Believing where we cannot prove

[Boots13]

AJ, I wish my mind worked like yours....but somewhere along the way I ended up being satisfied with throwing my brainless body through space and the text books fell by the wayside. You are indeed remarkable !

My impression is that Evidence is based on the equation of hypotheticals...beliefs. We approximate, we ask, we reason, we hypothesize and then we have equations that solve, or not, the question at hand....for example , when we fail we make the rule "THAT CANNOT BE" but we have the potential to ultimately evolve the information to find an exception to the rule...proven by equation.

Rules (evidence) have exceptions but how would we know, if we did not believe and work, rework, continue to hypothesize based on our beliefs?
And we may never know all the hard rules and evidenciary benefits of our belief systems but should that dictate that we stop striving for truths?

And I really hate that this argument extends to beliefs that oppress and damage people, cultures, religions, etc. (Pat Robertson, Jim Jones, Radical Terrorism and individuals following their damaging beliefs).

Oh gawd, I feel like I just poked the bear...be kind AJ !

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

AJ, I wish my mind worked like yours....but somewhere along the way I ended up being satisfied with throwing my brainless body through space and the text books fell by the wayside. You are indeed remarkable !

My impression is that Evidence is based on the equation of hypotheticals...beliefs. We approximate, we ask, we reason, we hypothesize and then we have equations that solve, or not, the question at hand....for example , when we fail we make the rule "THAT CANNOT BE" but we have the potential to ultimately evolve the information to find an exception to the rule...proven by equation.

Rules (evidence) have exceptions but how would we know, if we did not believe and work, rework, continue to hypothesize based on our beliefs?
And we may never know all the hard rules and evidenciary benefits of our belief systems but should that dictate that we stop striving for truths?

And I really hate that this argument extends to beliefs that oppress and damage people, cultures, religions, etc. (Pat Robertson, Jim Jones, Radical Terrorism and individuals following their damaging beliefs).

Oh gawd, I feel like I just poked the bear...be kind AJ !

I'm a big believer in continually testing beliefs against reality with reality being the final arbiter. One thing that I wish more scientists would do in their public pronouncements is make it clear that there's always a codicil "to the best of our knowledge at this date, subject to revision on new evidence". Of course, when we *do* say that it drives the general public nuts because they want us to be certain. In fact, one of the ways that scientists are hobbled in our public discussions with, say, creationists or global warming deniers is that we tend to hedge ourselves in. It is a habit of mind to say "X works like this, however, it may be that it could work like that..." While creationists are free to say "it doesn't work like that" full-stop.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and columnist for Scientific American, gave a scale in one of his books that I think is really useful in talking about what we know. The scale goes from 0 to 1 with 0 being absolute certainty that the idea is false and 1 absolute certainty that the idea is true. With the exception of certain rather prosaic things (my parents are dead, I am married to Belly, my son is named William, I'm a lesbian, etc.) everything else falls into the realm of .1 to .9. I would put astrology, psychic powers, homeopathy and racialist conceptions of humanity (be that Aryan nationalism or Afrocentrism) at .1. I would put quantum mechanics, relativity, evolutionary theory at .9.

It's a GOOD thing to constantly question and ponder what we think we know and why we think we know it. Ultimately, however, I think we have to, at some point, fish or cut bait and proceed 'as if' we knew. I also think that in testing our ideas with the real world we should always 'be humble before the data' and accept the world that the data presents to ourselves. While I don't believe in God I am willing to be convinced that there is one if someone (like God) ever presents compelling evidence for it. But the bar for that level of evidence would (and should be) set high because the God hypothesis is an extraordinary claim and as Carl Sagan so sagely put it "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

You mention exceptions to rules. Sometimes those exceptions *prove* the rule. Let's say, for instance, that I took a picture of an apple hanging suspended in a room. It's clear that there's no string holding the apple up and it's not in anyone's hand. Would I have just disproven gravity which demonstrates that apples can't just float in mid-air? No. If I'm honest I'll say "well, this picture was of an apple that was released by an astronaut on the International Space Station". At which point, it's clear that I haven't disproven gravity but, in fact, supported the theory of gravitation because in the absence of a gravitational field apples (or anything else) will float but IN a gravitational field it will drop. (As an interesting aside, if it were on the space shuttle and the shuttle were accelerating the apple would STILL fall because acceleration and gravity are effectively the same thing)

Part of why I'm so passionate about this is that I'm watching my country descend into a very scary state. Over the summer there were the tea party protests against the health care reform bill. Now, whatever you might think of the bill, it is demonstrably true that nothing in the language of the bill mentioned 'death panels'. Yet, people *consistently* made this claim and were rarely ever challenged to actually quote the language, chapter and verse. When I was growing up and someone had said that the bill contained language it didn't on, say, 60 Minutes or Walter Cronkite those newspeople would have said "We have a copy of the text here, would you mind reading it to us" and when they hemmed and hawed they would be called out for telling a lie. Now, we have become a society where if you *believe* that HCR bill contains language about death panels and you SAY that it contains language about death panels then even if the language isn't in the bill, we'll treat AS IF it were there!

