Before you can decide whether the hypothesis God is falsifiable you must first clearly and unequivicolly state the hypothesis. I can imagine many “God hypotheses” which would lend themselves to falsification. These doubtless would be of little use to you since they would not match your own view of God.
I have read the OP, and I see that you have mentioned a couple of characterisitcs of your particular God hypothesis. Those, in and of themselves, do not lend themselves to falsification. It may be that other aspects of your God hypothesis are testable, but I doubt it. I do not mean that to be in any way insulting. Most religions that have a place for mysticism require ineffibility to be a characteristic of their God. And the ineffible is notoriously difficult to reduce to a testable proposition.
I believe that everything that exists is explainable. If we do not now know how to explain it, some day we most likely will know how. IMHO, I do not believe that with current knowledge (yeah, like I even know close to what all current knowledge is) the existence of a God is falsifiable. If someone had done that irrefutably, it would have made headline news.
On a more personal note, as a teenager and young adult, I was a hard-core athiest. As I get older and see parents and friends die, I am much less hard-core, my desire to believe that those people are not irrevocably gone directing this I’m sure.
I have heard about “after death” experiences (although must not be TRUE death or the people wouldn’t be alive to tell about it; that would make headline news). Most of these seem to have in common the long dark tunnel and the presence of a bright light at the end of this tunnel. I believe myself to be a person who experienced this, although it is at the furthest reaches of my memory because it happened when I was a very small child. Is there a known physiological explanation for the bright light at the end of a tunnel phenomenon?
I was going to point this out, but he beat me to it. If we are talking about the type of God who doesn’t routinely do miracles and the like (at least not these days), then it is not falsifiable (see below). If we are talking about the type who routinely does faith healings, statue bleedings, water walking, etc., then it is falsifiable (and, indeed, such things have been falsified many times). Knowing what I know about Polycarp, I’ll stick with the first one.
Conveniently, I don’t have to write a really long message about this, because I co-wrote an article about it for Skeptical Inquirer’s special issue on science and religion. That article specifically deals with the local groups, but mostly tackles the whole falsifiable issue.
Thanks for those links. I went to the skepdic site and skimmed over some of the material and bookmarked the site for later. I notice that if the researcher seems to have a previous agenda, the findings of that researcher will often agree with the opinion s/he already held. It will be interesting to see how these researchers deal with their topics. I am of the opinion that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably something physiological, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is no life after death (corollary, sort of: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you).
Well, that is true, although I wouldn’t expect the unfaithful to believe it. Poly, if you are looking for testimonials to real miracles, the first I ever performed (or, er, God performed through me lest I be accused of witchcraft) was to materialize a pepperoni roll out of thin air. I really had that trick down, I could have fed a multitude – although towards the end, when my faith was waning, the best I could do was a half eaten burrito. It occurs to me now that God was trying to tell me something there. The Church also likes to keep a few people around who can turn water into booze. I know it isn’t exactly the moving of mountains described by Jesus by those who have faith, but not bad all things considering.
I sit with Gaudere (and jodi and I think bantmof). The traditional Judeo-Christian god has two properties that, taken together, frustrate any efforts at falsifiability.
God is omnipotent, capable of creating any situation we see, i.e. the outcome of any experiment we could ever perform can be manufactured by God. This is not a limitation of our current technology, it applies to any level of technology.
God is inscrutable, beyond human understanding. There are therefore no limitations we can put on what he might use his omnipotence to do.
Put the two together and you find that logically there is no experiment that could ever be done, at any level of technology, even in principle, whose results are not compatible with the god described. So omnipotent inscrutable gods are not falsifiable.
On a second note. I haven’t read Lewis (except for the Chronicles of Narnia as a kid), but turning water straight to wine isn’t a natural process, even for a grapevine. What is natural is to take soil nutrients, light, and atmospheric gasses and turn them into organic compounds and ADD them to the water. Then, after fermentation by yeast, with more compounds ADDED and altered, you get wine. To turn a bucket of water to a bucket of wine immediately and miraculously means adding all these compounds spontaneously: a violation of conservation of matter. I suspect that the distinction between unnatural and supernatural will evaporate under close inspection in any given particular case.
