Creation Muesum

[Esquilax]

Do you agree that for a conclusion to be scientifically viable, it first has to be possible?

Yes, I think I would agree with that.  However I think it begs the question of how you are defining what is possible.

If a thing can happen, or has happened, then it is possible. If it cannot be demonstrated to potentially happen, then I have no reason to think that it's possible.

It's a pretty simple definition, but it's where christian science uniformly falls down; what happens when christians attempt to use science to confirm the bible is very different from actual science in a lot of ways, but the big one is that they're using a totally different, inappropriate set of terms. All we get is the conclusion that a given phenomena is consistent with the bible's teachings, but consistency is not the issue. Any number of things are consistent with everything, especially if we, as we must when talking about the bible, open ourselves up to magic and supernatural things; consistency does not privilege a given idea over any other. It's essentially fantasizing about all the things that could have caused a thing, rather than trying to hone in on what did cause the thing, which is what science strives to do.

You'll never see any experiments done to prove the christian hypothesis in christian science, by which I mean, experiments in which the accuracy of a given biblical claim is the variable being tested. What you get is christians who take other, unrelated data that was being used for some other conclusion and go "see? That totally meshes with the biblical account! Science!" They want to pretend science is about consistency, whether their story can be slotted into the data without any glaring flaws, but that's not what you see when you look at the experiments they piggyback on themselves. There what you'll get is a tireless adjusting of variables in order to make the cause of the data as pure as possible. You get control groups and multiple different experimental groups specifically to monitor what variables are influencing what changes, because it's not enough to just have a conclusion that is consistent with the result, we want a conclusion that actually reflects the result.

For that to happen, the variables need to all be possible, but that's something that isn't factored into consistency because there's not really any need; lots of impossible things are consistent with real things. The idea that demons cause disease is consistent with our observations of disease, just as much as germ theory is; the difference is that germ theory is both possible and demonstrable, making it scientific, whereas the demon stuff has none of that. But consistency offers a positive sounding conclusion to laymen, it's a "yes," where real science would give a "no," and that's what christian scientists want. But it's an attempt to short circuit the scientific method to get to a preferred conclusion that sounds sciency, and that's why christian science is not real science until it switches tacks and first demonstrates that its ideas are possible.

And believe me, we'd already know if they demonstrated that magic and miracles were possible.