Do tell. Do you mean absence of religious beliefs?
Because then you would be talking about CP, and science.
Also, the idea that I am controlling another poster is through the…what, internets? is…uh…unscientific.
You’ve been watching too many movies.
It’s a fact you are ignorant about science if you think houris* have an greater than zero chance of existing.
Hope that helps as you seek to advise the SDMB about science. 
*Also, Tinkerbelle, in case Peter Pan comes up.
Also, Peter Pan.
CP: I have said nothing about Houris. Anyway, as I understand the term, those are beings which happen to exist, according to some, in the afterlife. Care to show the scientific experiments which have proven that they do not exist?
While it’s true at least some of the masses blow themselves up in quest of permanent erections with which to eternally pleasure dingleberry-free appetizing vaginas, that isn’t the reason science rejects an epistemology that insists heavenly white playmates with large breasts are not falsifiable.
Science simply begins with the premise that the supernatural is bullshit.
The thing that is inconvenient for you here is that you find your approach to epistemology defending the non-falsifiability of abjectly ridiculous claims such as a young earth creationism or playmates in the sky. (More inconveniently–though not germane whether it’s potentially true–is that particular belief in houris is pretty obviously the result of an overall religious scheme that treats women as appetizing vaginas and sexually oppresses nearly everyone, as opposed to being just a harmless fairy tale or scientific incompetence.)
But science falsifies all supernatural.
It does have a starting set of axioms, without which (as I mentioned above) one ends up not being able to decide if one is picking one’s own nose, or even if there is a nose there.
Having accepted science as the approach for epistemology–a justifiable belief–we can get past the philosophic masturbations of yore and actually figger out what is real and what is false. What is consistent with scientific constructs and what is imagination.
When philosophy tries to elevate itself as a construct inside of which we can get to truths that are somehow independent of science and therefore not falsifiable by science, it indulges itself in a grab for authority that is as meaningless as are imaginary large-breasted, dingleberry-free playmates derived from a masturbatory fantasy.
That grab for epistemologic authority is itself a premise which must be accepted, and it is a premise at odds with science.
You can have science. You can have make-believe. You cannot have both.
Wordsmithing what “proof” is and then gloriously defending houris as non-falsifiable is exactly the kind of bullshit science stands against. It’s lots of fun for classroom discussion in philosophy class, and potentially useful as a linguistic massage to avoid startling the religious too rudely.
But it adds not a shred–not one iota–to the zero possibility Muslim believers will enjoy white vaginas in perpetuity post-mortem while being attended to by permanently young boys.
With the bathwater containing Arendelle and 7-day creations, science throws out the Houri baby.
But you know that. I suspect that your gentle nature is just trying to protect the religiously sensitive with a few word flower condoms, and that’s probably a sweeter approach to the topic than this crusty old curmudgeon has.
So go right ahead and leave a little crack in the epistemologic door through which the sexually repressed can glimpse those gorgeous, giant white vaginas.
Among your confusions is the idea that experimentation is the only route to falsifiability.
At issue here is science versus houris. Science versus imaginary giant white post-mortem vaginas being pleasure by permanent erections, in this case.
I have already given you one approach by which science would dismiss this as false. It would establish what consciousness is and how that is linked to a physical substrate of the brain. It would then demonstrate that imagination is limitless (and particularly so for sexual imaginations, perhaps, ) and that a thousand people imagining independently come up with so disparate, mutually contradictory fantasies that their fantasies cannot be messages from Beyond.
With the certainty that science proves anything, houri case dismissed.
Now you can wordsmith “proof” and “falsifiability” if you want to retain your houri fantasy (see above response by me).
It just wouldn’t be science, because science falsifies houris.
(I suppose you could also put a bunch of dead believers in a room to see if it looks like they are enjoying themselves in an afterlife, but that sort of experimental approach would stink, and probably not get past an IRB.)
I’m not confused at all. I, unlike you, happen to have a working understanding of the scientific method. I’m not pretending that science is something that it is not.
Nope. What’s at issue here is your ridiculous and offensive description of something that actually is not addressed by science.
I, for one, do not have a houris fantasy.
Again, I ask: what scientific study has done so? After all, that’s something that’s purported to exist in one particular view of the afterlife.
Really, you’re just embarrassing yourself with your display of bad understanding of science.
