Falsifiability is Your Friend
This material realm concept and it's usefulness for your deconstruction and spiritual life
It’s Friday! Let’s talk about Falsifiability today.
There are few things in the material realm that I firmly believe are helpful for a spiritual life—this concept is one of those things. So let’s talk about what falsifiability is and is not.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/karl-popper.html
I’m going to start you guys off with this because it gives a good outline of this concept, in fact, it’s a glorious outline hitting just the right notes. Let’s take a look:
Falsifiability is a key principle in the scientific method. It emphasizes that a scientific claim should be open to potential disproof, rather than simply being framed to fit existing evidence.
The concept was popularized by philosopher Karl Popper, who argued that falsifiability is what distinguishes scientific theories from non-scientific claims.
Falsifiability helps differentiate between genuine scientific claims and those that may be based on faith, speculation, or unsubstantiated beliefs. If a statement cannot be tested for falseness, it cannot be considered scientific
A scientific theory should make predictions about what should be observed if the theory is true. If those predictions are not observed, the theory is considered falsified.
Falsifiability doesn't mean that a theory is necessarily false. It means that it can be tested and, if found to be false, it can be rejected or modified. Even if a theory withstands rigorous testing, it is still considered tentative and subject to revision in the face of new evidence.
Falsifiability in part, means that science is never completely settled. And that is a good thing. When new evidence comes along that is falsifiable, for example in the case of medical science, you want your doctor using that to treat your meatsack.
What you don’t want is a doctor stuck in the 1850s treating you with technology from back then just because his/her personal beliefs dictate that the 1850s were a better time period for everyone and therefore he’s/she’s going to stick with the treatments from back then. Hopefully, in the best case scenario such a doctor would lose their license, but these days with American healthcare the way it is, gosh, it’s something to keep an eye out for.
So how does falsifiability apply to your spiritual life?
The simple answer is that it does not apply to anything outside of the material realm. BUT the answer is a bit more complex than that because there are some fields of mathematics that can calculate objects that sit outside of the material spacetime realm (amplituhedron, anyone?) and math is falsifiable. We can perform mathematical calculations inside the spacetime material realm to predict non spacetime objects and mathematical functions.
Religion and spiritual concepts are not falsifiable. There is no religion or spiritual ideation that exists on the face of this planet that is falsifiable. And that’s neither good or bad, it’s just how falsifiability works to help us to separate our beliefs, our feelings, our spiritual life, from the functioning material spacetime universe our meatsacks are trapped inside of.
So when someone, say, an evangelical, tells you that unless you believe in the Jesus that died for your sins on the cross and rose from the dead you will not be “saved” from the “lake of fire”, you can be certain that this is not falsifiable.
Spiritual texts are only falsifiable in a few ways: Forensic examination for things such as authorship, publication dates, locations, cultural relevance. They are not, however, falsifiable in the spiritual concepts they espouse.
Does that make the spiritual concepts that you or I believe in, wrong?
No, absolutely not. If anything, the concept of falsifiability is something that can set you spiritually free, especially if you are a deconstructing evangelical or on another path of deconstructing fundamentalist or a cult-like, high control belief system.
Once you understand that nothing in the spiritual realm is falsifiable, then it’s much easier to let go of the spiritual beliefs that harm or hinder you or have caused you to act in ways that harm or hinder others.
If you’ve been here a while, you already know that I identify as a gnostic christian. It’s a DIY christian spiritual practice based on a number of texts that were excluded from official church biblical canon. It was a DIY form of christianity when there were a diverse number of sects that practiced it in ancient times a similar way to how I practice today. I also like to call it “authority-free” christianity.
It’s also not falsifiable.
It doesn’t need to be.
Falsifiability is a useful tool in preventing spiritual harm to yourself and other people. And the harm that fundamentalism from any religion has caused humanity is absolutely falsifiable. We can witness the harm it causes in the material realm. People and other sentient beings are harmed and die in the material spacetime realm due to fundamentalist religious beliefs. Beliefs that are not falsifiable.
The fact that your spiritual beliefs are not falsifiable should not bring you anxiety, it should bring you joy! You have freed yourself from the bondage of
apologetics.
Apologetics are not falsifiable concepts. They are spiritual concepts. Apologetics tries to “prove” that certain “things happened” and because of that a particular religious view is true. Problem is that they do not formulate proof based on falsifiability which is the standard of testing concepts in the material realm. Square peg into round hole. And every major world religion with any form of fundamentalism or evangelicalism engages in apologetics.
I hope my posting here today has helped you to free yourself from fears, such as hell or demons or whatever your fears may be, with the understanding that spiritual concepts are not falsifiable.
Have a blessed Friday.