So, you choose to contradict yourself in two paragraphs.
However, at this point I doubt that you can be swayed from your beliefs, so there seems no point in continuing.
Scientific objectivity…
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity/
Short version… Loaded questions are not scientific…
The fact that science begins with premises that let us prove anything at all is not a contradiction to the idea that, out of the gate, science falsifies the Tooth Houri, which is the drum I keep beating.
You want to use an epistemologic argument that science “can’t address” something, and therefore my Tooth Houri might exist. But an epistemologic approach that rejects the premises of science rejects all proofs of any kind since nothing can be known about anything if we cannot even accept (for example) that our own senses can be used to investigate the world.
If that satisfies your approach to “non-falsifiability” then fine. That’s just a wordsmithing game where you don’t remind the reader each time that within such a vapid epistemologic terminus there is no proof of any kind for anything. “Falsifiability” itself is then an utterly meaningless word. Words themselves are meaningless. Without the premises of science, we might ourselves be figments of my Tooth Houri’s imagination. This is a vapid epistemologic terminus that creates a world devoid of any mechanism with which to prove anything. In that non-scientific world, you can fancy yourself enjoying my Tooth Houris, get rid of death, and even make yourself King of the Afterworld. I can add features for you to that afterworld if you like, 
all of which “might exist” in your non-scientific, nonsensical, non-falsifiable paradigm.
What you are wrong about is what science is, and does, and falsifies.
Science accepts premises that let us investigate reality and then falsifies the Tooth Houri using the scientific approach for how to prove something, whether it is the perceived color obtained by adding yellow and red or whether dead people get eternal erections with which they pleasure the double-breasted Tooth Houri.
There was a time when the Straight Dope was built on a scientific paradigm for approaching questions about how the world works, but perhaps it is now segueing into a politer response where all imaginations are entertained as possibly existing and no one is offended by being told their idiotic fantasies are bullshit.
The science falsifying bullshit won’t change though. Longer term, western education will win the day in the battle against superstition unless Boko Haram manages to make western education itself disappear from the earth.
A bit more relevant to the OP…
While Islam may not be going away it is slowly becoming a focus of some critical thinking by European politicians.
No one is making an argument that the tooth fairy exists. Or even might exist.
First off, it’s the Tooth Houri whose non-falsifiability is being promoted by others. She has two vaginas, double sets of breasts, etc. I am on record as being willing to add other upgrades to advance her cause.
Second:
I am only making one point here, from the beginning:
Science falsifies the Tooth Houri. It does not just ignore her. It falsifies her. Science takes the position she cannot exist at all if science is correct about the way the world works. Scientifically, she does not exist. At all. She is, in fact, an absolute violation of science, right out of the gate.
Third:
It is an epistemologic argument–not a scientific one–that my Tooth Houri is not “falsifiable.” Such a non-falsification argument depends on a paradigm for determining what is real that rejects science as the only path for discovery of what is real and suggests that there may be realities of some kind which are outside the boundary of the physical world. It was a highly successful approach for belief systems before science came along. But with the practical bat of actual success based on scientific precepts, science beat down the wand of magical occurrences these “other” realities conjectured.
Fourth:
To hold the position (I believe tomndebb just came out and said it) that the Tooth Houri and Science are not contradictory–or even just to say the Tooth Houri is not falsifiable–is exactly tantamount to saying she “might exist.” Else “not falsifiable” means nothing at all, since “exist” is a binary state. The argument being advanced there is that there may be “existences” of some kind beyond those which the precepts of science permit, and therefore no conjecture of any kind can be said to be falsifiable. The word “exist” itself becomes meaningless in such a paradigm (which is one of the reasons that paradigm is rejected by science).
Fifth:
If you accept as a starting premise that there may be existences outside of science which are therefore non-falsifiable, the word itself becomes nonsensical because it cannot mean anything at all in absolute terms. Nothing then means anything at all in absolute terms. Nothing is provable. Nothing is falsifiable. We may all be figments of the Tooth Houri’s imagination, and you cannot “falsify” that.
Finally:
An epistemologic approach where philosophers and sixth graders ponder “falsifiability” or wonder what “really is,” and ultimately decide imaginations not grounded in scientific principles are “not falsifiable,” indulge themselves in super fun wordgame mental masturbation which fails to reach the climax of any conclusions at all. Beyond the Land of Science lies not only the magical attraction of the Tooth Houri but also the demon of ignorance.
Humans have lived in that ignorance for a couple hundred thousand years, but it is my hope the SDMB and western education will help stamp it out.
