Sir Karl Popper's "Science as Falsification" 

Basic algorithms... Patterns. What if that's all that's at the core of everything, even physical science?

I think you might be correct, look at the physical world and its amazing how much it takes the form of a fractal.

Agreed. Aplhazero is throwing out inductive handicaps out the window and humiliating our algorithms. Perhaps metatruth is beyond our physical limitations and evolution is in order

Thanks for your comment. I am wondering if you could distinguish what Popper calls the _riskyness_ of a prediction from what you are referring to as specificity. I believe what you are talking about as specificity would be relevant to the power of a theory, whereas this piece is addressing the demarcation of a theory as scientific. These matters are clearly intertwined as a theory requires a some minimum level of power to be scientific. Here is the text which the video is based on if that helps at all: www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html This reading is an excerpt from his book _Conjectures and Refutations_ which was about empirical science; hence the reference to things that are necessarily true would not be applicable. The importance of falsifiability becomes clearer in the larger context of the book. Briefly, it is a response to the position that empirical scientific theories must be verifiable. The Popperian position counters, correctly I believe, that scientific theories are essentially make a universal statement about the world that _All X are Y,_ and as you can never observe every instance of _X_ to see if _Y_ follows, we can only conjecture _All X are Y_ and try to refute the statement. My understanding anyway. Cheers Mate

***** He's talking about theories. If you just want to make a distinction defining "scientific" theories as falsifiable, but other theories are just as valid, then that's fine. I just don't see the point when we can apply the same criterion of specificity of evidence to both types of theories. It seems to me Popper was trying to distinguish between defective theories and effective ones; not just make an arbitrary distinction. I mean, let's get to the meat of the reason atheist here use falsification. If I propose God exists, then an atheist wants me to propose a certain test where, in that case, God does not exist. Because God exists in all possible worlds, there is no case we can test for where God does not exist. That doesn't make God a bad theory equivalent to fairies. It just means God isn't in the arbitrary category of "scientific" theories.

***** "My god exists in all possible worlds" is structured as an untestable claim. It takes zero risk of being falsified. The statement "prayers to my god can regrow this amputated limb" is very testable and risky. How about: "This holy statue can be demonstrated to be weeping real blood"? "Divine action can be demonstrated to be the best explanation for this apparent imprint of a Jewish messiah on my toast/tortilla chip/stain on my mattress" "Christians can be demonstrated to be less likely to commit crimes per capita when compared with non-theists" I would propose that falsification is generally most useful in fields where predictions about the observed world are to be made. For example, I can test the hypothesis that "seismographic activity will correlate to earthquakes" or "patients who dream of losing their teeth will have underlying fears of impotency" or even "between 40 and 50% of people will vote against this bill". Most theologians have abandoned the idea of testable claims... because they were always falsified on further inspection. All that is left are non-physical, untestable claims. I was once swayed by Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA idea, but then I realized that primitive Christian theology made a number of claims that over time were discarded. That is, it isn't that Judeo-christians have always believed in a non-physical, immaterial god... it's that all the interesting material claims are no longer plausible and therefore abandoned. See: Noah's Ark, Tower of Babel, Abraham and the burning bush, etc.

C0nc0rdance _"an untestable claim"_ Perhaps not in your sense of testable, but in the sense of being able to determine the truth of the claim, God's existence is certainly testable. For example, Aquinas' first way uses the existence of motion to prove the existence of God and his third way uses the existence of contingent of things to prove the existence of God. Of course, you may disagree with these arguments, but it is in principle possible prove the existence of necessary truths. For less controversial examples consider proving a triangle has angles which sum to 180 degrees, or that 1+1=2. There is no way to falsify these claims because there is no case where they could be wrong. That doesn't mean we should reject these necessary truths. On another note, in the case of necessary truths, one could falsify my claim by finding a contradiction in the terms. For example, if someone was to say a triangle has angles which sum to 140 degrees, I could show them that this leads to a contradiction and thus is false. This is true of everything, however, (including magical fairies) so I don't think this is the kind of falsification Popper has in mind. Just, fyi, from the beginning of Christianity, the understanding of God has been as Immaterial: "Look for Him who is above all time, eternal and invisible" - St. Ignatius of Antioch (35 CE - 107 CE) This idea came from philosophy more than anything. Most people in those days still worshiped the greco-roman gods, so it wasn't like they got tired of those pesky atheists disproving God's existence. It comes from the philosophy around God being the creator of the universe.

***** You are thinking of something different from what possible worlds mean to philosophers. It means exactly that you cannot imagine circumstances in which that claim is false. (source: I took an introduction to logic course in college).

did you get your answer?