As queer people this should give us all a moment of pause. In California a trial just wrapped up about gay marriage where the proponents of Prop 8 said manifestly untrue things about us. They claimed (falsely) that we are more likely to molest children. They claimed (falsely) that in the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage is legal, the divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate skyrocketed *because* of the passage of gay marriage laws (the first is an outright statistical falsehood and the second is untrue because the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already climbing for a decade before SSM became legal). While the judge will most likely dismiss their arguments, many in the public and media will take it as being true no matter WHAT the reality is. This is a threat to not just our ability to have our relationships recognize legally but a threat to our very ability to live peacefully in this society. Why? Because if *enough* people believe that about us, they *will* pass laws to protect their children from us. It won't matter if we are *not* a threat, all that will matter is that they *believe* us to be.

Don't know if that answered your post or not. Please let me know if I didn't.

And thank you for the praise, I never quite know what to say when folks say such things to me. I don't think I'm intellectually all that but I'm flattered and humbled that you do.

Cheers
Aj

[Cyclopea]

Aj your comments on "death panels" reminded me of this astounding study released a year ago:

The Power of Political Misinformation
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, September 15, 2008

Have you seen the photo of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin brandishing a rifle while wearing a U.S. flag bikini? Have you read the e-mail saying Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was sworn into the U.S. Senate with his hand placed on the Koran? Both are fabricated -- and are among the hottest pieces of misinformation in circulation.

As the presidential campaign heats up, intense efforts are underway to debunk rumors and misinformation. Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation.

But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

In experiments conducted by political scientist John Bullock at Yale University, volunteers were given various items of political misinformation from real life. One group of volunteers was shown a transcript of an ad created by NARAL Pro-Choice America that accused John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court at the time, of "supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber."

A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. People who did not like Roberts to begin with, then, ought to have been most receptive to the damaging allegation, and this is exactly what Bullock found. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to disapprove of Roberts after hearing the allegation.

Bullock then showed volunteers a refutation of the ad by abortion-rights supporters. He also told the volunteers that the advocacy group had withdrawn the ad. Although 56 percent of Democrats had originally disapproved of Roberts before hearing the misinformation, 80 percent of Democrats disapproved of the Supreme Court nominee afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval of Roberts dropped only to 72 percent.

Republican disapproval of Roberts rose after hearing the misinformation but vanished upon hearing the correct information. The damaging charge, in other words, continued to have an effect even after it was debunked among precisely those people predisposed to buy the bad information in the first place.

Bullock found a similar effect when it came to misinformation about abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Volunteers were shown a Newsweek report that suggested a Koran had been flushed down a toilet, followed by a retraction by the magazine. Where 56 percent of Democrats had disapproved of detainee treatment before they were misinformed about the Koran incident, 78 percent disapproved afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval dropped back only to 68 percent -- showing that misinformation continued to affect the attitudes of Democrats even after they knew the information was false.

Bullock and others have also shown that some refutations can strengthen misinformation, especially among conservatives.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.

Bullock, Nyhan and Reifler are all Democrats.

Reifler questioned attempts to debunk rumors and misinformation on the campaign trail, especially among conservatives: "Sarah Palin says she was against the Bridge to Nowhere," he said, referring to the pork-barrel project Palin once supported before she reversed herself. "Sending those corrections to committed Republicans is not going to be effective, and they in fact may come to believe even more strongly that she was always against the Bridge to Nowhere."
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[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1fKzw05Q5A"]YouTube- Idiocracy Brawndo's Got Electrolytes[/ame]

[Andrew, Jr.]

Dearest AJ,

I am lost now. Totally. I have reread everything so many times, and I am still lost.

I can tell you this from my pov, there is nothing wrong with inter-racial or inter-faith marriages/civil unions. I don't believe in oppression. I think we all need to focus on living in peace, and to educate ourselves for peace. We need to act justly, behaving with civility, and to revere ALL that God has made. If we plant peace in our hearts and souls, then the world would be a much better place.

Andrew

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Andrew, Jr.

Dearest AJ,

I am lost now. Totally. I have reread everything so many times, and I am still lost.

