falsification principle

   Suggested by Karl Popper, the falsification principle distinguishes scientific statements from non-scientific statements in virtue of their conceivable falsification. A highly influential application of the principle to religion is found in Antony Flew's contribution to the essay 'Theology and Falsification'. Flew presents a scenario, taken from John Wisdom, where two individuals enter a forest clearing, one convinced that it is tended by a gardener, the second remaining a sceptic. Through successive attempts by the sceptic to falsify the belief for instance by waiting in the bushes and erecting an electric fence to catch the gardener - the other keeps revising the attributes of the gardener, for example, he is invisible and can walk through fences. Clearly the belief in the gardener does not meet the principle of falsification. The gardener is of course meant as an analogy for belief in God, equally rendering such belief, and theological reflection on it, unscientific or even vacuous. Even if this did apply to a minimally defined theism, it would appear not to work for a religion like Christianity, which could conceivably be falsified either by empirical evidence (for example, historical evidence that the resurrection of Jesus was a hoax) or by demonstrating the incoherence of a central Christian belief (for example, the Trinity). A more basic difficulty for the principle is that it does not accurately describe the nature of scientific statements. As Imre Lakatos argued, a scientific hypothesis need not ever be falsified, so long as one adds supplementary hypotheses to explain prima facie contrary data. The real fate of unsuccessful scientific theories is not falsification but increased degeneracy until they are finally abandoned. As such, theological assertions are no more infinitely adaptable to countervailing evidence than scientific ones, and so theological statements are none the worse if they are not falsifiable.

   See Flew, Antony; science; science and religion; verification/verifiability principle

   Further reading: Diamond and Litzenburg 1975; Flew and MacIntyre 1955; Popper 1996; Rosenberg 2000