My (O’Leary for News)’s new piece at Salvo:
Proving Grounded Multiverse Supporters Put the Brakes on Falsifiability
… today, some scientists want to throw falsifiability overboard. They hope by doing this to protect the concept of the multiverse. Put simply, there is currently no evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own, making the theory of the multiverse unfalsifiable. But if the proposal to dispense with falsifiability were accepted, that would be very convenient for naturalist atheists. They could then argue that any stream of events that occurs in our universe may well have occurred differently in any one of an infinite number of other universes. So no inferences (other than their own) could be drawn from a given state of affairs here in the only world for which we have information.
Thus, falsifiability was one of the ideas included in This Idea Must Die (2015), a recent book on scientific theories that are allegedly blocking progress. As cosmologist Sean Carroll cheerily explains in his essay in the book: More.
As I have noted elsewhere, a lot of today’s “cosmology” could have been thunk up by a mystic sitting on a prayer mat thousands of years ago.
See also: Why the multiverse has become more important than falsifiability.
and
Will there still be science in 2020?
Note: ” … falsifiability was one of the ideas included in This Idea Must Die (2015), a recent book on Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.” It is blocking progress, if progress means a gradual retreat from the demands of evidence.
Barry Arrington writes to say:
You write, “Put simply, there is currently no evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own, making the theory of the multiverse unfalsifiable.”
That is not quite right. Absence of evidence for a proposition does not make it unfalsifiable. A proposition is unfalsifiable if, in principle, there can be no empirical test that would disprove it.
In other words, the multiverse is unfalsifiable because all scientific experiments are limited to testing phenomena in this universe. We cannot, in principle, test the proposition that another universe exists.
Good to get that straight.
Follow UD News at Twitter!