The falsification thing has problems.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/
"3.3. Popper and falsificationism
Another approach that took off from the difficulties with inductive inference was Karl Popper’s critical rationalism or falsificationism (Popper 1959, 1963). Falsification is deductive and similar to H-D in that it involves scientists deducing observational consequences from the hypothesis under test. For Popper, however, the important point was not whatever confirmation successful prediction offered to the hypotheses but rather the logical asymmetry between such confirmations, which require an inductive inference, versus falsification, which can be based on a deductive inference. This simple opposition was later questioned, by Lakatos, among others. (See the entry on historicist theories of scientific rationality.)"
" Originally, Popper thought that this meant the introduction of ad hoc hypotheses only to save a theory should not be countenanced as good scientific method. These would undermine the falsifiabililty of a theory. However, Popper later came to recognize that the introduction of modifications (immunizations, he called them) was often an important part of scientific development. Responding to surprising or apparently falsifying observations often generated important new scientific insights. Popper’s own example was the observed motion of Uranus which originally did not agree with Newtonian predictions, but the ad hoc hypothesis of an outer planet explained the disagreement and led to further falsifiable predictions. Popper sought to reconcile the view by blurring the distinction between falsifiable and not falsifiable, and speaking instead of degrees of testability (Popper 1985: 41f.)."
Karl Popper was a an interesting guy but it seems he had less faith in his theory than you have.
I’m not mad about the way you use the term epistimology either.
Correct. “Absolute terms” is, realistically speaking, a meaningless phrase implying some kind of idealized pure contextless Truth which is completely independent of prior assumptions. Maybe there does somehow exist some kind of axiomless Truth of that sort, but as far as I’m concerned the notion is not very interesting.
Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, is interesting, and it does depend on prior assumptions: specifically, the prior assumption that the material reality we can experience empirically and analyze rationally is the only kind of reality there is.
Yup. So what? Why are you so incapable of accepting this unremarkable fact about the formal theoretical constraints on human knowledge? It’s not like you’re being forced to believe in anything supernatural simply because it’s not technically falsifiable.
If you’re going to insist on perfect epistemic certainty in contextless “absolute terms”, devoid of all contingency of any kind, you might as well just cut to the chase and become a religious believer. Perfect epistemic certainty in “absolute terms” is the province of faith, not of scientific rationality.
I love how articulate you are, but may I ask you to also be fair in stating my position? I have said over and over that “science falsifies the Tooth Houri,” and not that some alternate approach to epistemology falsifies her.
At issue is not whether there are theoretical constraints on human knowledge. Philosophers have had fun with that since humans started to think. Science itself may be completely wrong about how things work; we may have showed up Last Tuesday (as you know) as the imagining of my Tooth Houri.
But…science falsifies my Tooth Houri. It does so by accepting starting premises about what it means to exist within those premises, and the process by which that existence can be investigated. Science relegates my Tooth Houri to non-existence, with no chance whatsoever of my Tooth Houri being scientifically correct.
When an alternate approach to epistemology (equally arbitrarily) claims its guiding principles supercede those which science accepts, it can (arbitrarily) relegate science to the study of only some kinds of knowledge (the kinds that are derived with the scientific construct of what existence is). That epistemologic approach can then assert that there may be knowledge “beyond science” (or whatever fluffy term is used), and therefore conclude that my Tooth Houri may still exist. Therein lie the demons of ignorance which this board fights, but apparently not very enthusiastically.
I appreciate you not relegating my Tooth Houri to absolute falsifiability, and in honor of your persistent effort to salvage her possible existence, I am going to upgrade her yet again so that she can now change into a male, and pleasure men-seeking women (so the dead are covered regardless of any preference they may express in the afterlife). I will also add lactation, to cover dead babies until they are old enough to get teeth and eventually have intercourse.
However, as a scientist I also understand that the alternate epistemology which finds her non-falsifiable cannot find anything either provable or falsifiable, including whether or not a brain is even “existing” to read these words and follow an argument. Fancy words to the contrary, there is science, and there is epistemologic nihilism–permanent chaos with wordsmithed opinions winning the day for what is real instead of…what is real. Without the tenets of science, “falsifiability” is a term devoid of meaning–as are all words; all coherent defenses of any knowledge structure at all. Witness the ridiculousness of asserting that my Tooth Houri might exist because she is not “technically falsifiable” within some non-scientific approach to epistemology.
Have at it defending the possible existence of my Tooth Houri, and I will continue to try and upgrade her as I think of good features to add.
But science shot her down out of the box, and that’s the point I’m making (and why western education is the enemy of Islam and all other superstitions, epistemologically speaking). It falsifies them.