I can tell you this from my pov, there is nothing wrong with inter-racial or inter-faith marriages/civil unions. I don't believe in oppression. I think we all need to focus on living in peace, and to educate ourselves for peace. We need to act justly, behaving with civility, and to revere ALL that God has made. If we plant peace in our hearts and souls, then the world would be a much better place.

Andrew

Andrew:

If I gave the impression that I thought YOU believed that interracial or interfaith marriages were wrong I apologize. I was not talking about *your* beliefs. I was talking about beliefs that non-trivial numbers of people hold.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

So in Britain a group of skeptics are trying to get one of big chain pharmacies, Boots', to stop carrying homeopathic remedies because, well, not to put too fine a point on it but homeopathy is a load of hokum.

This from the organization's web site:

Following on from his 'law of similars', Hahnemann proposed he could improve the effect of his 'like-cures-like treatments' by repeatedly diluting them in water. The more dilute the remedy, Hahnemann decided, the stronger it will become. Thus was born his 'Law of Infinitesimals'.

Taking a single drop of caffeine and diluting in ninety-nine drops of water creates what is known to homeopaths as one 'centesimal'. One drop of this centesimal added to another ninety-nine drops of water produces a two-centesimal, written as 2C. This 2C caffeine potion is 99.99% water and just 0.01% caffeine. At 3C the dilution is 0.0001% caffeine, at 4C it's 0.000001% caffeine, and so on. Homeopathic remedies are commonly sold at 6C (0.000 000 000 1%) and even 30C (0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1%) dilutions, which homeopaths will often drip onto little balls of sugar to sell.

When these numbers are written out, it's easy to see how absurd they are. At 12C you pass what is known as the Avogadro Limit*, the point at which there is likely nothing of your original substance left.

By the time you reach 30C, you have more chance of winning the lottery five weeks running than you have of finding a single caffeine molecule in your homeopathic sleeping draft. It's just ordinary water, dripped onto ordinary sugar.

*Avagadro's number is 6.022137 × 10^23. It’s the number of atoms or molecules of a substance in a number of grams of that substance equal to its atomic mass. So 1 gram of elemental hydrogen or 12 grams of carbon12 will have Avagadro’s number of atoms. This amount is also called a mole – so a mole of anything has Avagadro’s number of elementary particles – a mole of water has Avagadro’s number of water molecules.

http://www.1023.org.uk/what-is-homeopathy.php
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1536

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Cyclopea

But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

There's a great quote in Terry Pratchett's wonderful Discworld series "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its' boots on". This (amongst many other wonderful lines) is so insightful into how people *actually* work.

As queer people we have a vested interest in a reality-based culture. If we're going to win our civil rights struggle we have to be able to stand up, just as my parents did during the 50's and 60's, and proclaim without equivocation that we are fully human, fully citizens and fully deserving of our own little measure of life, liberty and happiness. Can you imagine King's speeches with the codicil "...but if you believe that the Negro does not deserve these rights, that's true for you"? I shudder to think how different my life would have been if my parents, during the marches they attended, had carried signs "I am a man (unless, of course, you think I'm not in which case that's true for you and that's ok)."

Cheers
Aj

[Andrew, Jr.]

Dreadgeek,

My adopted sister, who is white, married a black man. They love each other. To me that is what life is all about...love. Most people don't understand this. It is like they have an excuse for every little thing. That makes me very sad.

Andrew

[Boots13]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Don't know if that answered your post or not. Please let me know if I didn't.

Cheers
Aj

Yes and No ! LOL.
I appreciate, greatly, the terms and examples you used in your reply. Easy to read, easy to understand. I wanted to quote and respond to your whole reply but fear that I would end with a multi page jumble of idiotic questions and statements! I'm interested, but not well versed.

When responding in my first post, I haphazardly introduced why I hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence. And that basically is : what is an unsupported (evidenciary) belief today, may become a supported rule tomorrow and ultimately a basis for learning and believing yet additional unsupported ideas in the future.

I know, a big grey zone. It still doesn't answer why I believe in the hand of something greater than I.

I agree with you in that questioning absolutes is good..even though they appear irrefutable. Newtonian Physics = absolutes. I believe in them, the evidence shows why the apple falls (or in your example, doesn't) or why the car skids. But do we stop there? What if science believes there is more, yet there is no proof?

So this is another example of hanging on to 'beliefs for which there is no evidence':
Quantum Physics-Dimension. It started with three, now arguably four. Even more astounding mathematics project six postulate it could be infinite?!
While there is no hard evidence, I believe !

