Tab, here’s the problem for me.
You’re a scattered poster and you are shifting onus.
I point out problems with YOUR claim that no unfalsifiable claim has value (they are worthless according to you).
And in posts like this…
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=190138&p=2760673#p2760664
You are demanding that religious practices must be valuable to EVERYONE. That the methods must be foolproof for everyone, which modern medicine does not achieive,
but more importantly, it is an onus shift.
I am saying that your belief, that all unfalsiable beliefs are worthless is not something you could possibly know.
And then you go all over the place. Now I contributed to this by taking a number of angles on falsification and also by pursuing a number of angels or examples. So, I bear some responsibility.
But to me this kind of flailing, onus shifting is just not worth my time because you are evading actually supporting your own statement. And it can’t be defended. And no one follows it, though albeit many people with beliefs of less weight than that of a deity. An agnostic, who does not know if God exists, by his own assertion, cannot possibly then know if some theists are experiencing God and learning from God and getting benefits from that deity. This does not in any way represent an argument for why that agnostic should take up a religion or believe in God. It is not a proof of God. It just means
you
can’t
as
an
agnostic
rule out
these things
as
worthless.
And then your even broader claim that no unfalsifiable belief could be worth anything, is confused. Because all humans work on beliefs that they have not checked to see if they are falsifiable or if they will be falsified via testing.
Now if all you mean by ‘worthless’ is that other people do not get strong evidence from unfalsifiable beliefs, well, even that fails and it is a poor use of the word ‘worthless’. Because if someone meets someone who, for example, seems at peace and finds out this has to do with their belief in God and practices, and that person takes up said practices and comes to belief in God, they did not work from strong evidence, but nevertheless may, for all you know, have come in contact with a deity and received benefits, in even deeper practices, via the assertions of and experience the first theist. Of course Nature journal, given its epistemology, which is a very effective one for creating scientific knowledge, has not burden to publish such a story as a scientific paper. But that has nothing to do with your claim that such things are worthless. You need to be agnostic about that also. Or you are not an agnostic, you are a specific kind of atheist who is claiming to know a lot of things, including other minds and what is possible for a deity should one exist.
And the general assertion that unfalsifiable claims are worthless does not even hold in the history of science and has strong critics within both science and philosophy. It’s not what has happened, unfalsifiable claims have in fact helped advance science at times, and well, the other stuff in the articles earlier linked.
People throw falsifiablity around like it is one of the tend commandments, especially in philosophy forums, but it isn’t.