“Irrelevant” and “non-existent” a two different things, though. A deity whose existence has no bearing on the material world is still possible (though, IMHO, with a neglible likelihood).
I can’t agree with this statement entirely. Proving the existence of an intelligent god that interacts minimally (perhaps, as above, solely by talking to random people) would be a problem on the order of proving that I loved my wife and kids rather than just playacting that I did because it was expected of me.
I agree, but so what? The FTL particle may be possible as well. There may an infinite number of types of massless, non interacting things out there but why should any one care about them? If we have know way of knowing anything about them and they have no effect, what is the point?
If there is an after life, and a god that judges us in it, but that god has no effect on this world, any thing we do to please that god in this world is basically just a completely random guess.
Loving you wife and kids is falsifiable, though. A neurologist could measure brain responses during interactions with your wife and kid. Even if we did not know which parts of the brain are triggered by thoughts of loved ones, it is something we could know.
If god actually talked to random people, unless he says entirely random things, it would be testable. All you would need to do is isolate a large enough sample from each and wait and then compare accounts. As I said before, the test just has to be theoretically possible, not currently feasible.
Somewhat easy to defeat with a god that says “don’t tell anyone I said this”. 
Not if all the people are hooked up to highly advanced brain imaging equipment that lets our researchers see exactly what words they are perceiving. Or if we develop an actual memory reader. Again, not currently feasible, but theoretically possible. It took many years after neutrinos were proposed for them to be detected. Wormholes still have been neither proved nor disproved, but remain falsifiable.
If god has any interactions with the universe that are different than pure random chance, then he/she/it is falsifiable. If not, then he/she/it is irrelevant.
But saying “don’t tell anyone I said this” to every randomly selected interlocutor would fall under the category of “patterned communications,” ergo, not random.
This amuses me mostly because it’s practically the converse of the earlier discussion that can be summarized by “even if there was a mountain that naturally eroded into the shape of a photorealistic statue of some knights, it still wouldn’t say anything about god because something like that COULD happen by chance”
The relevance of a hidden, unpredictable god is another argument altogether, unrelated to falsifiability.
If such a mountain was found, and you formulated a hypothesis that is was done by god, then you would need to come up with a way to falsify it. Just one incident doesn’t work. You need to come up with a prediction and then look at the data. You cannot formulate your prediction based on the data you are using to test it. You either need additional data, or a new way of looking at.
I disagree. You might claim this semantics, but the idea of such a god is relevant and can be falsified, but the god is irrelevant to this world. If the god is truly unfalsifiable, than any idea of the god is not based on the god at all, so the god is not even relevant to the idea.
My point is that any phenomenon that’s theoretically caused by an intelligent being cannot be assumed to repeat in any meaningful timeframe, and without a way of predicting event frequency I don’t think it’s actually possible to construct a practically valid falsifiable hypothesis.
It’s (in my head at least) analogous to me claiming something like “I can fly an aircraft”. As you have no practical method of forcing me to do so, you can never prove whether or not I am telling the truth unless you happen to catch me in the act…and I might decide to not exercise that skill for the rest of my life. However, the fact that there is no feasible way to prove that I have that skill doesn’t mean that I lack said skill.
I recognize that in the case of a human being we can easily imagine technological advances that would enable us to bypass some of the objections by, say, directly reading my neural structure and finding structures that correspond to ones in the brains of known pilots. However, that requires you to have physical access to my brain, which is not necessarily something you can do to a hypothesized extra-universal god. (even if said god is a natural phenomena existing in some sort of higher-order universe that contains ours, there is no guarantee that the laws of physics will allow two-way passage between the two, after all.)
I should point out again that I don’t necessarily believe the above is true, just practicing a bit of devil’s advocacy.
So you’re saying it’s impossible for a god to exist that is capable of deliberately sensing and avoiding attempts at testing for its existence? I honestly think there’s room for the idea of a god that acts in such a way that his actions are lost in the statistical noise and cannot be readily teased out.
Unless you’re saying such a god would technically be falsifiable over a long enough timeframe in theory, regardless of whether the universe is likely to endure heat death before we have sufficient data.
