Forget Falsifiability
Fighting foolish faithlessness
1. Millions, Billions, and Trillions of Invisible Dragons in Garages
Carl Sagan, famous for making a cool TV show about space, had a nasty habit of being a lazy internet atheist.
Well, a lazy book atheist maybe: in The Demon-Haunted World (1995), he presents a thought experiment called “The Dragon in My Garage.” The story goes like this:
“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle—but no dragon.
“Where's the dragon?” you ask.
“Oh, she's right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon.”
Of course, you wouldn’t take Sagan at his word—probably you’d try to do some kind of experiment to find out whether his dragon really existed.
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.
“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”
Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”
You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
“Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.
Do you get the metaphor?
Believing in invisible, floating, heatless, incorporeal dragons is like believing in God! It’s unempirical and illogical and silly.
It’s the ultimate example of the unfalsifiability fallacy—believing in a “theory or hypothesis [that] cannot possibly be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of any physical experiment.”
Logical people aren’t allowed to hold beliefs that can’t be physically proven.
2. I Believe the Cat You Just Put in That Box is Alive
Imagine you’re trying to demonstrate quantum superposition to me using the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Though I’m really more of a visual learner, and you’re trying to be accommodating, so you’ve decided to make it a physical experiment, and you actually do have a cat and a cardboard box.
Unfortunately, you weren’t paying much attention in physics class, and you forgot about all the business with a radioactive isotope and a Geiger-counter-controlled vial of poison—oops!—so you’re really just planning to put a cat into a cardboard box. Still, you know a thing or two about experimental design (you had a cute lab partner you wanted to impress), so you made sure to prepare a vacuum chamber in which you’ll place the box, and I won’t be able to do any sort of physical messing-about with it, or listening for meows or anything.
Ok, great, you start your experiment—put the cat in the box, seal the box, put the box in a vacuum chamber, and ask me whether I think the cat’s still alive.
I reply, “Yes, obviously the cat is still alive.”
And you say, “Aha! You have no physical means to test that belief! You’re committing the unfalsifiability fallacy; checkmate, theist.”
At this point, I undeniably have a right to slap you.
As
put it when he argued against the burden of proof, “We should just be Bayesians.”If I have strong prior evidence for a given proposition, it’s ok if I can’t conduct a physical experiment to prove it! So long as no countervailing evidence is produced, there’s no reason for me to update my belief.
So if a theist has come to believe in an ultimate God for any number of reasons, it’s wrong to object that their belief is illegitimate simply because it’s unfalsifiable by physical experiment. Sometimes it’s hard to do physical experiments! That’s not the only way to build knowledge about the world.
3. I Still Don’t Believe Carl Sagan Owns an Invisible Dragon
Low priors!
4. Falsifiability Can Make Sense
Sagan writes:
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
I agree with this!
It’s just that disproof comes in lots more forms than the physical. The dragon thought experiment is a massive strawman: thoughtful theists simply do not behave the way Sagan’s dragon-believer does!
They present compelling arguments for God’s existence, listen when you present counterarguments, admit that countervailing evidence holds some sway over them, and come to believe with a well-reasoned degree of confidence.
None of this is fallacious!
Falsifiability can be a decent heuristic when you’re dealing with conspiracy theories, but it’s mostly just an overextension of the idea that beliefs should pay rent. It says something like, “every belief must pay rent, in cash, at 50% above market rates.” Cool, I guess, if you can afford it—but in no way necessary, and counterproductive to most discussions.
1) It’s been well over a decade since I read that book, but I think it’s worth mentioning that Sagan was not a New Atheist shitlord (he was appropriated by reddit atheism). He was very much of the agnostic variety of “God means many things for many cultures and I don’t believe in it because it’s not testable but we can never know.” I bring that up because it’s important to understand that (I think) he’s not talking about God, but just unscientific beliefs in the first place (conspiracy theories, astrology, etc). The Sagan/skeptic ethos is that unscientific thinking can be costly, leading people down pathways that cost them money, toward quackery alternative medicine, etc.
