Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76.

[Edwardo Piet]

Yes. And for something to be at all plausible within the realm of science it has to be falsfiable... and all evidence is empirical, and empirical evidence is exactly what science deals with.

OK, you're merely dressing up materialism.

That's not an an argument and it has nothing to do with materialism... it would still apply if idealism is true (and maybe it is?).

Wrong. As soon as something is unfalsifiable it's outside the natural world and therefore non-empirical and therefore there's impossible to have evidence of it within our natural world... which is the only world we live in.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

Popper accordingly repudiates induction and rejects the view that it is the characteristic method of scientific investigation and inference, substituting falsifiability in its place. It is easy, he argues, to obtain evidence in favour of virtually any theory, and he consequently holds that such ‘corroboration’, as he terms it, should count scientifically only if it is the positive result of a genuinely ‘risky’ prediction, which might conceivably have been false.

This doesn't apply to things outside the natural world. He's talking about science in case you didn't notice.

And his point is that whereas there can be evidence from other theories... falsifaiblity is the best approach and this is why it is now the standard of science. Other forms of evidence are not considered scientific anymore... that was my point there.

If you want to claim that the evidence you have is unfalsifable and unscientific still weak evidence then that's one thing... but to claim that it's evidence of something outside the natural world is another. It can't be. There is no theory of science that addresses things outside the natural world. You know this so your point is simply a red herring.

Furthermore, other theories can also be interpreted from a point of view of falsfiability... to say that you can take the approach of confirmation and that can work as well doesn't mean it couldn't work even better through falsfiaiblity. Neither can apply to God because God doesn't even reside in the natural world.

I believe in causality outside of the known universe but I don't pretend that there is evidence of that like you do. If you wanna call that faith simply because it is belief without evidence that is one thing: But I wouldn't call basing a belief no less probable than improbable based on all information we can ever possibly gather (none) to be faith.

This is not the case with God. With God you are postulating a complex entity outside the universe that is unknowable by definition but also has certain characterisics... it's all very unparsimonious. It's not like you're having faith in A as opposed to not A when not A is no less parsimonious than A. I wouldn't call that faith. The A you choose as opposed to the not A is a complex entity rather than no complex entity. That requires evidence and you're just going completely against Occam's razor.

P.S. No one is on block for me now. I will get back to talking to Khem and Roadrunner but once someone starts repeatedly ignoring all my points in one particular thread I'll start ignoring them in that particular thread... while making it clear that I'm ignoring them because they're ignoring my points so it's pointless discussing with them.

I have to remind myself why I have these debates. It's not just because I want to correct and be corrected... it's because I want to correct and be corrected and if the one person or I is corrected I want the person who is incorrect to be willing to acknowledge it and to actually want to learn from the discussion.

If someone has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not trying to be helpful in a discussion... I will ignore them in that thread and tell them that's why: Because they not only ignored my points but showed no interest in stopping doing so. So the discussion simply becomes a waste of time and energy for the both of us.

I have also decided that from now on I will kudos people for being helpful in a debate whether I agree with them or not. Form now on kudos doesn't mean simply "I agree with this post." It can simply mean "I'm particularly enjoying this debate because it seems to me like we're actually debating properly".