Re: Making money from Java


<docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dnopvn$75d$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <1134531661.345534.173010@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Richard <riplin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> If you assume the Bible is correct, then
>>> there can be no evidence to demonstrate it to be false, because God
>>> could,
>>> by definition, do anything, so any "evidence" we found could simply be a
>>> Devine artifact.
>>
>>Exactly. That is why religious beliefs are not in any way scientific,
>>or even logical.
>
> I'd agree halfway, Mr Plinston. Religion is not 'science' if 'science'
> includes, as one of its criteria, the reproducibility of results.
>
> 'Logic', on the other hand, may be seen as 'a game played by a particular
> set of rules' (Witt.); given that definition a religion can be 'logical'.

I think what Richard meant was that religious beliefs tend to be
"unfalsifiable" and thus unscientific, a term I discovered while looking up
the names of logical fallacies (e.g. Strawmen, etc.) for an earlier post.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfalsifiable

<quote>
Falsifiability is an important concept in the philosophy of science that
amounts to the apparently paradoxical idea that a proposition or theory
cannot be scientific if it does not admit the possibility of being shown
false.

[...]

Falsificationists claim that any theory that is not falsifiable is
unscientific. Psychoanalytic theory, for example, is held up by the
proponents of Karl Popper as an example of an ideology rather than a
science. A patient regarded by his psychoanalyst as "in denial" about his
sexual orientation may be viewed as confirming he is homosexual simply by
denying that he is; and if he has sex with women, he may be accused of
trying to buttress his denials. In other words, there is no way the patient
could convincingly demonstrate his heterosexuality to the analyst. This is
an example of what Popper called a "closed circle". The proposition that the
patient is homosexual is not falsifiable.
</quote>

- Oliver


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