I remember thinking what a good article that was the first time I read it. This time, I appreciated it even more, thanks to all that I’ve learned here at Straight Dope. Y’all did a really great job of clarifying your reference frame.
If Ramachandran can offer up evidence for God that is similar to that for the EM spectrum, then I think he can freely make his analogy, but I would be surprised indeed if he can.
Interesting question, Polycarp. Every time I’ve thought about my requirements for physical evidence of the existence of God, I always end up with some violation of natural law as part of that evidence.
Think about what would happen if we could haul Jesus into the laboratory to examine a miracle in real time. (Assume for the moment a cooperative Savior and special dispensation from the commandment not to test God.) As I see it, four possible things could happen:[list=1][li]Scientists would record a violation of natural law, (i.e., when measured, Jesus weighs 160 lbs. but is able to stand on the surface of a pool of water);[]Scientists would measure no violation of natural law, (i.e., no miracle);[]Scientists would measure a “short-circuiting” of natural law;[*]An event would occur by means of a natural law as yet unknown to science.[/list=1]If #1 happened, we would have evidence, but at the price of the inviolability of physics. Case #2 is self-explanatory. Option #3 is the least “clean” of the four. It leaves things open to interpretation. If Jesus doesn’t short-circuit a natural law by a significant degree, the scientists would say, “Sorry, JC. We can explain your miracle using our current understanding of physics. Now do that thing with your halo again.” If there was a significant anomaly, however, the scientists would likely disagree about how to interpret the results. Case #4 would produce apparent evidence of God, but it could eventually be explained.[/li]
My own agnosticism is based on two points that you might consider trivial, but I think one of them is relevant here. It’s basically bantmof’s idea of “relative godhood.” Our problem is that, because of our limited intellectual abilities, we really have no way of knowing whether any supreme being we encounter is the highest supreme being of all existence. The Gnostics used to have a very convenient theology that claimed that the god of the Old Testament was really a demigod empowered by the real God to create the world. This demigod was petty and vengeful, unlike the real God who Jesus talked about. Whenever other Christian sects disagreed with them, they would claim that the other sect was mistakenly worshiping the demigod, and then the Gnostics would “find” a lost gospel or two to support their claims.
Even if I don’t buy their specific version of the demigod idea, the basic point is still problematic. If Jesus came back to earth on a cloud with trumpets blaring, violating all kinds of physical laws in front of our eyes, that would only be evidence that a supreme being exists, or maybe that the Christian God/god exists. But how could we know that there wasn’t an even higher being who has been silent all this time, letting his subordinates carry out his commands? From our position, we can’t make the distinction. As a result, any physical evidence you produce for a supreme being would be subject to this refutation.
To be honest, I would be less impressed by a violation of physical laws than by some kind of large-scale moral change. If someone or something were able to inspire us to stop blowing each other’s brains out for a few weeks and start taking care of one another instead, I would find that to be compelling evidence indeed. Provided, of course, that I get to keep my free will.
Vis, “By way of analogy, consider the fact that most animals don’t have the receptors or neural machinery for color vision. Only a privileged few do, yet would you want to conclude from this that color wasn’t real?”
I thought he made quite plain that he isn’t talking about an objective measure by his analogy, but about a subjective perception, that is, not light as measured by spectrometers, but light as seen by brains.
If one could believe in God based on similar things (math, physics, scientific evidence), then the analogy would seem apt. But one cannot. That’s the answer to his question of, “Why doesn’t the same argument apply to God?” - because it’s not the same argument, even by analogy. In one case, the individual without direct perception of color can nonetheless show it to be real. In the other case, the individual without direct perception of God cannot.
You can show that frequency exists, but you cannot assign an attribute that you cannot perceive. Colorblind beings see various frequencies as the same color[sup]1[/sup]. There might be some attribute, X, that is not subjectively discernable by you. You cannot say that different frequencies each have different subjective attributes, X[sub]1[/sub], X[sub]2[/sub], … X[sub]n[/sub] (vis Red, Green, Blue, etc.) unless you can perceive them.
