Why do so many people believe in God? (Serious Question?)

In experiments where 25% was random chance, thousands of experiments (he's big on meta-analysis) showed corelation with psi phenomena ranging from 34-39%.

Parapsychologists argue that they should be held to the same standard of statistical significance as medical science, where claimed positive effects of, say, a new drug, are published when the statistical significance ("P value") IS 5% (p=0.05) or lower...

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Contrast this with the standard in the field of research [of] ... elementary particle physics. There the standard of P value for publication is 0.01% (P< 0.0001).

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A number of studies have claimed to be able to overcome the lack of statistical significance of single experiments by using a technique called "metanalysis", in which the results of many experiments are combined. This procedure is highly questionable. I am unaware of any extraordinary discovery in all of science that was made using metanalysis. If several, independant experiments do not find significanrt evidence for a phenomenon, we cannot expect a purely mathematical manipulation of the combined data to suddenly produce a major discovery.

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In any other field, such an unbroken history of negative resuilts would have long ago resulted in the claims being discarded. At the minimum, psychic experiments cannot be used to show that humans possess and special powers of the mind that exceed the physical limitations of inanimate matter.

Meta-analysis can never follow the rules of hard science, for example being double-blind, controlled, or proposing a way to falsify the theory in question....

A weakness of the method is that sources of bias are not controlled by the method.

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Another weakness of the method is the heavy reliance on published studies, which may create exaggerated outcomes, as it is very hard to publish studies that show no significant results. For any given research area, one cannot know how many studies have been conducted but never reported and the results filed away.[10]

This file drawer problem results in the distribution of effect sizes that are biased, skewed or completely cut off, creating a serious base rate fallacy, in which the significance of the published studies is overestimated. For example, if there were fifty tests, and only ten got results, then the real outcome is only 20% as significant as it appears, except that the other 80% were not submitted for publishing, or thrown out by publishers as uninteresting. This should be seriously considered when interpreting the outcomes of a meta-analysis.[10][11]

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The most severe weakness and abuse of meta-analysis often occurs when the person or persons doing the meta-analysis have an economic, social,or political agenda such as the passage or defeat of legislation. Those persons with these types of agenda have a high likelihood to abuse meta-analysis due to personal bias. For example, researchers favorable to the author's agenda are likely to have their studies "cherry picked" while those not favorable will be ignored or labeled as "not credible". In addition, the favored authors may themselves be biased or paid to produce results that support their overall political, social, or economic goals in ways such as selecting small favorable data sets and not incorporating larger unfavorable data sets.

If a meta-analysis is conducted by an individual or organization with a bias or predetermined desired outcome, it should be treated as highly suspect or having a high likelihood of being "junk science". From an integrity perspective, researchers with a bias should avoid meta-analysis and use a less abuse-prone (or independent) form of research.

rrrADAM-

It would be interesting to see the copyright on that quotation as it is almost word for word similar to what appeared in The Conscious Universe with the opposite spin. Who was trying to refute who first?

That's the whole frustration with anything not connected to material data. It's not 100% accurate or reproducible. I understand why scientists say it doesn't meet their criteria for hard empirical science. I just think they're being closed minded when they say that therefore there is nothing to it.