Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Overdog

It is NOT un-scientific to hypothesize that something unobservable does not exist, because it is a falsifiable hypothesis.

It IS un-scientific to hypothesize that something unobservable DOES exist, because this hypothesis is not falsifiable.

I’d take this a bit further.

If something is unobservable, then by definition, it can’t be observed by any experiment. Thus, the existence of something truly unobserveable – not merely difficult to observe, such as, say, a quark – is unfalsifiable, and any reference to it unscientific.

Originally Posted by Overdog

Likewise the statement "God Exists" is not falsifiable even in principle; there is no way to test whether God does or does not exist.

I disagree. One can, taking the description of God from any of various religious texts, fairly easily design God-detecting experiments. For example, Exodus 7 details an account of a public test of the existence of several competing gods, and their relative strength, in which, in order to convince an unbelieving Egyptian leader of the reality of the Jewish God, Egyptian magician and the legendary Jewish leader Aaron throw down wooden staffs which are then miraculously transformed into snakes. One can design an experiment directly from these accounts – say, have a devout believer in the literal interpretation of the Bible throw down a staff in the presence of a non-believer (with the modern improvement of a video recorder in hand), the null experimental result being defined as the staff not turning into a snake.

The hypothesis that the God described in a particular Bible verse exists is not unfalsifiable. Rather it has been shown false.

Alternately, one can define the pantheistic version of God as “that in nature the consideration of which sometimes fills some scientifically knowledgeable person with awe”. One can define measurable characteristics (eg: pupil dilation, blink rate, heart and breath rate, etc.) as indicative of a state of awe, and conduct an experiment in which a scientifically knowledgeable person exhibits these characteristics when considering some aspect of nature. This experiment can “prove the existence of God”, according to this particular definition of God.

A problem, the one underlying confusion and disagreement such as that I perceive between nutronjon and infinitenow, is due, I think, to the conflation of strongly different definitions concepts (which have associated definitions) of God. I’m confident that many people, and most hypographers, are easily able to avoid conflating the staffs-to-serpents concept of God with the pantheistic awe-in-the-face-of-nature one. More people, I think, have difficulty avoiding conflation of the pantheistic concept of God with the concept of a God that causes less Biblical miracles, such as telepathy and prognostication.