Speakpigeon
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,317
- Location
- Paris, France, EU
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationality (i.e. facts + logic), Scepticism (not just about God but also everything beyond my subjective experience)
You seem to be confusing logic and science...You lost me at P1. and P2. A logical argument states premises that can be refuted. That is not the case here.
Specifically, you are asking for falsifiable premises, but that's something that's not required for logical arguments to be valid. For example: All men have been created by God, Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates has been created by God. This is a perfectly valid, logically valid, argument and yet I don't think you could falsify the first premise, even though it is very reasonable to think it is false.
As to science, there is a view that for a theory to be scientific it has to be falsifiable, i.e. that we could conceive of a practical process by which it could be shown to be false, even if it is in fact true. Even though Quantum Physics is probably true, I can easily conceive of a way to disprove it, for example by setting up an experiment where we would fail to observe the photon predicted by the theory.
Some people disagree with the idea that falsification is necessary to science, saying that it's not the way science works, but it is still a widespread view, for example in the critics, usually by scientists, addressed to String Theory, that you can't even prove it wrong. Personally I think some people just don't understand the notion of falsifiability. That being said, people are free to regard as proper science a theory that's not falsifiable, but it's seems to me that non-falsifiable theories are more likely to go nowhere.
Quantum Physics seems to be falsifiable, as far as I understand the issue, but some interpretations of QM seem not to be.
EB