Codex Sincerus

On God

No argument about the existence of God is of any worth or meaning. This is because what is proposed by the existence of God is unfalsifiable. Any lower-order argument than this must necessarily proceed from this fundamental issue, and without falsifiability being tackled, no further conversation is useful.

Falsifiability is important to any claim because it it means that the claim, in theory, can be proved wrong. In other words, the claim is so constructed that we could find evidence against it to such an extent that we know it to be untrue. In practice, this means that when we have severe difficulty in finding such evidence, the credibility of the claim is high: it should be possible to disprove it, but we cannot, so it is likely to be true. Equally, if we find plenty of evidence against it, it is likely to be false.

So what of unfalsifiability? When a claim cannot be falsified, it means that no matter what evidence is provided, you could not possibly find enough to demonstrate that the claim is false. In essence, any evidence becomes pointless: evidence for is plainly expected because it cannot be false, and evidence against isn’t even possible to begin with because it cannot be false. Any argument for or against collapses into nonsense.

Unicorns are real: there is significant folklore across the planet containing unicorns; we already have non-magical versions we can see called horses; the fact we cannot find them is expected because they are magical; etc. and so on. Notice that these arguments mean nothing. “There is significant folklore across the planet containing unicorns” - evidence for an unfalsifiable claim is expected. “We already have non-magical versions we can see called horses” - evidence for an unfalsifiable claim is expected. “The fact we cannot find them is expected because they are magical” - evidence against is meaningless if something cannot be false. Thus, for the unicorn-denier, they have no good retort. There is no point to arguing against these points. It is not possible to raise enough evidence to prove the nonexistence of unicorns by definition.

It is for this reason that the entire enterprise of religious debate is a complete waste of time until a falsifiable God is presented. This is because God must, by definition, be at least to some extent supernatural, and the supernatural is, by definition, unfalsifiable. On topics surrounding religion, there may be arguments that include falsifiable claims of interest: has religion caused the most wars? or has religion produced great value to us? (given value is given an agreed definition with falsifiable evidence). But on the point of religion being true in the first place? A complete waste of time.

When the theory of evolution became overwhelmingly accepted, the religious simply brought this into their understanding of God. When falsifiability became the greatest test of the meaningfulness of any claim, the religious brought this into their understanding of aliens, unicorns, magic; but never God. How curious indeed.