Well it was you that suggested that some "fooling" was going on. It was you that suggested that God would try to avoid being detected. Thus suggesting "motive".

I beg to differ. Science can also investigate what has happened in the past. e.g. Cosmology (big bang etc). Sociology (causes for WW2 etc). Evolotution (how life has changed in the past).

We can easily check if there is any advantage to faith.

Did war/slave ships sink more than christian missionary ships? for example would be a good test for checking if praying for the safe passage of missionaries is worth doing.

Do christians take anti anxiety medication? would be a good test for the effect of God's peace on Christians.

How many mountains move when prayed for? would be a good test for faith moving mountains.

Do Christians die when you poison them? would be a good test for the claim in Mark 16 v 18 for example.

(17“These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name …18they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; …”)


I don't see the problem.

Some claims can't be tested e.g. God is love

Other claims obviously can.

CC

the fact that you are using science to investigate object that has motives is the entire problem. Gravity doesn't decide to let you fall because you are fat, it just does exactly what it always does. The speed of light in a vacuum is not altered by sacrifices to crocodile gods.

Sociology is a science, like it or not.

It just isn't though, is it.
There's nothing scientific about it.
It's a religion with no factual basis, in fact it's not even that, it's a cult.

My sincere apologies. I read that as Scientology.

None of those claims can be scientifically tested. Except the snake handling one which is trivial as even christians don't take that literally, except a handful of extreme nutters.

If god is infinitely powerful. And if God knows all. And if God doesn't want your scientific experiment to find anything. You will find nothing. Because you are not all powerful, you are not all knowing, and none of your empirical data is beyond manipulation by a being that that does have such properties.

That does not mean that we should not seek to advance our understanding of the world using the most reliable tool we have. The scientific method.

I believe you are wrong. The most reliable tool we have is Alcohol. After drinking this wonder tool all problems seem to be solved and the world is put to right. The downside is of course the hangover the next day

Hmm, I am beginning to suspect that your knowledge of the scientific method is not as sound as you think it is.

Your assertion that God actively practices deceit would upset a lot of believers who believe that God and truth are the same thing.


CC

Note

I will acknowledge that a deceitful omnipotent entity could void the research of any investigation into anything.

That does not mean that we should not seek to advance our understanding of the world using the most reliable tool we have. The scientific method.

Religion does not fall into the category of objects measurable by empirical observation, and scientific method does not fall into the category of objects that can investigate metaphysics.

Children as young as 7 were among 53 people rescued from a religious school in Karachi where students were chained in a basement room equipped with hooks.
Police uncovered a warren of underground rooms used to detain and punish students in the madrassa in the notorious Sohrab Goth areas of the southern port city, a no-go area for most Pakistanis let alone foreigners.
The raid on Monday night exposed the brutal conditions in some of Pakistan’s unregistered madrassas, some of which feed the Taleban and other violent militant groups with their foot-soldiers.
Madrassa Zakarya catered mostly for Pashtuns from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. Although some students claimed to have received jihadist instruction and a recent visit from an armed group of insurgents, others denied that the seminary was being used to train Islamist militants.
The school’s owners say that the chains were used to restrain drug addicts.
Coverage of the basement rooms, described by one official as a torture cell, has prompted disgust in Pakistan and renewed demands to clamp down on unregistered madrassas.
Television pictures showed the students, about 18 of whom were under 20, led from the the seminary next to a mosque. Some were jubilant while others were clearly too traumatised to speak.
One rescued youngster said that students were sometimes chained upside down and beaten with sticks while another said that he was pressured to join the Taleban.
“If someone fails to get up at four in the morning, they threw cold water on him and later the principal tortured him with a bat,” 12-year-old Sher Ali said. “They also showed us CDs containing jihadi material and two weeks back a group of armed men came here and they gave us lecture on the significance and sacredness of jihad.”
Mukhtiar Khaskheli, a police official, said that the school claimed that staff chained up only students who were drug addicts and that “they wanted to rehabilitate them and make them better Muslims”.
But Rao Anwar, another senior police official, said: “Most of the recovered are ordinary students while a few drug addicts and mentally-challenged persons were also recovered from the basement.
“It seems that the administration was running a sort of religious school-cum-rehabilitation-centre and were receiving considerable sums of money from parents of those kept in for that purpose,” he told The Times.
Sharfuddin Memon, a spokesman for the home department of Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, said police were investigating links to militancy and that the raid had exposed an unacceptably harsh regime.
“It showed the brutalised aspect of our society and our police’s effort was aimed at eradicating that element,” he said.
Some of the students’ families, however, defended the madrassa director, Mufti Dawood, who has so far evaded police capture.
“I admitted my son for rehabilitation because he was an addict of heroin,” the father of one boy said. “We are so happy with Mufti Dawood — he could even rehabilitate a monster.” He was paying some £50 a month to keep his son at the seminary, he said.
Pakistan has more than 15,000 registered madrassas, which educate about one in 20 of the county’s children. Many more, however, operate without any oversight.

