The Theory of God - Testability and Falsification

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Man seeks to know. God is a theory, offered to explain the unknown.

As the iron fist of Chruch rule over truth was broken by the dawn of science, and as Religious Authority was revealed to have been wrong about some things, other competing theories were free to be offered. Darwin, for example, no longer had to fear being burned at the stake as a heretic. Religious Authority was relegated increasingly to a smaller and smaller domain of only those things that could not be proven and could only be taken on faith.

But all of these theories, such as God or Darwinism or the Big Bang, tend to share the same lack of testability. They may all be sophistry, nonesense masquerading as sophisticated thought. Good explanations have testability as a property. Even Einstein’s claims about all instances of certain phenomena across the entire universe, past, present and future, even much of those highly regarded claims, cannot be verified or falsified.

If something can’t be tested against experience, then is it really justifiable as part of a strong theory?

It seems to me, for example, that this is one reason why Academics have such a firm strangle hold on published Philosophy. Absent testibility or falsification, then the credentials of the claimant take on a whole new use. Instead of offering proof, I offer my credentials. (Personally, I would be in favor of this predjudice, if only being wrong carried a more severe penalty. For example, any Economist could sell the government on any new economic theory, but if it did not work, then off with their heads. One would have to have the courage of their convictions, so to speak.)

Science develops theories, verifies or falsifies them, and thus is scientific progress achieved. Not possible with some theories, including the theory of God, among many others.

But I wonder, why accept some theories that can’t be verified or falsified, and yet reject others? Why accept Einstein or Darwin, but reject God? It seems to me that if one is going to reject what cannot be verified or falsified, then one ought to do so without predjudice.

2

hey PC.

I don’t know any “theories” about the existence of God, meaning theory as in empirical science – except by maybe saying, “here we are”. Most proofs for God are (i think) based on philosophical argument, which does not rely on empirical falsification – although that’s nice to have. They are based on observation and arguments founded by dialectic reasoning – without which there would be no basis for scientific theory.

Cheers,
mrn

3

Sorry my friend, the ‘Falseifiable Theory’ is just fanciful a myth as ‘God’. Referance: Duhem, Quine, ect. ect. ect…

Ducks behind wall
(I think I finially figured out how to get everyone to hate me in one sentance.)

4

Color me poorly read, but would you care to explain?

The Philosophy of Religion is just not my cup of tea, so you’ll have to allow me a little leeway. (Well, you don’t have to per se, but it would be polite).

(Although I’m not sure this was orignally under the umbrella of religion? Perhaps it was more the philosophy of science?)

5

There is no evidence whatsoever of evolution? I always thought there were a few things that keep the theory alive…

6

Actually its Philosophy of Science.
I do highly suggest reading all about it, its sort of the hot contemporary stuff.

In a nutshell though problem 1:
No theory exist in a vaccume.
The basic idea of falisfication, is that you do an expermerment to test a given theory. That is if the theory is true a certian observation should relust, and if that observation does not result, than the theory is false.

The problem is that the observation is not the relust of the thoery alone but the theory and a bunch of other auxilary conditions and thoeries, all of which could be regected. For instance, imagen your testing a new drug an antibiotic. You apply to your sample, you look in the microscope the bugs are still there. The claim that the drug is good, is falsified. The lab guy checks it off, simple. Then the lab guy realizes he accenteally applied penicillin, not the new drug. Now because an established “fact,” Penicilin is an effective anti-biotic, all the auxillary theories come out. Maybe this is a resitant strane, maybe the microscope doesn’t work, maybe all microscopes don’t work, maybe this particular bug isn’t really a bacterial, ect. ect…

Problem 2:
The swan problem.
(Self-identified Christians love to whip this out too- “not a true Christian”)

This is a subset of the other one, but its funny enough to put up here.

Scientist 1: “I have been studing birds all my life, and I can say with great confidence all swans are white.”
Scientist 2: “Um, Bob, isn’t that a black swan over there.”
Scientist 1: “Er, uh, that is obviously not a Swan.”
Sci 2: “Why not? It seems to have all the features of a Swan.”
Sci 1: “Because its not white.”
Sci 2: “Good call.”

Erm, yeah, this is fun stuff to study. Highly reccomened. And indeed their are responses to all these, and reponses to those responses ect. ect.
I’m not sure how long I can be interested in giveing other peoples theories, but I assure you, historically this have tended to get worse and worse for the falsifyable claim from the time Sir Popper wrote about it. Of course, thats one interpretation of the liteurature not meant to subsitute your own.

