Actually, there is no practical difference between someone with the ability to fly who refuses to ever fly, and someone who can’t fly. But that doesn’t matter. In theory, there could be a mind control device/method/drug that would relieve you of your cussedness. Problem solved.
And that is falsifiable. It would take a long time, but it would be. But you are right. the probability issue comes down to us being able to declare our confidence of something being true or false, not the actual falsifiability.
Let me put it this way. How would such a god be relevant? He couldn’t change the average outcomes of believers in life outcomes or happiness. He can’t communicate information of any type in a way that we differentiate between him and a mad man or huckster. In what way could he possible be relevant to this world?
I’m not interested in your personal beliefs, I’m interested in the logical consistency of your arguments.
Why is an unfalsifiable god any more relevant than the other things you mention? I agree that a lot of people think it is.
My guess as to why is the observation that lots of people (and cultures) have a hard time giving up on hypotheses which have been pretty much falsified. The God hypothesis was not a bad one 600 years ago. Even Tom Paine, who utterly rejected the standard Western God, accepted a deistic God since he had no other explanation for the structure of the solar system. (From The Age of Reason) In our culture we get a lot less flack if we say we believe in a generic God rather than no god at all. So, god belief is relevant only for social reasons, not logical ones.
What I’m saying is that there’s a statistical threshold whereby I could imagine a god acting in ways that hide in statistical noise, but are nonetheless “relevant” from a human-scale viewpoint–again, the easy one is “Hitler gets a congenital heart defect and dies before he’s in grade school” or something similar.
I’m not saying one should take any actions on the belief that such a god could exist, mind you, I’m saying I think such a god would meet the qualifications for both unfalsifiable and relevant.
Unless we’re making the argument that we COULD eventually make experiments that would prove or disprove such a god if we had sufficient time and good records, thus it’s not technically unfalsifiable even if it’s practically unfalsifiable.
But that is falsifiable. Hitler didn’t die. No god is out there keeping bad people from doing bad things. Bad things happen. No you could postulate that worse things should happen, and this god prevents it. Theoretically you should be able to model how bad the world should be and compare it to what is real. That is the way many things are tested: If X were true, we should see Y. figure out how to see if there is Y, and away you go.
It’s actually interesting to me to see how many attributes that you’re kinda arbitrarily assigning to this otherwise featureless and random “god” I’m theorizing. It’s as though you assume anyone willing to even try to postulate the existence of a god both unfalsifiable and somehow relevant absolutely MUST be some kind of crypto-Christian trying to trick you into agreeing to their boogeyman twit of a Biblical God.
So what if god’s insane, and my prediction is “god will randomly kill people before their time or preserve people from near-fatal accidents at a rate undetectable in a practical sense, but he prefers to hit future potential world leaders as children and doesn’t care if he takes out Hitler or Simon Bolivar or Pol Pot or Eisenhower.” Outlandish, yes. However, it’s also by definition relevant since he’s deliberately fucking with future world leaders; but since WE cannot even theoretically look at a child and say yep, he’ll be president one day, how would we even start trying to falsify the existence of such a divinity?
Your very reasonable position that one shouldn’t act as if this god existed makes him irrelevant from our point of view.
Well, if there is indeed no experiment or observation which could tell us if this god exists, he is unfalsifiable. It is just like saying there is a pixie with a script of your life, who pushes things into and out of your way invisibly and undetectably based on the script.
I am just working off what you say. Killing Hitler (the only example you gave) seems like making the world a better place to me.
Why not? Who would it be relevant to? Saying it is relevant to the people whose life would be different is hard to take seriously when the same is true for every quantum wave collapsing. You want to talk about making small undetectable changes, just have your god choose which sperm makes it to the egg. Of course if it is just random choices, then it is no different than what would be expected without the god and the god is irrelevant.
I guess what I am trying to say is if there is no way to tell the difference between the world with and without the god it is irrelevant. And, IMHO, that is also the best definition of unfalsifiable.
It wouldn’t have to be random choice, just choices made with an eye to minimizing the likelihood that statistical methods would turn up proof.
I’m drawing, admittedly, a distinction between “a change we can detect” and “a change a theoretical omniscient observer can detect”. The only way an unfalsifiable god could have any impact AND remain unfalsifiable is by hanging out in the places where we can’t detect but our hypothetical omniscient observer can.
“Relevant” is a very sticky term in this realm, after all–your statements could be interpreted as saying anything we aren’t aware of is by definition irrelevant, which I don’t think is the case.
So, they wouldn’t be random. They would be deliberately chosen to appear random. Not seeing a real distinction.
Earlier I mentioned a way to potentially create new wormholes that required twice the mass of the solar system and several other conditions that we are unlikely to ever be able to set up. That mathematical model of creating a wormhole is unlikely to ever be tested, but it is still falsifiable.
You seem to be almost reaching for a god of the gaps argument here, but it is not really applicable. To be falsifiable does not require it to be practical to make the test, just theoretically possible.
Not just that we aren’t aware of it, but that there is nothing to be aware of. If all this god can do is pick a winner the sperm race in way the that has no net effect on the world (say picking more “good”, or “bad”, sperm to guide evolution in a specific way) than who cares.
Again, go ahead, propose a god who is both relevant and unfalsifiable.
I don’t think that necessarily follows. Suppose such a god guides evolution by tweaking which sperm hits the egg (as you mention below). Not random, but how would we tell the difference?
I don’t disagree–I made a distinction upthread between “theoretically unfalsifiable” and “practically unfalsifiable”.
