Just looking at the first bullet point, and seeing its disclaimers: "If the prophecy is vague, unclear or garbled" and "If the prophecy is trivial." There's no objective way to determine if a prophesy is vague or trivial. So to me, this is still unfalsifiable, because you could take any prophesy and say "Hey, it's trivial." Some prophecies are vague or trivial enough that they would not convince me there is a God. Others would clearly persuade me of this. Others are a middle ground. If my goal was to determine the truth about the existence of God, I would do my best to evaluate a given fulfilled prophecy fairly, and decide in which category it fell in. If my goal was to hold to my belief that God did not exist regardless of the evidence, I could claim that prophecies were trivial when they were not. But that would be intellectually dishonest. It's hard for me to understand the content of the post I'm replying to unless you think that I, the writer of the web page, and anyone else who claims to hold a falsifiable belief that God does not exist, are all intellectually dishonest in this way.
Here's a specific example, to convince you my belief is falsifiable. If the holy book of a religion predicted the winner of the world series for ten consecutive future years, other than a prediction involving a lack of winner (because of a baseball strike, for example) for more than one of those years, and it makes no more than 100 incorrect predictions of world series winners, I would consider that prophecy non-trivial. (The last clause is needed to prevent someone from writing a "holy book" that contains a google or so predictions, one of which will turn out to be correct).
Do you think that if I hadn't written that paragraph, that I would have claimed, should a holy book make such a correct prediction, that this prediction was "trivial"? Do you think the author of the web page would have claimed it was trivial? I don't think so, and I don't think you do either. So I don't see what bearing the fact that we *could* claim it to be trivial has on the subject of falsifiability. There might be some predictions that you would find non-trivial that I find trivial, or vice versa. But unless you think I'm completely intellectually dishonest, and would claim any prediction that came true to be trivial, I don't understand your point.
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Date: 2010-04-14 11:23 pm (UTC)Some prophecies are vague or trivial enough that they would not convince me there is a God. Others would clearly persuade me of this. Others are a middle ground. If my goal was to determine the truth about the existence of God, I would do my best to evaluate a given fulfilled prophecy fairly, and decide in which category it fell in. If my goal was to hold to my belief that God did not exist regardless of the evidence, I could claim that prophecies were trivial when they were not. But that would be intellectually dishonest. It's hard for me to understand the content of the post I'm replying to unless you think that I, the writer of the web page, and anyone else who claims to hold a falsifiable belief that God does not exist, are all intellectually dishonest in this way.
Here's a specific example, to convince you my belief is falsifiable. If the holy book of a religion predicted the winner of the world series for ten consecutive future years, other than a prediction involving a lack of winner (because of a baseball strike, for example) for more than one of those years, and it makes no more than 100 incorrect predictions of world series winners, I would consider that prophecy non-trivial. (The last clause is needed to prevent someone from writing a "holy book" that contains a google or so predictions, one of which will turn out to be correct).
Do you think that if I hadn't written that paragraph, that I would have claimed, should a holy book make such a correct prediction, that this prediction was "trivial"? Do you think the author of the web page would have claimed it was trivial? I don't think so, and I don't think you do either. So I don't see what bearing the fact that we *could* claim it to be trivial has on the subject of falsifiability. There might be some predictions that you would find non-trivial that I find trivial, or vice versa. But unless you think I'm completely intellectually dishonest, and would claim any prediction that came true to be trivial, I don't understand your point.