At the Edge, Sean Carroll argues that falsifiability should be retired:
My answer was “Falsifiability.” More of a philosophical idea than a scientific one, but an idea that is bandied about by lazy scientists far more than it is invoked by careful philosophers. Thinking sensibly about the demarcation problem between science and non-science, especially these days, requires a bit more nuance than that.
Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth. The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms that are impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they are not falsifiable.
The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.
Pigliucci replies, noting that Carroll thinks the multiverse eliminates the problem of fine-tuning of our universe, such that it is friendly to life:
More crucially, again as pointed out by Baggott, the reasoning basically boils down to: we have this empirically unsubstantiated but nice theoretical complex (the multiverse) that would very nicely solve this nagging fine tuning problem, so we think the theoretical complex is on the mark. This is dangerously close to being circular reasoning. The fact, if it is a fact, that the idea of a multiverse may help us with cosmological fine tuning is not evidence or reason in favor of the multiverse itself. The latter needs to stand on its own.
And yet Sean comes perilously close to proposing just that: “We can’t (as far as we know) observe other parts of the multiverse directly. But their existence has a dramatic effect on how we account for the data in the part of the multiverse we do observe.” I truly don’t think I’m reading him uncharitably here, and again, I’m not the only one to read some cosmologists’ statements in this fashion.
None of the above should be construed as suggesting that ideas like the multiverse or string theory are somehow pseudoscientific. They are complex, elegant speculations somewhat grounded in well established physics. Nor is anyone suggesting that barriers be put around the work or imagination of cosmologists and string theorists. Go ahead, knock yourselves out and surprise and astonish the rest of us. But at some point the fundamental physics community might want to ask itself whether it has crossed into territory that begins to look a lot more like metaphysics than physics. And this comes from someone who doesn’t think metaphysics is a dirty word…
Some of us think there is no question that the fundamental physics community has crossed over into metaphysics. A while back. Here’s a question: Would it have been possible to develop a cosmology where avoiding the concept of God is a goal (and that is clearly what this whole fine-tuning issue is about) without the cosmology becoming a metaphysic?
See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
And
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips
Note: Pigliucci crossed our screens before here, in “Pigliucci: nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution — NOT!” and here on the frequent imprecision of the science/pseudo-science divide in medicine (no surprise, given the strength of the placebo effect).
Sean Carroll states
Pigliucci, not trying to be to condescending, states:
News, a bit more bluntly, puts it like this,,
Well, contrary to what Carroll thinks, the non-falsifiable multiverse, that he would prefer to believe in, (rather than Carrol entertaining any notion of God, for whatever severely misguided reason), is an epistemologically self-defeating proposition that undermines our ability to practice science in the first place!
Thus, basically Carrol has not only, as he himself admitted, given up falsifiability as a criterion for believing in a multiverse(s), but Carrol has also, apparently unbeknownst to himself, given up rationality altogether!
Moreover, Alvin Plantinga’s most powerful work against Naturalism/Atheism, showing it to be a self-refuting and incoherent worldview, is where he turns the theory of Evolution itself against metaphysical Naturalism (i.e. Atheism) in what is called the ‘Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’ (EAAN). Turning Evolution against metaphysical Naturalism/Atheism is simply ‘poetic justice’ in extremely high form, as to showing the inconsistency inherent in the Atheist’s a-priorily preferred naturalistic worldview. Here are two videos and a paper in which Plantinga lays out, and rigorously defends, the logical consistency of his argument:
I find it to be funny that people who claim they have no mind end up ‘losing their mind’ in the EAAN.
In fact, Plantinga’s work undermining the epistemological integrity of Naturalism, which had had a stranglehold on higher philosophy in America for many decades prior to Plantinga’s arrival on the scene in the late 1960s, led him to comment in no less than the New York Times that,,,
It is also interesting to note that Darwin himself expressed doubt that reasoning itself could be based in Naturalistic Evolution:
As well, Pinker and Dawkins also both agree that Darwinism does not guarantee the soundness of our reasoning.
Which begs the question, ‘if you can’t trust your own reasoning how do you know anything you say, scientifically or otherwise, is true?’. The basic outline of Plantinga’s EAAN argument was laid out decades earlier by C.S. Lewis in his ‘Argument From Reason’:
That a perspective outside the material order, i.e. a mind, is necessary in order to practice science in the first place, is beautifully captured in this following quote:
And whereas Naturalism sows its own seeds of destruction from within to wind up in a pseudo-scientific pit of endless logical absurdities and contradictions, Theism stands up quite well, logically, to all the main ‘defeaters’ that have been leveled against it by atheists.
A bit more on ‘falsifiability’, which Carrol seems to consider so much primitive thinking, it turns out that nobody can seem to find the exact mathematical demarcation criteria of neo-Darwinism so that we may finally learn how to properly designate real Darwinian science from the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design?
Or if mathematics is not a useful tool for ascertaining the falsifiability of a theory in science, perhaps empirical evidence can demonstrate for us the truthfulness of Darwinism? Demonstrate for all to see that Random Mutation/Variation and Natural Selection are the way in which species have originated?
Well so much for Random mutations/variations providing proof for Darwinism! How about Natural Selection? Can Darwinists/Atheists demonstrated that the second pillar of Darwinism is true?
WOW, Natural Selection is not even in the right dimension to do any ‘undirected selecting’! Moreover, even if Natural Selection were on the right playing dimensional field to be a viable explanation, Natural Selection would still be hopelessly blind to the subtle changes it is required to select at the molecular level,,
This devastating ‘princess and the pea’ problem for natural selection is pointed out by Dr. John Sanford at the 8:14 minute mark of this following video,,,
All of which begs the question, if showing Darwinisn to have no rigid mathematical basis, and showing that both of the two primary pillars of Darwinian thought are false cannot falsify Darwinism, exactly what scientific finding could possibly falsify Darwinism? Without any solid foundation in science, and still their dogmatic insistence that Darwinism is true, then as far as I can tell, the actual demarcation threshold for believing neo-Darwinism is true is this:
,, I hope neo-Darwinists/Atheists can help us to designate a more rigid threshold for neo-Darwinism, since, as far as I can tell, without such a rigid demarcation criteria, neo-Darwinism is in actuality the pseudo-science that they constantly accuse Intelligent Design of being!
Of note: Intelligent Design does not suffer from such a lack of mathematical rigor:
Moreover, Intelligent Design can easily be falsified by empirical evidence:
Moreover, ID has positive evidence for its claim that Intelligence, and only Intelligence, can generate functional information/complexity, whereas Darwinism has no evidence that it can produce non-tivial functional information/complexity:
Dr. Fuz Rana, at the 41:30 minute mark of the following video, speaks on the tremendous effort that went into building the preceding protein:
In fact there is a null hypothesis in place stating that purely material processes will NEVER be observed generating non-trivial levels of functional information:
Verse and Music;
Supplemental note:
Wasn’t ‘it’s not falsifiable!’ one of the principle supposed arguments about how ID wasn’t science?