[sup]1[/sup] Note that color is not the same as hue.
Seriously, I agree with them; it was an excellent article. And I am very grateful to everyone for the thoughtful posts.
A couple of quick comments: Lewis’s elucidation of the water-into-wine thing involved the stoneware jugs in which the water was kept, etc., it was not the simplistic “grapevines turn water into wine” inanity that I inadvertently suggested.
For me, Dumb Ox’s option #4 would be the way to bet. I don’t believe in “miracles” in the sense of something breaking natural law by some magical fiat, but in a God whose work in creation is sufficiently great and thorough enough to take into account the most miniscule detail of natural law – superfluidity, to grasp one odd example – and in sufficient detail to be concerned for what happens to someone’s sick child. To say that “a rainbow is comprised of suspended droplets refracting sunlight” and “a rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant” are not mutually exclusive; the first addresses how and the second why. That there were 4,599,997,600 years during which rainbows formed prior to the precursor of the Noah story does not preclude a purpose in their creation, just as a good mystery writer “salts” chapter 1 with details that will only become useful in the plot in chapter 38.
I am well aware of the Gnostic “tiers of godhood” stuff, and was wryly amused by Heinlein’s demonstration in Job: A Comedy of Justice that the fundamentalist God must be very low on the totem pole. My assumption would be that any god worth analyzing on the omni-whatsis a priori level would be the Chief Honcho of All Creation, regardless of what intermediate levels there may be between Him and us.
My own assumption is that the God in which I have subjective experience and hence believe is that God. I do not have any proof of the equivalence, of course, any more than I have objective proof subject to skeptical analysis of His existence.
As an aside, David, as I’m fairly sure you know but may be worth posting as a useful distinction, the viewpoint you appear to espouse is traditionally referred to as Materialism, not pejoratively but with the definition that “all that which is real is subject to analysis by the tools of science” (and hence material in some form). My non-skeptical view that “whatever exists, whether material or not, is subject to the tools of inductive logic” is Rationalism as the term is traditionally used, though I hardly go to the extremes that some do with it. I believe that John Paul II would be a good example of modern-day Idealism with the “non-overlapping magisteria” that Gould and you accept as a means of allowing faith-based “knowledge” not subject to analytical tools. (As skeptics, you and Gould would not be Idealists in this sense.) And there are other schools that I would need to leave to those with more recent or more thorough knowledge of epistemology as a practical philosophic discipline than I. Since you referred to your viewpoint as Rationalism in the article, I thought the historical distinction might be useful as clarification.
The problem comes in where, if most people are color blind, and there are various people who claim to not be color blind, who are the color blind people to believe when told what color something is?
Even in natural law, as has been demonstrated on the sub-atomic level, everything and where it is exists as a matter of probability. You can’t point at a photon and say “there it is” – you can only say where it probably is. There is a very slim chance is it halfway to Alpha Centauri, quite in “violation” of where it is “supposed” to be according to the “macro” understanding of how things are supposed to work. There is always a very slight chance, for example, that as I sit here typing I will suddenly disappear and rematerialize in Outer Mongolia – and science does not forbid this from happening. Would that be a miracle? No. But if I had told people I’d been praying to God to go to Outer Mongolia all day, and suddenly there I was – that would seem to be a miracle then – although as far as the people I’d told, I’d just off and disappeared, no evidence, and to the Mongolians I would have just appeared, and I’d have a hard time proving what had just happened.
That’s the whole point. Objective data is always subject to subjective interpretation. I don’t think you and I disagree, so much as we are two ships passing in the night.
Ramachandran was merely saying (and I agree with him), that the same data (an apparent connection between the limbic system and faith in God) can be used to argue either side in the “Does God Exist?” debate. Atheists might argue that they interpret the data to mean that God’s origin is in the human brain (particularly the limbic system), while theists might argue that God created the brain (particularly the limbic system) for the purpose of making Him apprehensible.
That’s why debates between atheists and theists, given equal intellectual prowess are always stalemates. Machines make objective measurements, but meaning and purpose are assigned by each of us subjectively in accordance with our own unique view from our own unique frame of (moral) reference.