7

Hey, is it possible that all God did was roll out the carpet so to speak? Perchance to entertain one of His girlfriends? :smiley:

8

Thus my second statement in ()s. :slight_smile:

Ummm…so you do more and better tests. It doesn’t seem that the falsification concept is so much a problem as the implementation. That’s like saying, “Utilitarianism is wrong because goods and harms are difficult to calculate.” You can’t say the concept is wrong because we have difficulty implementing it.

I’ve heard that before when dealing with the problem of induction. And I’m still not convinced.

Yes, it means induction has difficulties, but it in no way means it’s wrong, only problematic.

But your point(s) is(are) taken.

9

Well in theory is the problem is there is no better test. That any empirical test conciveable actually test more than one theoretical statement. So that you can never find which theory is actually wrong.

Well, actually the whole point of falseficationalism is to avoid haveing to use induction. The idea being that only negitive resluts really count, and that they have a dectutive relationship to the truth of a theory. So yeah, if your going to go with induction then you really don’t need to worry about the falsifability of your claim. After all the justification would come from induction.

It’s funny how this thread talks about philosophy being under the stranglehold of creditial and science not being, my exeperiance has been the oppoiste. A new scientific theory won’t be accepted with aproval of the right members of the club. But slip a good logical scathing philosophical criticism of an idea under someones door, and you can get yourself a job. Some philosophers stay in Grad school 9 years until they write that paper that will pay their meals for the next 20 years.

10

LOST GUY

I do like the way you think, but…

Popper’s thesis was that it’s ONLY a good theory IF it CAN be falsified. Conjectures, such as those offered by Einstein, are tested and refuted. If refuted they are replaced by further conjectures, and so on, until conjectures can be found that cannot be refuted. Popper saw this as distinctive to science. Others since Popper (Wittgenstein, Quine, Kuhn) have contended that testability and falsification were only applicable to an already accepted body of concepts, beliefs and practices, which I think agrees with what you were saying. Certainly western philosophy with it’s emphasis on logic has such a body.

However, if you think about it. Those truly original thinkers who come up with radical new points of view that fly in the face of all that come before them, such as Einstein rewriting Newton for example, receive the widest attention and acclaim. Even when (no I’d say ECSPECIALLY WHEN) the theories offered lack testablity or falsification. Particularly so, when the thought comes from a source that has all the right credentials and pedigree. This is the stuff that Academics thrive upon. Whole careers in physics are spent on theories that cannot be verified or falsified. It is “POP” physics, so to speak. Much the same of Philosophy, me thinks. First, come the high priests who claim to understand the new stuff, although they just as often get wrong as right, and then come the skeptics who take shots at it, and finally comes a competing theory that has a similar pedigree with similar credentials offered to replace proof.

I think perhaps it has been so throughout history. Imagine the first guy who came up with the theory of God somewhere around 12,000 BC, as a way to explain a drought or a flood. And think of the attention he must have garnered when he suggested that he could explain how to win back God’s favor by offering sacrifices and doing penance. For those folks living on the banks of a river, and depending upon crops, such as in Macedonia or along the Nile, that guy must have been the Einstein of their day, don’t you think? He gave rise to a whole new career choice, temple priest. He even created a new career for women, vestal virgin. LOL

True, neither testability nor falsifiability will settle everything or solve all crucial questions. But the deepest fear that plagues philosophy as a profession is just this: Sophistry - nonsense masquerading as sophisticated thought. Physics ought to share the same fear, me thinks. And testability and falsifiability are valuable tools in overcoming this fear.

11

Haven’t you heard of/or seen famous preachers/pastors such as Benny Hinn or TD Jakes e.t.c who have actually commanded people on wheelchairs to stand up and walk or healed cancer through prayers and asking for God’s divine intervention. It doesn’t get any more realistic than that.

12

I once set in a debate between a fundamentalist preacher and a Holiness preacher. The Holiness preacher said I can make a sick man well. The fundamentalist preacher (I think he was a Church of Christ Bible Thumper) said, you know what? I can do one better. I can make a well man sick. Then he proceeded to do exactly that with a volunteer from the audiance. It turned out that the Bible Thumber had a Masters Degree in Psychology and was a licensed and certified hypnotist. He had his volunteer rolling on the floor doubled up in agony. Then he miraculously cured the volunteer who had no memory of ever being sick at all.

Not to make light of your examples, but there have just been too many con artists doing tent show miracles for that to swing my vote one way or the other.