That’s the crux of our disagreement, really. I don’t think that “we wouldn’t know the difference” or “who cares” are equivalent to “relevant”–it’s almost a parallel distinction to the one above between. You’re arguing that such a god would be “practically irrelevant” since such a god wouldn’t give us any way of being able to change our own actions based on its actions. I’m saying that’s not at all the same thing as “actually irrelevant”. It’s like saying a star had a supernova sometime in a far-distant galaxy when no astronomers observed it. That fact isn’t relevant to us, but it’s relevant in the sense that it’s an event that actually happened in our universe.
Because evolution would follow an altered course. In other words, unless god is “guiding” evolution randomly, it would be possible at some point to detect. Casinos are very good at this. Again, if god is having a non random effect, then he should be falsifiable. It may be very hard, or even completely impractical, to test, but it should testable.
We seem to be talking past each other. I am not saying it is irrelevant because we can’t detect it, but that if it is totally undetectable in any way, ever, then it is irrelevant. Take a million universes, one with your god, and the rest without. How would the one with god differ from all the others? If an outside observer cannot tell the difference between the universes, then the god is irrelevant.
Because evolution would follow an altered course. In other words, unless god is “guiding” evolution randomly, it would be possible at some point to detect. Casinos are very good at this. Again, if god is having a non random effect, then he should be falsifiable. It may be very hard, or even completely impractical, to test, but it should testable.
Casinos are looking at a large number of deals. In evolution we are looking at what is effectively one deal. We can’t distinguish God tweaking evolution to make sure we emerged. as opposed to our emerging by chance as one of many possibly intelligent species.
I think maybe the difference here is that Zeriel is looking at this situation from God’s point of view (from which the intervention is relevant) while we are looking at it from our point of view, where we can’t tell if any god exists let alone if he is interfering. For us it is irrelevant.
How many acts of evolution do you think it took to produce humans? How many different organisms have evolved?
If there is a god out there that is so narrow in focus that all he is ever done is make one child develop a disease he had a chance of developing anyway(the Hitler dieing young scenario from above), we have pushed it into a really tiny gap.
Even if the changes are small, if they have a purpose, over a long enough time they would be detectable. If they are so small they would be undetectable, they are irrelevant.
Imagine a roulette wheel. You have the ability to change the outcome, but don’t want to be detected. You change a red to black every once in a while, but not in ways that look like anything but a normal string. You don’t give anyone an extra advantage. You keep the numbers in the normal probability distribution and no one looking at numbers has a reason to suspect. Who cares? If the game with your input is indistinguishable from the game without it, you have not had an effect on the game.
God, to be relevant, has to have an effect. The universe must be different in some way from a universe he is not actively involved in. And that, at least theoretically, should be falsifiable.
We’re hitting on something here. And it’s these distinctions between “falsifiable in the universe we live in” and “falsifiable in theory”, and the ones between “relevant to us” and “relevant in the sense of actual events however meaningless” that are going to define a lot of this argument and results.
I have, depending on how you define those two terms, as has already been stated. Your argument boils down, from my perspective, to “if I can’t see it, it’s not relevant; and if I can see it, it’s falsifiable.”
Suppose a god that adjusts the race for which sperm gets to the egg first. Suppose he does this only in humans. Suppose too that he only does this (being an intelligent being who for some reason is very shy) when no one is specifically looking at the sperm, so that the only chance to catch him is in statistics.
How exactly do you falsify a theory of god that can just as easily be explained by random chance in biology? (Assuming that the sperm in question have no particular motile dysfunction.)
I predict that you’re going to declare such tampering irrelevant.
It’s not “if I can’t see it”. It’s if it can’t be seen ever, in any way". If something actually makes the universe a different place in some way. Even if the only way to falsify it is rerun the universe. If we limited to just what we can test now, then we could have done the same thing 300 years ago and most of our science knowledge would just be “God did it”.
That depends on how he tampers. If he tampers in a way that actually has an outcome (i.e. it is relevant) it should be falsifiable. It may not be falsifiable by humans from within the experiment, but if the tampering has an actual effect on the evolutionary path of humanity, then it would be falsifiable.
How about this: If this was true then the evolution would change as soon as we had the ability to check the sperm. We isolate one population and always observe the sperm and compare them to the unobserved population. Over a long enough time, there should be differences, or his intervention is irrelevant.
Now, you could say that this god would just stop all intervention for the course of the experiment. But then, evolution would be different during that period compared to earlier periods, and that should be detectable. If it is not, then the intervention was irrelevant.
It feels like you are trying to find the quantum gap.
Long ago it could be claimed that god did anything. Then science started falsifying all those claims. God retreated to gaps in knowledge. You seem to be saying that there is a theoretical gap god can go to that science can’t possibly disprove him. I contend that puts him outside realm of relevance. We can’t measure something smaller than 16.163×10^−27 nm not just because we haven’t developed any tools that precise, but because smaller distances are meaningless*. The point is that I still think that any example you come up with that actually has an effect on the world will turn out to be at least theoretically falsifiable.
Roughly, I feel the same way about falsifiability as you do about relevance–that is, if it’s not possible for us to falsify it, ever (i.e., by interacting in sperm selection infrequently enough that it would be lost in the statistical noise even if we were to retroactively look at every birth compared with parental genetics in the entire lifespan of the universe from Big Bang to Heat Death), then it’s practically unfalsifiable.
As I said–the meeting of the minds here, such as it is, is somewhere between “theoretically unfalsifiable” and “practically unfalsifiable”, and also somewhere between “relevant in the absolute sense (something actually changed)” and “relevant in the relative sense (something changed that Strassia noticed)”.
There’s also the argument from statistics, come to think of it–there is a finite percentage X of interactions that, if meddled with, fall within the standard 95% confidence interval for any observed set Y. On some level, phenomena that we are measuring statistically are able to be interfered with without us noticing even in theory–at least as far as my 300-level stats class over a decade ago would have had me believe.