(September 24, 2020 at 10:47 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: To approach God scientifically you need to start with God first, and then attempt to falsify it. You cannot start from zero and attempt to prove your way up to God.
This is because you would be affirming the consequent in your experimental design: If you hypothesize that "If ghosts exists, then lights will flicker at the cemetery" and you take a light to the cemetery and it flickers, that information is insufficient to conclude ghosts exists because other explanations are possible (dead battery).
But if the light doesn't flicker at the cemetery, we can conclude that ghosts don't exist. For that reason science never aims to prove it aims to disprove.
I understand Popper. I'm saying that scientists don't assume ghosts in the first place, because there is no definition of what a ghost is, nor a model to describe what its existence would predict. Maxwell's Demon is a similar arbitrary construct, which illustrates how science should not be done.
The same problem applies to a god. The premise of a god must clearly define what it is, and what it does. Only then can an experiment be done to falsify its existence. Alternate simpler explanations are always preferred if the experiment does not disprove the god.
Please tell me an experiment that could falsify bible-god. I've thought of many ways over the years based on various Christian claims about God's nature and promises. They all come up disproving the bible-god. But, you can always come up with special pleading to make the falsification impossible, leaving the God hypothesis just another unsupportable idea.
A scientist doesn't come up with ghosts, demons, fairies, leprechauns, or other anthropomorphic imaginings to explain nature. Because its never worked, ever, and is usually defined in a way that can't be falsified. It is a bad probability bet.