13

Philosophic Caveman.

I think you may have articulated something akin to that distirbuing thought that drives me towards metaphilosophy. What if philosophy, science, religion, new-ageism, ect. are all just differeing forms of shouting at one another. And we have gotten so far as to forget what it was we were argueing about and are now shouting almost exlusively about shouting. I half expect to see the point in my lifetime when everyone just starts busting out laughing. Then we can have a beer and go to bed. A short period of world peice before we wake up realizeing we are the same place we have always been: In a tiny campground, surronded by vast unkown territory, with the possibility of snakes hideing in our tents.

Or maybe not. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

Lost Guy

Yes, and we can all sit around the campfire and formulate competing theories about what is in that vast unknown territory. The key word is “unknown”. Man seeks to know. He can’t abide the unknown. So he formulates conjectures about it.

Then we would go explore it and some of our theories would fall by the wayside as they became falsified. For example, the guy who theorized that nobody could ever cross the boundry between the known and unknown, whose theory came crashing down upon his head as soon as we walked about two feet beyond what we had explored before.

Which brings us back to my original statement. God is a theory offered to explain the unknown.

I think the guy we should fear the most though, is the guy who says we should not explore the unknown because it makes God angry. That guy would not be welcome at my campfire nor me at his.

15

I have independently studied and thought about so many theories & arguments concerning God. I arrived at not only one “theory” or as I call them “truths” that God does indeed exist; but several in fact. But it seems to me that even if I did share all the information that I know with you pertaining God, there would still be innumerable other theories that do not hold enough water for you. So naturally, I must ask be4 embarking on anything, what do you really believe in? what holds water for you? what’s an absolute truth?

16

Well, to over extend my metaphore to a fault for my own amusement. Let’s say this campground is the campground of sensory experiance and the content of our ideas. The Scientist looks down and the ground, sensory experiance, and sees little foot prints. So he exlaims, “It’s a hoard of little creatures that steals our children in the night.” Then the Religionist look up at the trees, the content of our ideas, and upon seeing the broken branches proclaims, “It’s a terribly large thing that takes our children in the night.” Then they argue for a while about weather to have more children to satiate the hunger of the large beast, or less to starve out the population of the little beasties. Meanwhile, the Western Philosopher is popping marshmallows and listening to both sides, until his burst out with a surgar charged cry, “WTF mates??? Don’t you see, if could be a shapechange, or maybe monkeys that sometimes walk on the gound, or or anything!!!” Then he screams and hides in his tent.

Now who is this explorer you talk about. Who tries to escape the campground of sense data and inborn ideas? Perhapse, the artist, who slits her throat or beats her conciouness sensless with drugs. Well she never comes back does she.

So back at the campground, sure a couple people went to go look around, but they sure aren’t back yet. What do we do?

17

This sort of qualifier is almost an apology for what will follow, no? If your proofs of the theory of God were compelling then you would not need to pre-qualify me as worthy of your thoughts. If these are private religious experiences, then you can save them.

But, for discussions sake, I’ll play along. It gives me the chance to say some things I think you need to hear, turnabout being fairplay.

I believe in mental self-discipline. Reserve judgement until you know you have all the facts. Any theory is innocent until proven guilty, one way or the other. But the intended point of my post was that no mere Theory, absent proof, or absent sufficient reason, could claim dominance over any other mere Theory. The theory of God was offered to explain the unknown back at the dawn of civilization somewhere around 12,000 BC, and has certainly undergone some radical reductions over the ages. It was inevitable. As the unknown was reduced by the sciences, then God’s domain was increasingly smaller. As more and more became known, then it became increasingly less necessay to posit God as an explaination.

Until today, mankind tends to fall into two broad categories (two ways to live if you will). 1)Nothing is a miracle or 2)Everything is a miracle. I think both camps are suspect, but those who deny God are more suspect to me than those who insist upon God. As much as we come to know, our knowledge remains finite. Those who embrace untestable and unfalsifiable theories as evidence of no God, display a disrespect for truth, in my opinion. They claim to know the unknown. They are guilty of the same error of which they accuse the Theists. This is not worthy of their own beliefs.

Those who insist upon God do the very same thing. However, that camp never did claim to require proof, did they? No, in fact, from the very start they embraced their lack of proof and have always proudly worn it as a sign of great Faith. They even went so far as to argue that God abhors being tested, and that God withholds proof of his existence as a way of testing mankind. They argued that God is and always will remain a mystery beyond our understanding. My point is, they were at least consistent.

