Theology and experimental method

I think tomorrow morning I will take the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession). It will be the first time for more than 15 years. Why not? I will do it with absolute sincerity, but also reflect on it afterward as an experiment I am conducting on my being.

High-IQ rationalists often look down on religion, but does scientific rationality not obligate one to conduct experiments with religion? To reject religion on a rational-scientific basis, without periodically varying your exposure to religious treatment, is to make inferences from what a social scientist would call a truncated independent variable. If your phenomenological database has zero cases of religous treatment — if there’s no variation on your independent variable — then your model’s predictions for its dependent variable (the estimated rationality of religious commitment) are likely to be biased.