Well yeah, if your definition of “falsifies” means “determines to be nonexistent or untrue according to scientific criteria for existence/validity”, then sure, we have no debate here. Nobody is disputing at all that science can authoritatively determine which phenomena do or do not meet science’s own axiomatic criteria for existence.
According to the premises of “scientific correctness”, to borrow your term, which define reality as consisting only of the material phenomena we can experience empirically and analyze rationally, anything supernatural is by definition nonexistent. Period. Done and dusted.
But that’s merely a restatement of scientific premises about the supernatural, not any kind of scientific finding concerning the supernatural.
Which is not a particularly meaningful use of the term “falsification” when we’re talking about the supernatural, at least in this discussion. It also doesn’t rebut in any way the basic point about what science can and can’t do. Science can define supernatural phenomena as nonexistent-according-to-scientific-criteria-for-existence, but it can’t demonstrate the nonexistence, in a broader sense, of any hypothesized supernatural phenomena to which those criteria hypothetically don’t apply.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
[…] an alternate approach to epistemology […] can (arbitrarily) relegate science to the study of only some kinds of knowledge (the kinds that are derived with the scientific construct of what existence is). That epistemologic approach can then assert that there may be knowledge “beyond science” (or whatever fluffy term is used)
[/quote]
Exactly.
In other words, non-scientific criteria for the existence of hypothesized supernatural phenomena are useless for determining scientific validity. Sure. AFAICT, nobody’s disputing that either.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
western education is the enemy of Islam and all other superstitions, epistemologically speaking
[/QUOTE]
I don’t really get what you mean by “western” in this context. AFAIK, by far the most atheist nation is China, if we’re using religion as a proxy for “superstitions” in general.
Exactly so: “Falsify” means to demonstrate the incorrectness of a claim, not simply to hand-wave it aside. Falsification is an a posteriori function, not a priori. If someone says that two oxygen atoms plus one hydrogen atom makes water, we can falsify that. If someone makes the (correct) claim that one oxygen atom plus two hydrogen atoms, that could be falsified if it were not true. There are ways to test the claim, that would show concrete results if it the claim were wrong.
If someone says, “God is love,” we can’t demonstrate it to be wrong. There isn’t any way. There is no procedure that would give a concrete result.
In practice, science doesn’t define supernatural phenomena as nonexistent. Science just disregards the claim entirely as something it has no way to address. It would be a bad scientist who says, “Science falsifies God.” Because science does no such thing. It would be an equally bad scientist who says, “Science defines God as nonexistent.” It really doesn’t. (For that would be to make a distinct and concrete claim about the supernatural!)
(A quick aside: some atheists, myself included, dismiss some definitions of God as internally contradictory. This is not a scientific falsification, but, of all things, a linguistic or even legalistic one. If someone says, “I am thinking of a number that is odd, but also divisible by two,” I will reject his claim because it contradicts itself. If someone says, “God has infinite power,” I will reject this because it contradicts the meaning of the word “infinite.”)
For one thing, in practice, it would be pointless and counterproductive for science as an institution to describe alleged supernatural phenomena as by definition nonexistent instead of just “non-scientific” or “irrelevant” or “scientifically meaningless”.
After all, there are plenty of people engaged in science who are perfectly competent at applying the assumptions and techniques of science to determine scientific facts, but who personally happen to believe in the existence of something supernatural. It would be dumb for science to attempt to exclude such people from the practice of science on philosophical grounds, simply because of some personal irrational/nonempirical convictions they maintain outside their scientific work.
I feel kinda stupid: I didn’t even think of that! There are tons (heh, literally!) of very religious scientists. A definition that made that impossible would be silly.
(And I’m sure there’s been plenty of prayer in the lab, too!)
(Old joke: “Is it possible to create life in the laboratory?” “Yes, but it depends on who you’re there with.”)
Which is why I keep saying “science falsifies the supernatural.” Glad to hear you saying it as well now.
As to the remainder of your point, science is the only mechanism by which anything can be falsified wrt to its existence.
If you discard the axioms of science, there is no mechanism whatsoever to falsify anything, so the term “falsifiability” becomes meaningless. Without the axioms of science, my Tooth Houri is non-falsifiable, sure. But in that paradigm nothing at all is falsifiable; not even the idea that this entire conversation exists in your imagination, and you exist only in the imagination of my imaginary Tooth Houri. And oh; by the way, existence in any sense of the word is also non-provable.
Lovely linguistic mental masturbation; devoid of any substantive climax, and certainly devoid of meaning.