2) I think you and Bentham are making a similar mistake in that you’re 1: not treating actual religious beliefs as relevant and 2: ignoring that bayesian reasoning is about what is probable given what is possible, not just what is probable.
2.1) You may assert the whole “smart, reasonable” theist conjecture and may be thinking about their arguments for design or the PSR or the Kalam, but most popular manifestations of religious debate are on abortion or gay marriage or trans identity of the theory of evolution. Put another way, “the philosopher theologian” is a niche position; that doesn’t invalidate her, but that when we’re talking about norms of conversation/discussion, Sagan is super correct and relevant. All of these popular positions are a little silly and rely on unfalsifiable assertions. We don’t know when a fetus is ensouled, the essence of maleness, that homosexuality will cause metaphysical pollution that will cause the land to vomit up its people (see Leviticus), or that “God did it” (evolution).
2.2) Falsifiability on what is possible is an excellent constraint on what is “allowed” to be proposed as an explanation, as it prevents people from hijacking discussions into absurdity or from claiming “reasonableness” while leading people down the path of scams and needless cruelty. If my opponent puts the prior probability that homosexuality is metaphysically evil at 100% and I’m at 0%, we can’t really have a conversation. I can *maybe* provide conceptual falsifiable evidence (i.e that their definitions of its wrongness are incoherent) or that their model doesn’t map onto reality, but this is not a probabilistic argument. Similarly, if a known con man claims to be Allah’s new Messiah, I can think of 3 priors that put this probability as low (Islam has no more messiahs, he’s a con man, and messiah’s aren’t real), but this is unconvincing for the people who believe it. You’re not going to convince these people they’re wrong using probability as you/BB describe it, but logic and reasoning broadly. In the meantime, falsifiability is an extremely potent tool for this
3) Having said that, falsifiability is not a universal principle of determining truth (and I don’t think most people who champion it would say so). Like, I’m not sure how we would falsify the law of non-contradiction (though it probably could be done). Falsifiability is itself a complex idea, and so reliant on other basic ideas/intuitions. Having said that, I think the philosophy enthusiasts on substack misunderstand its context and do a poor job of arguing against it. At base, falsifiability is a scientific principle, and it’s super helpful at establishing the existence of things scientifically, or the viability of certain explanations *given what we know about the universe.* But not every solution (like God) needs to fall under the purview of science (like God).
4) Falsifia-bros stay winning. The dragon isn’t real. Most popular religious arguments are bad. The interesting religious arguments are probably outside falsifiability’s purview (and a proper understanding of it knew that to be true)
Just like the heterogeneity of evolutionary niches results in heterogeneity of living organisms on the planet, so also the heterogeneity of people’s societal niches. Gene —> meme. It’s a platitude at this point, but it still surprises me that people have big debates about “who’s right” instead of “what works for you and why does it continue to be thus and will it be so later and should everyone else be like you?” In other words, I think beliefs / religion are a tool / technology, like so many others humans have evolved / developed, that allows them to simplify decision-making with an eye toward maximizing survival of the species. Mass / public education — developed long ago to fulfill an emerging societal need. Is it still useful?.. Yes, but not uniformly so, just like religious beliefs aren’t uniformly useful to everyone.
Consequently, I also think that, as the environmental and social factors change, so too should the tools and their usage. The system *must* be dynamic. That some people’s daily lives, with their interactions, hobbies, responsibilities, scope of influence, thought patterns, etc., remain relatively unchanged from five or ten centuries ago is the simplest mechanistic explanation. Lucky for them that their environmental niche was preserved?.. Perhaps. No value judgement here — just stating what I think is the reality. Some of us weren’t that lucky — in the late ‘80s my family faced a very high probability of extinction, took the chance to emigrate, and had to develop a whole new set of beliefs and habits to survive and prosper!
For folks with priorities, responsibilities, relationships, and interests that didn’t / couldn’t exist even 50 years ago, or even three months ago, the situation has changed. “New shit has come to light, man.” -The Dude.