I am the most evidenciary based suspicious, "prove-it" person (maybe due to my job?) but on some things I just have to believe there might be more, even without the hard evidence to support its presence.
Dimension? Ghosts? God? Nirvana?

Conversely, I think the danger in believing without evidence comes when we refine a belief into a standard. Think of all the things we didn't believe in the past, and we are paying the price now... That standard must be held as non harming; non-intrusive, and non-judgmental. Because when we enact beliefs into standards upon another human being, it is the absolute that becomes restrictive, harmful, damaging, catastrophic.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

Yes and No ! LOL.
I appreciate, greatly, the terms and examples you used in your reply. Easy to read, easy to understand. I wanted to quote and respond to your whole reply but fear that I would end with a multi page jumble of idiotic questions and statements! I'm interested, but not well versed.

When responding in my first post, I haphazardly introduced why I hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence. And that basically is : what is an unsupported (evidenciary) belief today, may become a supported rule tomorrow and ultimately a basis for learning and believing yet additional unsupported ideas in the future.

I know, a big grey zone. It still doesn't answer why I believe in the hand of something greater than I.

I agree with you in that questioning absolutes is good..even though they appear irrefutable. Newtonian Physics = absolutes. I believe in them, the evidence shows why the apple falls (or in your example, doesn't) or why the car skids. But do we stop there? What if science believes there is more, yet there is no proof?

So this is another example of hanging on to 'beliefs for which there is no evidence':
Quantum Physics-Dimension. It started with three, now arguably four. Even more astounding mathematics project six postulate it could be infinite?!
While there is no hard evidence, I believe !


.

It's interesting that you should bring up extra-dimensions because string theory is a near-perfect case-study in how the scientific process works out. Everyone I know who has read up on string theory finds it beautiful and WANTS the Universe to work that way. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that string theory is *deeply*, perhaps *fatally*, flawed as a theory. Part of that vulnerability is the requirement of up to 9 extra-dimensions to make it work (in any of its millions of possible permutations).

To understand why, I first need to explain a bit about the four dimensions that we KNOW exist. Let's say we're going to meet up in downtown Portland. You need to know where I'm going to be and when I'm going to be there. Those coordinates are: Let's meet on the Second floor of Powell's books at the corner of Broadway and 10th at 4:00 PM. Those are the four dimensions. The X coordinate is Broadway, the Y coordinate is 10th, the Second floor is the Z coordinate. These are the three-dimensions that people are all familiar with. 4:00 PM is the fourth dimension which is Time.
If you have the XYZ and T coordinates then you and I can agree where and when an event (our meeting) will take place. What's more ANYONE given those coordinates can know where the event will take place (thus making it invariant).

String theory, in order to work, requires that there be between 6 and 9 extra-dimensions that are all curled up into incredibly small, very complex shapes using what's called Calabai-Yau topologies OR they are extremely large dimensions called 'branes' (for membranes). The problem with this is that, depending upon who you ask, those dimensions are either completely undetectable (although you can demonstrate how they would work mathematically) or they require such huge amounts of energy to penetrate that it will be a VERY long time before we are ever able to build a device that will penetrate them. (To give you a sense of scale, the LHC in Europe is a collider with a 17 mile circumference. A collider that could potentially probe these curled up dimensions would need to be the circumference of the solar system! Taking the Oort Cloud as the absolute outer edge of the solar system at 18 *trillion* miles (the radius) the circumference of the solar system is approximately 113 *trillion* miles! Needless to say we would have to be a much more sophisticated space-faring civilization in order to build such a device.)

Herein, then, lies the problem with string theory. If it can't be falsified then it isn't science. It may be mathematically elegant but it isn't *science*.

From my way of thinking any statement about the world in the form of "X exists" or "X works this way" should have implications. For example, the statement Barack Obama is the 44 President of the United States has the implication that he was NOT the 43rd President and that George Bush is NOT the current President of the United States. If it could be shown that George Bush IS still President then that would, by definition, mean that Barack Obama is not the President. I think that almost any statement we make about the world that involves the collective reality we all share should have implications. A world where there is a secret Illuminati controlling everything should look *different* than one where there isn't one. If there's no way to determine either way then we should always default to the least convoluted explanation, following Occam's Razor.



Cheers
Aj

[Boots13]

There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.

So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?

But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.

[Boots13]

And I think what I'm saying in my "laymens" terms is also expressed in your scientific approach.
And that is,
"If there's no way to determine either way then we should always default to the least convoluted explanation, following Occam's Razor.
"
A consistant approach to maintaining civility, order, and perhaps consistancy in our method of relating a belief to the masses...

But what about religion ? Or Spirituality....how would this apply?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Boots13

There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.

