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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> You can't simply propose an unfalsifiable idea and declare that the fact that the idea is unfalsifiable means it is rational to believe in it.

The fact that teleology is unfalsifiable is not the reason it is (potentially) rational to believe it. Russell's teapot is unfalsifiable, but it is not rational to believe in it. However, consciousness (for example) is also unfalsifiable. A conscious being cannot be experimentally distinguished from a philosophical zombie. It is nonetheless not irrational to believe in consciousness.

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Consciousness is only unfalsifiable if you define in such a way that there is an undetectable and magical component to it, which is an unjustified and unfalsifiable assumption. Otherwise the most you could say is that it can sometimes be hard to detect, and that our understanding of how it works is very limited. We know it can be altered by physical changes in the brain. Hard solipsism aside (you're not really going to go there, are you?), we have plenty of evidence that consciousness exists.

So since we agree that the unfalsifiability of an idea does not make it rational to believe in it, then it should also be clear that the statement "you can't prove it is false" is not an argument in favor of your idea.

(merging threads on your request)

Can you prove that? Can you falsify it?

I made an argument for it. I used the example of tools that we make for specific purposes. Do you not agree that those purposes are not an intrinsic property of the tools? If you don't agree with that, I'm interested in knowing where you believe the example fails.

Well, I can tell you that I have subjective experiences. I can't prove that to you. You can call it undetectable and magical, but it's very real to me. It is also unfalsifiable, at least to me. There is no conceivable evidence you could present to me that would convince me that I don't have these experiences.

We could settle on a logic that includes some of these unfalsifiable aspects as axioms or rules. A useful logic doesn't necessarily imply unfalsifiability in the sense of physical experiment. It could very well contain axioms we all reasonably agree on, like "I exist." The problem with Christianity is not that it makes unfalsifiability claims, it's that it includes all-encompassing statements like "god is everything", "god does everything". How does this tree grow? God grows the tree. How is it that I age? God ages me. How come it appears the tree grows according to laws? God made the laws--or more perversely--god made me think there are laws. This perspective is useless for fuethering knowledge. In fact it attacks knowledge by trivializing it. It unversally wraps every possible statement in "god". My stance toward christians is they may as well keep all the god stuff to themselves because it adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.

I totally agree that adopting Christianity as an axiom makes no sense. However, "existence has some greater purpose or meaning" is a not-entirely-unreasonable axiom for someone to adopt, and I think someone could get from there to Christianity as a conclusion.

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