Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply (38)

Consider the claim "When we die, we go to another universe, inaccessible from this one, except through death." How could science possibly disprove this claim? Isn't, the grandiose claim, the claim that science will one day be able to disprove this claim? You have absolutely no idea how science could even begin to disprove that claim. It is inherently untestable by science. To claim science will one day be able to disprove it is grandiose, putting an excessive and irrational faith in the power of science.

The fact that other supposedly similar beliefs have been disproven by science, is no evidence against this belief. Science can't disprove it. Science will never be able to disprove it. You have absolutely no evidence to the contrary, just analogies to radically different kinds of claims which science can disprove.

Homeopathy is disprovable by science because homeopathy claims "X is an effective remedy for Y". By a double blind trial, we can compare X to a placebo. If X really was an effective remedy for Y, we would expect to a statistically significant result that patients with Y given X have better outcomes than patients given a placebo. In the absence of such a result, we can conclude X is not an effective remedy after all. Thus, science can disprove homeopathy.

Science can't disprove the claim "When we die, we go to another universe, inaccessible from this one except by death". What kind of statistical test can we perform for this claim? There is none. So this is a radically different claim from "Homeopathic remedies are effective". Science can disprove claims that homeopathy works, it can't disprove this claim.

If science disproves homeopathy, and homeopathists refuse to accept the findings of science, then so much the worse for them; but that is irrelevant to the question of those who accept a claim which by definition science cannot disprove.