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→Atheist Science: Falsifiability, scientific testing, etc.
If you think that the past is not falsifiable, why do you want to convince anybody here about things in the past. This position is close to solipsism. If we accept that as an argument, you do not know anything certain either. If that would be true, I could freely claim that the first books of moses were written by two marsupials and a ham sandwich. You wouldn't be able to falsify that. Or that the world got created last Thursday. If you need such a strong assumption to support your position, you position cannot be too strong. [[User:Order|Order]] 03:18, 18 December 2007 (EST)
If you think that the past is not falsifiable, why do you want to convince anybody here about things in the past. This position is close to solipsism. If we accept that as an argument, you do not know anything certain either. If that would be true, I could freely claim that the first books of moses were written by two marsupials and a ham sandwich. You wouldn't be able to falsify that. Or that the world got created last Thursday. If you need such a strong assumption to support your position, you position cannot be too strong. [[User:Order|Order]] 03:18, 18 December 2007 (EST)
: Yes, you have to be careful about eyewitnesses. The article I linked to referred to ''reliable'' eyewitnesses. I'm quite sure that the eyewitnesses that I'm talking about didn't have TV reports to cloud their views!
: No, you have falsifiability wrong. If an idea is falsifiable, it doesn't mean that it can be wrong, it means that it can be ''scientifically shown to be'' wrong. Actually, it's more precise than that. To be falsifiable, the scientists have to be able to ''devise a test'' to see if the theory can be wrong. The article pointed out that some theories were shown to be wrong ''not by the science'', but by eyewitnesses. Even with the example the article gave where new evidence turned up later, this falsified the theory, but it wasn't a test that could be devised to check the theory, else they would (or should) have done it at the time.
: Yes, it does say that eyewitnesses have to be corroborated, but it's talking about being corroborated ''by another eyewitness'' (the Bible reference is about having ''more than one witness'').
: I do think that the past is not falsifiable (i.e. able to have a scientific test devised to check if the claim is wrong), but that doesn't mean that you can't check out ideas about the past. There's other ways of checking than scientific tests, such as seeing if another witness corroborates the story, seeing if it's logically consistent, etc. Even these methods may not be able to "prove" that the history is correct, but you can often decide if it's is ''probably'' correct (and yes, scientific tests can help towards this, too). So, I could not "falsify" (scientifically test) whether the Pentateuch was written by two marsupials and a ham sandwich, but I could quite readily conclude that it's ''extremely'' unlikely to be true given that we know of no marsupials or ham sandwiches that could write, let alone see (in the case of the sandwich), etc. Of course we could apply Occam's Razor also (remembering that Occam's Razor is a guiding principle, not a test of truth). Just because it's not scientifically testable doesn't mean that we can't make a reasonable judgement of the claim.
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 07:44, 18 December 2007 (EST)
===Legitimate views===
===Legitimate views===