You are wrong in this; “zero” probability is all but nonexistent, even in the physical world, let alone when talking about absolutely unknown ideas like the supernatural.
How do you measure this probability? Against what experimental parameters do you calibrate it? How do you dismiss the “sim” or “drug induced hallucination” notions? How, exactly, do you assign “zero” probability to Cartesian Doubt?
There is a non-zero probability that this entire experienced world is a “sim,” and an operator, out of whimsy, could introduce houris into it at any time. You cannot “prove” this to be false.
Hogwash. Just to begin with, science has studied the supernatural, such as Rhine and his ESP experiments. So you’re factually wrong, as well as philosophically way off base.
Your idolatry of a “science” that does not actually exist appears pretty much a religion, to me.
That’s basically what I’ve been saying all along. The premises of science assume that reality includes only what is consistent with the rational understanding of empirically observed material phenomena: any other alleged or hypothesized sort of reality is effectively nonexistent as far as science is concerned.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
The thing that is inconvenient for you here is that you find your approach to epistemology defending the non-falsifiability of abjectly ridiculous claims such as a young earth creationism or playmates in the sky.
[/quote]
That’s not “inconvenient” for me at all. Unlike you, I’m not confused about the distinction between non-falsifiability and plausibility. So it doesn’t bother me in the least that many (arguably, most or all) supernatural claims are both technically unfalsifiable and completely absurd from a rational perspective.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
But science falsifies all supernatural.
[/quote]
Nope, you’re still confused about that. Science falsifies all known rationally consistent and empirically testable claims for supernatural phenomena (so far). But that is not the same thing as falsifying the supernatural itself, which science by its very nature cannot do.
Lemme give you a frinstance. If somebody says “There’s a supernatural being who tells me how to correctly identify, without fail, unseen cards picked at random out of a deck”, science can test the related claim “I have the supernatural ability to infallibly guess unseen cards picked at random out of a deck”.
That claim is rationally consistent (i.e., it relates to objects and events, like picking and guessing cards, that fit in with our basic understanding of materiality and causality in the real world), and empirically testable (i.e., scientists can set up an experiment that can accurately assess how well the claimant actually succeeds at guessing cards).
So scientists set up a cheat-proof experiment to test this claim, and surprise surprise, I bet you anything you like it’s going to turn out that the claimant does not do any better than random chance at guessing cards. So the claim that they have an infallible ability to guess cards has been falsified, and any attempts to use that alleged ability as evidence for the existence of an alleged supernatural being now stand exposed as utter bullshit.
But that does not mean that the underlying supernatural claim “There is a supernatural being” has been falsified. It hasn’t, and it can’t be.
Testable claims can be falsified; untestable ones can’t. That’s just the price we pay for having an epistemic system as precise and powerful as science: it comes with very clear boundaries between what it can and can’t do.
Yup, I never said it wasn’t. You can insist that there is no possible reality that is undetectable by or inconsistent with science and that all supernatural claims are necessarily, absolutely bullshit, and nobody can prove you wrong. The assumption that supernatural phenomena do exist or may exist is not in any way more valid a priori than the assumption that supernatural phenomena do not or cannot exist.
All I’m doing is to point out that what you’re insisting upon so vehemently is an assumption, not a fact.
I don’t understand what you mean by the “equivalence” of philosophical stances. Equivalent in terms of what?
Does the last paragraph of my previous post to CP address this question at all?
Actually, not that my personal motives are relevant to the validity of my arguments, but since you brought it up:
I’m not in fact trying to protect the feelings of the “religiously sensitive” or any other advocates of supernatural claims. What I’m trying to defend is science itself.
I value science as a very powerful and crucial tool of human thought and discovery, and I’m kind of allergic to exaggerated claims made in the name of science. When ill-informed people say “science proves…” some conclusion that it doesn’t actually prove (e.g., that vaccinations cause autism, that a particular hurricane was caused by global warming, whatever), that’s annoying, not just because it’s factually wrong but because it’s misrepresenting what science does. Same goes for inaccurate statements such as “science proves that there isn’t any God”.
I dunno, I’ve seen some houris walking the streetsies.
Thanks for this.
No problem! 
But we are not in the state where we need untouched a priori assumptions anymore. We know that the assumption that the universe has a natural order that we can study, hypothesize about and test gives us useful information whereas the asumption that the supernatural is involved does not.