However, the causality camp originally required proof. In the beginning, they used their demand for proof as justification for withholding belief in God. But today, they have abandoned their own ethics. They now elect their own Theories into the same category as Proof (based largly upon their predjudice for Academic credentials). They treat their own untestable and unfalsifiable theories as somehow on a plane above the original Theory of God. This seems to me to be significant deterioration of their position, and that is what I was trying to say.

Mankind makes errors because our knowledge is finite. Man seeks to know, so he develops theories to explain the unknown. God is one of those theories. The error comes about when mankind blurs the distinction between theory and proof, between belief and fact, between opinion and knowledge. It takes great focus and determined effort to avoid this error. It takes deconstructing and reverse engineering your beliefs, opinions, and theories, to identify their source and correctly classify them. It also demands a very healthy awe for the unknown, and for the vast unfolding of natural events.

So you decide if I am worthy of your proofs or not? I’ll accept your judgement in the matter. LOL

18

The sensory experience can be explored and tested, no? Is this not the distinction between knowledge and conjecture, between theory and proof? Someone can follow the footprints and discover that one of us has become a canibal. Someone can convict us of eating us, by the bones around his tent site.

As to our own ideas, this is where we seem to get tangled up in our shorts. We elect our own ideas to the level of knowledge. It is very difficult not to do so. It takes great self-discipline, focus and determined effort not to do so. It seems to me that masses of men just tire of the effort, or get seduced and distracted by the onslaught of the mind’s relentless activity. The “don’t know mind” is the original mind, child-like. It may be very true that you have to be “born again” to find the truth, in that you have to return to the clarity of the “don’t know mind”.

Anyway, somebody follows the footprints, returns with an armload of bones, tells us where they found them and we give birth to ethics. Is it OK for him to eat our kids or not and what should we do about it? Meanwhile, some of us are so enamored of our own theories that we refuse to accept the evidence. Those ones go off and from new campsites, denominations, city-states, nations, divisions of every sort. We are well on our way to our first war, me thinks.

Hey, I like this game.

19

Well its true that sensory experiance can be explored to a degree, as can our own ideas (what is math after all). But it get truly terrifing when you consider that perhapse sensory experiance is our own ideas. The theory ladness of observation, at the very least, has been shown in some convinceing ways. (I think Davidson is the goto guy for this? I don’t have my books here.) Can you really say there is no forest out side that limited space of sensory perception. I mean the idea here is the tracks lead off a cliff, at which point the Scientist (or empiricist in general) goes "Ahh, look the edge of the world, there is nothing more we can say about this. Our poor little marshmallow hopped of Philosopher goes, “oh look, through the fog, I think there might be another side.” But the Scientist interputs him, “I’m not listening, nothing on the other side of the cliff, and I’m better than you the uni gives me more funding…” and stuff.

This is a fun game, isn’t it?

20

Yes, I agree. This is Descartes “great deciever”, no?So we have to ask ourselves, what is there that I could not possibly be decieved about? I’m pretty sure I exist but you might just be a figment of my imagination. And all of this “reality” could just be a very vivid dream. However, I think in order not to curl up in the fetus position and cease to function, we have to adopt the theory of sufficent cause. That knawing hunger in our belly’s motivates us to act and eventually that Mother’s milk makes us feel better, you know? To me it’s very much like learning to use a computer. The GUI does not exist, but we learn to interact with it using the mouse and the keyboard. If I right click here then such and such happens, and I like that, so pretty soon my neighbors are complaining about the meadow of wild flowers where my lawn used to be, because I am spending all my time on-line playing interactive games, and one day I have to stop and shave because my beard is getting tangled up with the “enter” key and that is when I discover that my wife’s clothes are missing from the closet and I wonder how long ago she left me…

But wait! I am getting too personal here. But you see what I mean. We don’t know if it is real or not, but we know that our interaction is real so we just learn the rules by trial and error. What we are percieving we don’t know for sure, but that we are percieving something is fairly reliable, me thinks. It’s like Plato said, if all we can see is the wall in front of us, then we try to make sense of the shadows…

Ahhh, but while we are standing there staring into the abyss, a grappling hook comes flying up out of the fog and a band of explorers comes climbing up the clift. They are shocked to see us and we to see them. We both ask the same question. "Who are you and where did you come from?’ and We both give the same answer, “We don’t know. We thought we were the only ones here.” It is Easter Island all over again.
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