Thinking About Falsifiability and Abiogenesis

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Before we are off to the races, keep in mind that this is false:

@Ronald_Cram

You call abiogenesis an axiom, but it is only an axiom to one who is committed to Philosophical Naturalism, that is, the belief that God does not exist or cannot be known to act in the material world. (Philosophical Naturalism is often confused with Methodological Naturalism, but Methodological Naturalism would never call abiogenesis an axiom.)

@Ronald_Cram

Philosophical Naturalism leads to the view that nature is all-powerful. But, if you think about it, that simply isn’t true. Nature is bound by natural laws. This should be obvious.

I do not take kindly to be called an atheist. Let’s not repeat that mistake.

1. The way I have defined it, I’m sayin that abiogenesis is an axiom in science, but outside of science we have a freedom to think about it in different ways. That is methodological naturalism (though it is incorrectly named).

2. I do not deny that God was involved in creating the first life, I’m just not sure how He did it.

3. I think it is perfectly reasonable to think He created the first cell, and it is entirely possible that abiogenesis by natural means is 100% impossible.

So please, if we pick up this conversation again, let’s not just call this approach philosophical naturalism. That is not what it is. Rather it is methodological naturalism, because a philosophical naturalist would not likely grant #2 and #3 (unless they were willing to gran uncertainty in their position).

@Ronald_Cram

One of the first steps toward falsification might be to determine what level of odds would put the hypothesis beyond the realm of credibility.

I’ll observe too that @Ronald_Cram has a strong falsification view of science (very Popper of him), but that is not how I understand science to work. Though, from this point of view, he needs to show how it is possible to rule out God’s action in origins. If not, he is putting forward an unfalsifiable view (and I think he is). So that becomes an absurd reason to reject abiogenesis research. Rather it demonstrates that the question he has concerned himself with is outside the bounds of science, even by his own standards.

@Ronald_Cram

In place of Philosophical Naturalism, I propose (although I’m not the first to do so) the use of Regularism. Regularism is the belief that nature will always behave in the same way given the same situation. It is completely unbiased regarding the question of God’s existence or man’s ability to identify God’s activity in cosmological history. Because it is unbiased, it is able to pursue truth wherever it may lead.

That, however, is not a coherent rule in my understanding. We have no way of observing or studying “long-tail events”, and abiogenesis (if it were true) is the longest of long tail events on the table. We can’t assess regularity in this context. There is no way to appropriately compute probabilities.

Which brings us to the key point:

@Ronald_Cram

Do you think it would be possible for scientists to come to agreement on this? I’ve read one scientist who said one chance in 10^{-50} means it is theoretically impossible no matter how big the multiverse is?

Absolutely not. That is just a math error.

First of all, there is no way to compute that 10^{-50}, and if the multiverse is 10^{50} times bigger than the context where that number was computed, well then the probability starts to approach unity (100% likely to occurs). What is being proposed here is a uncomputable number, that is unnormalized, and tightly depending on information that we just do not have.

@Ronald_Cram, I hope you understand why this is a just a math error. An uncomputable but finite probability multiplied by an independent potential infinity is 100% likely to occur. The fact that life is rare in the galaxy only makes this fact more clear.