Goddesses and Falsifiability

My Nobody’s Business co-blogger Rogier has a pretty good article up about divine delusions v.s. observable reality. It’s a plea for rationality, even if faith and mysticism seem like more fun. As is often my way, I have a small quibble.

Rogier and his opponent are discussing a Facebook poster’s insistence that a bit of lens flare in a photo of a pyramid is actually a sign that the “goddess era has arrived.” Rogier’s opponent is arguing that her subjective interpretation has meaning.

So here’s perhaps how she making the connection between her beliefs and aspirations and this photo. This photo for her is a symbol of her convictions: To bring the masculine energy (which she perceives is out of whack) into balance with the feminine energy.

He goes on to conclude:

So this image is a visual confirmation and symbol of her beliefs, and makes perfect sense.

Rogier had a problem with that:

I don’t see how he arrived there. At all. Unless he means that it makes perfect sense for some poor guy in an asylum to believe that he is Napoleon Bonaparte, or for the cat lady down the street to worship her scraggly charges as multiple reincarnations of Nefertiti. Yes, it makes sense to those two people, I’m sure. But almost everyone else easily recognizes the outsized fallacies involved.

There is no equivalence between the unprovable views of Cat Lady and Fake Bonaparte on the one hand, and the provable ones of Richard Feynman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and all the rest of science on the other.

This is where I feel the need to add a small clarification. I think “provable” is the wrong word. The key difference between the theories of scientists and the pronouncements of mystics is not that they can be proven, but rather that they can be disproven. In the terminology of Karl Popper, the theories of scientists are falsifiable.

What distinguishes a scientific theory from other kinds of ideas — personal beliefs, religious faith — is that scientific theories allow you to make predictions about the world that can be tested and that might be found false. (Note that I’m not saying that a theory has to be disproven to be scientific — that would make it a false theory — only that it has to be conceivable that it could be disproven.) Conversely, if there’s no way that an idea can be disproven, then it’s not really a scientific theory. If the theory can’t be tested against the real world, that means it doesn’t say anything useful about the real world.

Rogier’s opponent implicitly agrees that the goddess theory is not falsifiable:

For her [the Facebook poster] it’s a sign that the goddess era or whatever has arrived. Who’s going to prove she’s wrong?

If no one could ever prove her wrong, then she’s not saying anything interesting about the world.