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Comment Re:robotic slave worshippers (Score 1) 176

A billion people saying the same thing about god is different because their testimony is not repeatable nor falsifiable. I can devise an experiment that measures ground temperature over a long (200+hour) period. I have the hypothesis that it will rise in temperature when that big bright thing comes up and fall in temperature when that big bright thing comes down. (I actually used to do things similar to this when I did thermal modelling.) When I review my results, I see my hypothesis confirmed (note, not proven) via my experiment.

I may notice peculiar results though, minor fluctuations in my data samples. Clearly, there is more than one influence on the temperature than just that big bright thing. I might look to cloud cover and wind speed/directions in my next experiment to see if those accurately correlate with my findings. But at least my experiment is falsifiable and repeatable (you can run the experiment yourself to confirm my results). If you run the experiment and get different results, we should get together and compare our notes to find the difference. (Perhaps you ran your experiment near a pole during time of the year where the sun doesn't shine. We might explain the difference by noting that even though both experiments ran for 200 hours, the sun never rose for your experiment, so the temperature didn't fluctuate.)

There is no way to falsify someone's claim to have felt God. Even if there was some measurable/observable effect (like a glow in the corner, a burning bush, a descending angel) it is not repeatable.

Now, something may come along that explains why my rocks warm up when the big bright thing comes up and cools down when the big bright thing goes away. Maybe. If it does, I will then try to devise an experiment that incorporates that - that falsifies the hypothesis that there is something else actually causing the temperature increase. Or maybe I'll find a reason why my methodology of using temperature as a measure of proof is not sufficient. That is science. Science challenges itself to model the universe as we know it as accurately as possible. A falsifiable and repeatable experiment that takes an established theory (like that the sun exists) and shows it to be false is not a bad thing for science, because now we have new evidence to incorporate into our theory, or are forced to completely reformulate it. Until it does, we just operate with what we have: the theories that have, as yet, not been shown false by experimentation.

You're correct that a wise man does not stubbornly wait to be convinced. He reviews the evidence and makes a conclusion. What a wise man does not do is wait to have it proven to him.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

- Albert Einstein

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