]The first glimpse of the Higgs boson, the elusive source of mass nicknamed the “God particle”, has been captured by the Large Hadron Collider.
Two detectors at the £6 billion “big bang machine” have independently found evidence for the Higgs boson at the same energy level, offering by far the strongest indication yet that the mysterious particle really exists.
The findings represent a huge advance in the hunt for the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give matter its mass, though scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, emphasised that they have not yet made a conclusive discovery.
There remains a small but appreciable chance that the spike in the data collected by both experiments could have occurred by chance. Cern plans to collect four times as much data over the coming year, which will unambiguously show whether the Higgs boson exists. A firm discovery either way should be confirmed by the end of 2012.
To confirm the discovery of the Higgs, the evidence needs to have a level of statistical significance known as 5 sigma, indicating a vanishingly low probability that it could be explained by chance. A significance of 3 sigma is normally considered to be evidence for a particle’s existence.
The results presented today from the LHC’s Atlas and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detectors have a significance of 2.3 to 2.6 sigma — enough to be a strong hint, but not enough to claim a discovery. These leave a probability of around one in 50 that the findings could be due to chance.
“I think it will be extremely kind of the Higgs boson to be here,” said Fabiola Gianotti, who leads the Atlas team. “More studies and more data are needed. The next few months will be very exciting... I don’t know what the conclusions will be.”
Atlas found a spike in data pointing to a mass for the Higgs of between 124 and 126 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV), a measure of energy that also indicates a particle’s mass. The significance was 2.3 sigma. It also ruled out all potential energies for the Higgs except for a range between 115.5 and 131 GeV.
“This excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting,” Dr Gianotti said. “We cannot conclude anything at this stage. We need more study and more data.
“Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012.”
The second detector looking for the Higgs, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), has recorded broadly similar results in independent experiments. The bump in its data was most compatible with a Higgs with a mass of about 124 GeV, very close to the Atlas peak, with a significance of 2.6 sigma.
“As of today what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson,” said Guido Tonelli, who leads the CMS experiment. “Refined analyses and additional data delivered in 2012 by this magnificent machine will definitely give an answer.”
Claire Shepherd-Themistocleus, head of the CMS group at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, said: “We are homing in on the Higgs. We have had hints today of what its mass might be and the excitement of scientists is palpable.
“Whether this is ultimately confirmed or we finally rule out a low mass Higgs boson, we are on the verge of a major change in our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter.”
Professor Stephan Söldner-Rembold, head of the Particle Physics group at the University of Manchester, said: “Atlas and CMS have presented an important milestone in their search for the Higgs particle, but it is not yet sufficient for a proper discovery given the amount of data recorded so far. Still, I am very excited about it, since the quality of the LHC results is exceptional.
“The Higgs particle seems to have picked itself a mass which makes things very difficult for us physicists. Everything points at a mass in the range 115-140 GeV and we concentrate on this region with our searches at the LHC and at the Tevatron.
“The results indicate we are about half-way there and within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists with absolute certainty, but it is unfortunately not a Christmas present this year. The Higgs particle will, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn’t exist where theory predicts it to be.
“This would be a huge surprise and secretly we hope this might happen. If this is case, there must be something else that takes the role of the ‘standard’ Higgs particle, perhaps a family of several Higgs particles or something even more exotic. The unexpected is always the most exciting.”
Paddy Regan, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey, said: “The identification of the Higgs boson at Cern, if confirmed, would be the icing on the cake for the standard model of physics, which aims to explain how all the matter which make up the structure of the universe holds together and interacts.
“However, what I personally find most amazing is not necessarily the mathematical beauty which predicts the existence of the Higgs boson, but the incredible 21st century technology which allows the search to be undertaken.
“The Cern scientists at Atlas and the CMS try to pick out the weakest glimpses of the decays of the Higgs boson; to be able to select out these few, extra special decays from the overwhelming massive storm of residues from the multitude of other particle collisions and identify such a rare object is simply mindblowing.”
Professor John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which funds British particle physics and manages the UK’s subscription to Cern, said: “There is still some way to go before the existence of the Higgs boson can be confirmed or not, but excitement is mounting.
“UK physicists and engineers have played a significant role in securing today’s results, and will continue to be at the forefront of exploring the new frontiers of knowledge opened by the results coming from the LHC. This is an incredibly exciting time to be involved in physics!”