Falsifying Touchstone

In the comments on this post, Touchstone (who has an insatiable need to mock T-Bloggers before the Debunking atheists can—you know, the typical Christian response to other Christians who challenge atheists….) mocked Steve Hays and myself before dancing around a direct challenge I issued him. I triple dog dared T-Stone to demonstrate evolution from the fossil record.

Naturally, he didn’t, as I pointed out before. But I wanted to take the opportunity of his comment to address one of the other things T-Stone said.

T-Stone, speaking of falsification, said:

Here's a blurb from a physics professor named James Schombert at the University of Oregon I've participated with on other forums in the past on this subject:

The scientific method has four steps:

* observation/experimentation
* deduction
* hypothesis
* falsification

Note that there is an emphasis on falsification, not verification. If a theory passes any test then our confidence in the theory is reinforced, but it is never proven correct in a mathematically sense. Thus, a powerful hypothesis is one that is highly vulnerable to falsification and that can be tested in many ways. Science can be separated from pseudo-science by the Principle of Falsification, the concept that ideas must be capable of being proven false in order to be scientifically valid.

There are several problems with this, however (especially the way T-Stone is taking it). For example, every single universal negative argument can be falsified. If I said, “There are no elves in Greenland” then all it would take is one elf to prove my statement wrong. This would ironically put universal negatives in the class of being impossible to prove logically, yet being (according to T-Stone), “a high quality scientific theory.”

But there are other arguments that fit this same category. If I said, “There is proof for the existence of aliens on the back of Alpha Centauri”, that statement would be possible to falsify. All you’d have to do is get to the back of Alpha Centauri. That one is not physically capable of doing so right now does not mean the theory is not falsifiable, for at some point in the future it could happen that someone could go to the back of Alpha Centauri.

Now my examples are obviously trivial examples designed to prove a point. Let’s use a more pertinent example.

T-Stone is in essence arguing:

A. Evolution is falsifiable.
B. Creationists have not falsified evolution.
C. Therefore, evolution is true.

But this logic is identical to the logic that I gave above regarding aliens on Alpha Centauri. See:

A. The theory that there is evidence of aliens on the back of Alpha Centauri is falsifiable.
B. T-Stone has not falsified it.
C. Therefore, the theory is true.

This is obviously bogus. For the same reason, T-Stone’s implicit argument that Evolution is true because Creationists haven’t falsified it is likewise bogus (and that ignores the fact that Creationists have falsified many points of Evolution already).

On a more scientifically-broad basis, however, falsification is not some “magic” thing that suddenly gives a theory credibility. Indeed, it is not the case that all theories must be falsifiable to be scientific. In fact, is it possible to falsify the falsifiability theory? If not, then would that not mean that a non-scientific theory is defining science?

Now one other thing to point out. T-Stone said: “Being falsifiable makes it [a theory] ‘real science’, even if it is eventually falsified.” By that standard, my argument for the existence of aliens on the back of Alpha Centauri is “real science” even though I just made it up for the purposes of refuting T-Stone.

T-Stone said:

Ask yourself how "common design", an idea Steve Hays likes to throw out, or your favorite creation theory would be falsified.

That’s easy. Demonstrate how an irreducibly complex chemical reaction in a cell occurs without anyone designing the mechanisms. Just show one of them spontaneously occurring without a designer. That would falsify the theory, wouldn’t it?

Hey, I guess ID is “real science” after all now that we’ve got T-Stone’s stamp of approval on it.