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Originally Posted by beskeptical
....can you say there is no Pele, the volcano goddess of Hawaii? Of course you can.
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Well, you can
say it, but you cannot demonstrate it. How can you
verify that Pele is not out there somewhere, in another dimension perhaps? This is a perfect example of a claim ("Pele exists") that is unfalsifiable and therefore "unscientific" according to Popper (and most of the scientific community). Note that a believer could likely come up with assertions claiming to support the existence of Pele. As Popper says, "It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations." Of course the validity of such a conclusion would be highly questionable.
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Originally Posted by beskeptical
The idea you can never prove it one way or the other, to me, is just a rhetorical way of dancing around a sticky subject. With the correct choice of criteria, we can test the 'theory' of a god just as we can test the theory of quantum mechanics.
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I think you're wrong there.