Shouldn’t we adjust our priors at this point?
bldysabba: But that’s what we have done, in science. We don’t pay any attention to claims regarding the supernatural. If a nice chap says, “God is love,” we say, politely, “How nice; no go away.” We don’t dignify it with scientific attention, because there isn’t any productive way to address the claim.
But here’s the big thing, the only take-away from this thread: we don’t go so far in dignifying it as to say “That’s false.” We don’t address such claims at all. Taking the extra, unnecessary step of saying, “That is a false claim” in itself gives the claim more credibility than it deserves.
This is where the cute phrase “Not Even Wrong” comes in. The claim, “God is love” isn’t false. It’s “not even wrong.” It has no meaning for us. It’s something that we have no way of approaching, assessing, or examining.
To declare, firmly and formally, “It is not true that God is Love” is to make a definite claim about the supernatural…exactly what you’re saying we may not do. (And what I’m agreeing science does not do!)
I’m not disagreeing with any of this (with the caveat that of course the definition of “useful information” that we’re using here is the one that came in our science-premises kit).
But the issue at hand (or at least, the only issue I’ve been really addressing in this thread) is not “which fundamental assumptions about the universe should we pick as a basis for evaluating what we can know and believe?”, but rather “can we use a knowledge system based on certain specific fundamental assumptions about the universe to determine the truth value of statements based on different fundamental assumptions?”.
The answer to the latter question is, fairly trivially, “No”.
However, I quite agree with you that the former question is a more interesting one. I just don’t happen to have an answer to it. (Of course, like everybody else I’ve decided on an individual answer insofar as my own personal belief system is concerned, but that’s just a matter of personal preference as opposed to a debate-worthy position.)
As far as the universalization of the scientific perspective goes, what I think is that everybody ought to have a general idea of how it works, what it’s based on, how people use it, how to avoid misusing it, and what it can and can’t do. Just as I think everybody ought to have a general understanding of the properties and applications of number, the fundamentals of the legal system, the basic linguistic principles of grammar, the laws of logic, and all (okay, many of) the other rationally coherent and empirically consistent abstract systems that human beings have come up with to help us think and act constructively.
But I have little or no interest in whether other people believe in any of these systems as any kind of representation of ultimate reality. If somebody’s core beliefs about the essential nature of reality are unscientific or illogical or even ungrammatical :eek:, hey, it’s a free country. As long as they have a basic familiarity with the tools of rationality* and are willing to work out an agreed-upon set of ground rules about when and how to use them, that’s all I ask (and frequently a lot more than I get).
Dude, no. When CP says Allah is a fantasy, he is not making a claim. He is shooting down someone else’s claim. This is something science permits him to do. You can nitpick and argue at the margins, inasmuch as is there an infinitesimal probability of him being wrong(there is), is it a provisional statement or not(it is), is it outside science’s bailiwick or not(it probably is not, but even if it is, why should we listen to whoever claims to know things that are outside science’s operating boundaries?) but in substance he is correct.
In any other normal human interaction, you would not require so much precision in language. If he said little fairies don’t go around pushing our hands when we move things from one place to another, no one would be piling on to him to say “But science hasn’t proved that those fairies don’t exist, and what’s more, it can’t!”
Exactly as much evidence exists for Allah as does for these fairies. We should normalise and accept people junking religion as fantasy instead of fighting it.
Absolutely wrong.
He is making a claim.
Go back and read Kimstu’s latest post.
And if CP makes the claim that “science” has established the truth of his claim, he is engaged in the same activity as the person who does make a claim that Allah is real and has done various things.
I think what this discussion needs is a heaping scoop of clarity as to what we mean by the term “claim”, and exactly what statement(s) we think a particular “claim” consists of.
As in my previous example of the “divinely inspired” card guesser, there’s a fundamental difference between untestable supernatural claims, and testable rational claims about alleged supernatural entities. It breaks down more or less like this:
Situation A:
Claimant: “[This particular factual assertion] implies the existence of a supernatural deity.”
Science: “[This particular factual assertion] is false, and/or it doesn’t imply the existence of a supernatural being, because [evidence/logic/reason]. Consequently, this claim is false.”
Status: claim shot down.
Situation B:
Claimant: “A supernatural deity exists.”
Science: “This claim is meaningless.”
Status: claim untestable, “not even wrong”.