No, a truly unfalsifiable god is irrelevant by definition. That God would make no moral statements and give no moral direction, that God would never interfere with the universe in a way distinguishable from chance, so that god is irrelevant. Even if you get comfort from the thought that some god created the universe, your comfort is identical to that you’d get from just making up a god, or adopting a god someone else made up.
You are confusing something being falsifiable with it actually being falsified. For the plane example, if I fly you up to 10,000 feet, then bail out, we’ll soon see if you can fly or not. Whether we do that or not is not interesting, and, in any case, the null hypothesis is that you can’t fly.
The Flood is very falsifiable, in that the flood as a real event has some very clear consequences for life on earth and archeology. It has of course been falsified to the satisfaction of anyone with half a brain. That some people refuse to accept the evidence, or keep on making up non-Biblical events, has nothing to do with the matter.
If you claim you can fly an aircraft, all I have to do is be able to find some record of you flying and/or some witnesses that have seen you fly. Now if you are claiming that, although you have never been at the controls of a plane, you can fly. It is still falsifiable in the sense that if I put you in control of a plane we can tell the difference. Remember, you are making the claim, not me. If you have an innate ability to fly, but you never get in a plane, who cares? You ability to fly (and I really feel I am overusing this word) is irrelevant.
Again, undetectable from background is irrelevant. If I have the awesome power of once every 500 years changing the probability of an event by .0002%, who cares? I would have no effect on history and would not be able to bend the world to my will. I wouldn’t even be able to make any money in Vegas. I stand by unfalsifiable=irrelevant.
Irrelevant or no, he remains unfalsifiable.
Sure. he would be one of zillions of unfalsifiable concepts. Maybe you are actually living in a perfect simulation. Maybe you are the only real person on Earth, and it is a stage set to fool you for some unfathomable reason. Or maybe the universe got created by a grad student on the other side of the singularity. I can make up unfalsifiable concepts all day. God is the only one people tell us to worship.
Are under the impression I disagree with that?
And if I choose to crash to prove a point, and you decide from that that I cannot fly an aircraft, YOU WOULD BE WRONG. I’m counting as unfalsifiable things for which experiments can consistently “prove” the wrong result, which is only possible in cases where the only actual method of proving them is testimonial evidence from people who may or may not be lying.
I am getting sick as hell of you taking a perfectly valid theoretical discussion of what kind of gods might be unfalsifiable and trying to make the same stupid point about the God of the Bible that’s been made a hojillion times before. Yes, the Bible is probably not describing a God that exists. Move the fuck on, or stop responding to me with these idiotic digressions.
Only if I elect to go along with the experiment. I could, conceivably, decide to play dumb solely out of cussedness, and you’d end up with the wrong result.
Sure, if you’re going to redefine ‘unfalsifiable’ to mean something other than what it means.
Your definition gets into some very messy territory very quickly in terms of drawing a line between “effects small enough to be irrelevant” and “effects that are relevant”.
Also, I contend that changing one event’s probability to 100% or 0% every hundred years or so wouldn’t be noticed statistically, even if it was VERY relevant to someone (like, say, “you die of a heart attack today”).
That is precisely why no experiment proves a result, but just reports that the probability of the results being due to chance are below a certain value. The probability of you killing yourself to prove a point is small enough that if you did crash we could conclude with very high likelihood that you didn’t know how to fly. Thus, in scientific terms, the proposition is falsifiable.
I was trying to use an example I was pretty sure you agreed with. Do you consider the flood hypothesis to be falsifiable or not? Remember, a God who could create the flood could also clean up after it to make it seem like it didn’t happen. If you accept any kind of unfalsifiable God, you need to accept any kind of unfalsifiable anything.
Obviously, I’d think, we’re all aware of a plethora of unfalsifiable theories that don’t have any particular relevance (like the “God created everything in situ last Thursday, including our memories of times before then”). There are millions of theories that are unfalsifiable and also irrelevant. The only place anything that could be remotely described as “god” could realistically fit is as a theory that’s unfalsifiable but relevant. I contend that such a thing is possible, however unlikely or unnecessary.
This says nothing about my personal belief, so I don’t “need” to accept anything. :rolleyes: