@Setanta,
Quote:To the extent that he's trying to insert a plea for theism into the discussion here, he's trolling.
Only if a thread titled Obamacare considered criticism of the policy to be trolling and thus discredited by the pejorative intonations of the term. There is a claim to dictatorial authority hidden in Setanta's remark. "Goofy" is of the same order of discourse as "reactionary filth" as used by the leader of North Korea to justify the summary execution of his uncle.
Setanta has on Ignore the Pragmatist and Utilitarian idea that there is scientific evidence for religious belief in the "utility maximization model" and the dominance of practical reason over theoretical reason.
He has ducked the challenge of providing a mechanism producing him sat at a keyboard in the absence of Christian beliefs. Or one to enable him to live as long as he has, live where he does and live in the style he has become accustomed to. There is no scientific evidence of those consequences resulting from atheism and Christianity never having existed.
Were Darwin's and Einstein's ideas falsifiable in their day? Are Darwin's ideas falsifiable today?
Setanta's post is posited on the notion that none of us are intelligent or reasonably well read. He is trying to take advantage of an assumed ignorance on our part for which he has neither evidence or warrant.
One thing is clear---it is that the assertion that it is clear that neo "doesn't understand scientific standards of evidence, nor the meaning of the concept of falsifiability", is not evidence that Setanta does understand those things. The assertion is merely a devious claim to do so for which no evidence is offered.
By hiding in the folds of the Mom's apron of Ignore Setanta is the one certain troll as are others who have recourse to such play-pen reflexes.
Setanta cannot provide a single shred of evidence that what Virgil described in the Aeneid would not be still going on today if Christianity had never appeared in the world.
Popper's falsifiability doctrine is logically determined by his acceptance of the Humean position on "induction" from which he claimed that it is impossible to verify, or to confirm, any scientific theory with any degree of probability. Thus he had to have recourse to falsifiability or shut up.
Falsification is a temptation whenever positive proof is unattainable. A sophistical soft option.
Popper was at odds with Marxists because they refuse to be deflected by observational disproof, the non-existence of class say or the assumed antagonism of economic categories, and he opposed psychoanalysis because it does not make empirical predictions. In contrast to the Logical Positivists he never held that non-scientific activities, as he defined them, were meaningless or disreputable.
That Christian theology is scientific Popper doesn't seem to have considered despite Spengler classing it with the higher mathematics and modern physics as the only true sciences left standing.
All of which, and there is plenty more, is proof that Setanta's citing of Popper is ignorant and unscientific and serves the same purpose as the comb he uses to help him look good in the mirror. And he must think we are all going to prostrate ourselves in awe under the radiated gibberish he is spouting which is related to nothing else besides his personal dick-work.