestimate the frequency with which coincidences occur?​

 

[Pixel42]

Lets say that you decide to test my claim regarding prayer and without luggage or money, set out on the road hitchhiking.
Your aim is to show that you can reproduce the same without any prayer involved.

I'm still struggling to understand exactly what your claim is, but it sounds like you think prayer made a difference to the amount of of good luck you had. As there are plenty of people who have lots of good luck without praying and plenty of people who pray and have bad luck I already know that's unlikely to be true, and whatever luck I happened to have would just be a single additional data point proving nothing.

The question:
Q: What would that tell you about your belief regarding how we vastly underestimate the frequency with which coincidences occur?[/b][/INDENT]

It's not a belief, it's a proven fact, and one or two additional anecdotes will tell me nothing about it.

 

[Navigator]

Ya ha. *nods*