You will recall (or perhaps not) that the point of this chain on science is my position that science and western education will make religion go away. Any entity–including China–that accepts and promotes western education will effect the same result (although China kinda pitched in w/ some legislative anti-religion efforts as well. )
“Falsify” means nothing at all outside of a scientific axiom.
Without the approach to existence and proof that science takes, nothing at all is either provable or falsifiable. Not in the sense that a scientific approach cannot be applied, but in the sense that the terms themselves are meaningless.
When you discard the axioms of science, and the scientific approach to what exists as reality, you are left unable to prove if you have a nose, much less are picking it, much less thinking about picking it.
Assorted supporters of my Tooth Houri and other supernatural allegations like to pretend “science can’t falisify X” as if the phrase carried any weight for anything. It doesn’t, and certainly not in terms of leaving open the possibility of the existence of X.
While my Tooth Houri would appreciate your support of her possible existence were she an entity that exists, she’s 100% bullshit. Non-falsifying her in an epistemologic construct that begins with the premise of discarding science is an exercise in wordplay where you invent meaning at will and then declare victory for having the words mean what you want.
I have explained to you on several occasions the mechanism by which my Science Adviser Montie would falsify the Tooth Houri, and demonstrate the incorrectness of a claim that she exists as a mechanism for pleasuring the Dead. No hand-waving required.
Well, what I’m doing is agreeing with your tautological construction that “science declares supernatural phenomena to be nonexistent-according-to-scientific-criteria-for-existence”, which you say is what you mean by “science falsifies the supernatural”. Hard not to agree with tautologies, after all.
Note, however, that I’m not agreeing that “science falsifies the supernatural” in any more meaningful, non-tautological sense.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
If you discard the axioms of science, there is no mechanism whatsoever to falsify anything, so the term “falsifiability” becomes meaningless.
[/quote]
No. Falsifiability becomes impossible, but that’s not the same thing as becoming meaningless. The impossibility of falsifiability in those circumstances is a pretty important and meaningful concept.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
You will recall (or perhaps not) that the point of this chain on science is my position that science and western education will make religion go away. Any entity–including China–that accepts and promotes western education will effect the same result (although China kinda pitched in w/ some legislative anti-religion efforts as well […]
[/QUOTE]
Your “position” is somewhat undercut by the fact that religion is actually on the rise in China, currently and recently. China has an officially atheist governing regime and officially atheist educational principles, as well as a heavy educational emphasis on science and technology, but religion is not “going away” there. On the contrary, Chinese adherence to traditional Taoist/folk religion as well as to the more recent imports of Buddhism and Christianity is rapidly increasing.
I disagree. I think it is silly and counter-productive to encourage or allow for relevance of epistemologies that are not evidence based on the rather specious assumption that not doing so excludes people who believe in them in their personal life from performing the jobs that science requires of them in their professional life.
That’s like saying scientists who belong to the fandom of Tolkien would stop being scientists if science described elves as by definition non-existent instead of just “non-scientific” or “irrelevant” or “scientifically meaningless”.
You generally make good arguments, but this is not one of them.
I think there are a growing number of Muslims losing their acceptance of the dogma of Islam but not losing their faith in Allah. As well as agreeing with some of the views of the English Defence League I also support the aims of another group called One Law For All an anti Sharia Law group who supports equal rights for Muslim woman, rights that they are entitled to under U.K. law but denied under Sharia Law and there is a growing number of Muslims supporting this group. There is a movement away from Islamic dogma but it is very slow due mainly to the fact that if a Muslim leaves their faith they risk being cast out not only by their immediate family but also their extended Mosque family and the world can become a very lonely and threatening place for them
Right, like there is one amorphous Muslim whole, like the KKK, the evangelical right and Martin Luther King were all one whole.
For shit and giggles why not instead talk about the six earlier female Muslim Heads of State and what they might think?
It’s honestly beyond comprehension that, seemingly on a societal level, a 21st century democratic population could be so demonstrably infantile.
The USA today is making the naked ya-ya jingoism of the cheese-eating surrender monkey period seem like the good old days of informed debate.
The world looks speechless at the USA.
Which dogma would that be? Islam is a pretty large, very complex, and quite diverse outfit. It’s rather like Christianity or Buddhism in that respect: lots of differences between the groups constituting it.
I’m shocked anyone would actually own up to supporting the views of a racist/xenophobic/bigoted group. Anyway, women, even Muslim women, in the UK get the exact same rights that non-Muslim women get in the UK. How can you not know this?
Again: What dogma would that be?