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This is a conciliation, it's not real. Of course religious beliefs are falsifiable. Religions make falsifiable predictions all the time. Gods live on Mount Olym

This is a conciliation, it's not real. Of course religious beliefs are falsifiable. Religions make falsifiable predictions all the time. Gods live on Mount Olympus? Go meet them. Oh, they're not there? Hypothesis falsified. An angel protects you from harm. You're harmed? Hypothesis falsified. Prayer makes it more likely for a divine force to intercede on someone's behalf. Medical outcomes in a double-blind prayer study do not differ between groups? Hypothesis falsified. The fact that we have not invented the craft which can travel to heaven, or created the instrument that can detect a djinn, does not mean that those things are not falsifiable from a first principles perspective: they are technological and practical challenges, not philosophical ones. If you think otherwise, you must think that the definition of religious belief inherently incorporates its non-observability and non-potency: that which cannot be detected and which has no effect. In which case, it's clearly not "real" in any useful sense that you can share with someone else. It's just that it's such an obnoxious and antagonistic thing to say to people who keep religion, and sometimes to ourselves, so we bend our discourse around it in an effort to preserve peace and avoid saying it directly: a conciliation.

zdragnar 4y ago
> that which cannot be detected and which has no effect. In which case, it's clearly not "real" in any useful sense that you can share with someone else. ... and yet we pour tons of money into the search for dark matter and dark energy, things that we cannot observe directly and are hypothesized only because there are gaps in our mathematical models of how the universe ought to work.
- partdavid 4y ago
  Your analogy is inapt; the whole reason dark matter is hypothesized is precisely because of the directly observable, inarguable effects it has; we can even see that it is both not evenly distributed and not distributed congruently with matter, so we know enough of its nature to give a name to the phenomenon. Regardless, you've misunderstood my point, which is that if you expect religious phenomena to be undetectable (not "we haven't observed it" but "you can never observe it") and ineffectual (not "we haven't observed its effect" but "you can never observe any effect") then it simply isn't real in any useful sense: religious, scientific, or otherwise. And I don't think religious people believe that: I think they think their religion is real, in that it has effects (a volcano doesn't erupt because we've made appropriate sacrifices to it; my consciousness will live on in some way in the presence of other personhoods after my death, in another place; Florida will be hit by more frequent natural disasters because schoolteachers tell students that gay people exist) and is observable (my charismatic evangelical preacher speaks meaningful sentences in a foreign language when possessed by a spirit; unhappy dead emerge from the ground each year to be led by Hecate against the living). I'm pointing out that while, as a conciliation (essentially, because people dislike it so much and grow antagonistic and violent when challenged), we often say that religion and science are separate, or that religion, as something that is taken as faith, is not investigable by scientific methods; in fact if religion has any reality or meaning then it is investigable. Not necessarily as a practical matter (though to some extent, it is practicable), but there's no principle that precludes any religious hypothesis from being tested. To boil it down: if a religion were real, we could test it. An assertion that it's untestable is equivalent to saying that it's purely imaginary. That's different from saying that we just can't test it yet.

zdragnar 4y ago

> that which cannot be detected and which has no effect. In which case, it's clearly not "real" in any useful sense that you can share with someone else. ... and yet we pour tons of money into the search for dark matter and dark energy, things that we cannot observe directly and are hypothesized only because there are gaps in our mathematical models of how the universe ought to work.

partdavid 4y ago
Your analogy is inapt; the whole reason dark matter is hypothesized is precisely because of the directly observable, inarguable effects it has; we can even see that it is both not evenly distributed and not distributed congruently with matter, so we know enough of its nature to give a name to the phenomenon. Regardless, you've misunderstood my point, which is that if you expect religious phenomena to be undetectable (not "we haven't observed it" but "you can never observe it") and ineffectual (not "we haven't observed its effect" but "you can never observe any effect") then it simply isn't real in any useful sense: religious, scientific, or otherwise. And I don't think religious people believe that: I think they think their religion is real, in that it has effects (a volcano doesn't erupt because we've made appropriate sacrifices to it; my consciousness will live on in some way in the presence of other personhoods after my death, in another place; Florida will be hit by more frequent natural disasters because schoolteachers tell students that gay people exist) and is observable (my charismatic evangelical preacher speaks meaningful sentences in a foreign language when possessed by a spirit; unhappy dead emerge from the ground each year to be led by Hecate against the living). I'm pointing out that while, as a conciliation (essentially, because people dislike it so much and grow antagonistic and violent when challenged), we often say that religion and science are separate, or that religion, as something that is taken as faith, is not investigable by scientific methods; in fact if religion has any reality or meaning then it is investigable. Not necessarily as a practical matter (though to some extent, it is practicable), but there's no principle that precludes any religious hypothesis from being tested. To boil it down: if a religion were real, we could test it. An assertion that it's untestable is equivalent to saying that it's purely imaginary. That's different from saying that we just can't test it yet.