Question According to Karl Popper, a hypothesis is scientific if it can be observationally falsified, not, if it can be verified. One instance not in accordance with a supposed law refutes the law, but many instances in conformity with the law still do not prove it. Accepting this falsification test, we may remark that the idea of the divine existence either could, or could not, be falsified by a conceivable way of observation. If it could not, then science in no position to test theism. Please comment. Thanks

Accepted:
June 22, 2009

Comments

Yeah, I think that's right. The theistic hypothesis is not testable through the procedures of natural science. That in itself has led many, myself included, to a kind of agnosticism about theism. That's also one of the reasons why neither creationism nor much of what is described as intelligent design are scientific.

Do note, however, that testability may not be the only basis for rejecting (or accepting) theism. Some reject theism because they find theistic language itself intolerably confused and senseless. Others point to the political and moral problems associated with theisms (the violence, the intolerance, the blunting of norms of reason and critical thinking). (I frequently find that line of reasoning attractive.) Some object to the way theism fails to produce agreement and generates divisions and sects. (Often compelling to me, too.) Along similar lines, others have concluded that it's simply undesirable to commit to beliefs that are excessively complex or, alternatively not as simple as possible. (Think of how many, many logically possible theisms there are.) The scientist Laplace, for example, to a question from Napoleon as to why his book contained no reference to God responded with: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" (I had no need of that hypothesis).

On the other hand, many people do seem to need that hypothesis and derive many benefits and satisfaction from belief in a deity. Who's to say for sure that they are wrong?

So far as testability goes, however, you're dead on.

I'm not as confident as Peter Fosl about the testability issue: perhaps we need to know a bit more about what counts as "the theistic hypothesis".

After all, a lot of theistic hypotheses look perfectly testable by ordinary scientific standards. Take, for example, the claim that Zeus exists. I take it that no one now reading this site believes that that claim is literally true! But why? Well the existence claim, taken literally, is bound up with a range of stories about how the world works; and we now know the world just doesn't work that way. Mount Olympus is not populated with gods; bolts of lightning are naturally caused discharges of electricity; clouds and rain are not gathered by supernatural agency; burnt sacrifices to Zeus do not increase the chances of better crops or victory in battle; and so it goes. Science -- in the broadest sense of our empirically disciplined enquiries into how things work -- has shown we have no need of the Olympian gods to explain anything. Of course, that doesn't mean that the Greek myths aren't full of insights into the secrets of the human heart! But in so far as they essentially embody creation stories and stories about the origin of natural phenomena like storms and tempests, science -- in the broad sense -- uncontroversially shows that they are literally false.

So if someone claims that the empirical testing methods characteristic of science can't in general impact on the questions about the existence of various gods, then that's surely wrong. Which raises a nice question: why should the question of the existence of the Judeo-Christian God (the theistic hypothesis, perhaps) be different in this respect from the question of the existence of Zeus?

Well, the questions won't have a different status if we take the God-story also to be essentially bound up with e.g. certain biblical creation stories. Science has more than adequately shown that those stories aren't literally true. And again, petitionary prayer to God is no more effective in bringing about worldly goods than sacrifice to Zeus (it does no better in helping you recover from illness, say, than can be explained as a placebo effect). In so far as claims about the existence of God are bound up with specific such claims about how the world works, science can impact. And indeed, does impact strongly negatively.

But of course, sophisticated, scientifically knowledgeable, believers can and do react to that point in (at least) two different ways. One way is to try to keep a theistic hypothesis as a true factual claim, but aim to protect it by disentangling it from creation myths, and other such stories about how the world works: though you might well begin to wonder, as God becomes more and more abstract, more remote from the quotidian world in which we live our lives, why we should care. Another way (characteristic I think of one strand of English Anglicanism) is to agree that in so far as talk of God is bound up with stories about how the world works, it is encroaching on the province of science and is (mostly) literally false. However, you then go on to emphasize that this doesn't mean that the Christian myths, say, aren't very good myths to live ones life by, or that sharing Christian ritual practice isn't a sustaining prop to living a good life in a community.