So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".

And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?

But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.

Interesting. Well, I have a hypothesis about intuition and what it is. Now, as my starting place let me claim my bias: I look at human beings as evolved animals (because all the evidence points to us being exactly that). Thus not only did evolution give us stereoscopic color-vision (useful for when we were chimp-like animals living in trees) but also gave us our mental facilities. Intuition, I submit to you, is the brain's way of making on-the-spot decisions in the face of imperfect information. To see this, take yourself out of your familiar setting and imagine that you are one of our paleolithic ancestors (homo habilis) eking out a life at the edge of the African savannah. Survival requires you to forage for food across a pretty wide territory some of it out on the open savannah. So there you and your foraging party are, moving across the grassland and you hear a rustling in the grass far off to your right side. Is it a lion, a jackal, or just the wind? If you wait around to find out, it's probably too late to do anything with the information. So you make an *intuitive* leap that it's a lion and respond correctly. Now, here's where evolutionary logic kicks in. (And yes, nature really does work this way) If you run and it turns out you were wrong about it being a threat, you've burned some calories that could've been used for foraging but that's a very small price to pay given that if you didn't run and were wrong that it *wasn't* a lion, then your reproductive fitness would very quickly drop to zero while *greatly* enhancing the lion's fitness (in as much as it gets to eat for another day). Given this nature would favor a system that makes snaps decisions, in the face of imperfect information, even IF there were false positives (determining that there's a lion when there isn't one) over a system that either doesn't make snap decisions (deliberately weighing all options all the time) or one that was more prone to false negatives (determining that there's no lion when there is one). I'd be willing to bet that what we call intuition is a system for making workable-enough decisions on the fly.

As far as your second question that's a bit more of a sticky wicket. In science nothing is ever proven forever. Anything in science--the atomic model, Relativistic Gravity, evolutionary biology, any of it--could be overthrown tomorrow on better information. However, it's very much unlikely to happen because those things I've listed above are very robust (meaning that they have been tested and passed and then tested again in a different area and passed again). The problem with non-evidence based ideas is that there's no way to disprove them.

To give you a contrast, we'll look at a field of study near and dear to my heart; evolutionary biology. I LOVE this theory. I would say it is one of the deepest, most elegant in all of science. Best. Theory. Ever. Hands down. Yet, I could come up with three or four things, off the top of my head, that would definitively demonstrate that evolution through natural selection was false. This isn't the same as saying that it IS false, just that it's possible to set up conditions under which it would be false.

Here they are:

1. If there were no means of inheritance, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work since it depends upon offspring being similar, although not identical, to their parents.
2. If there were no variation within a population, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work. Natural selection requires that there be variation within a population that is heritable in order for nature to have something to 'favor'.
3. If there hadn't been enough time for evolution to work. Evolution is a very slow process. If the Earth were younger than it is by one or two orders of magnitude then there wouldn't be enough time for life as complex as us to evolve.*
4. If we found a large number of late-stage mammals (post Dinosaur mammals) in an early stage fossil layer (say pre-Cambrian) then evolutionary biology would be in serious trouble. ONE rabbit fossil in the pre-Cambrian era isn't a problem. Millions of rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian era is a problem since they shouldn't be there.

There are others, of course, but you should get the idea. My question is this: what kind of similar list could one draw up for homeopathy or astrology or what-have-you? Ideally, such a falsification list would be drawn up by those who believe in homeopathy or astrology and then they would go out and seek to find evidence for or against. That's how science works. You explicitly state the problems in your hypothesis or theory and how you have addressed them.

Lastly, because the Universe is a unified whole whatever one purports to be true should fit within that unified whole. By this I mean that, for instance, if your pet hypothesis violates the conversation of mass or conservation of energy or entropy then it's *wrong*, it's not the Universe that has it wrong. (If it isn't wrong then clear off your mantle because if anyone ever proves that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is wrong, that person is guaranteed a Nobel prize) So if your belief is supposed to be some kind of field, it should be subject to the inverse square law because every other field is. If it's based upon an energy then it should, under certain circumstances, behave like a field and there should be some way of detecting it, at least in principle.

Cheers
Aj

*The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. One order of magnitude would be 450 million years old. Two orders of magnitude would be 45 million years old. Three orders of magnitude would be 4.5 million years old. Four orders is 450,000 years. Five orders of magnitude is 45,000 years old. Six orders of magnitude is within the age that Young Earth Creationists believe the Earth to be. Anything more than 1 magnitude off with the age of the Earth and there might be *life* but it would be pretty simple life. Keep in mind that life didn't get started until about 500 million years after the Earth had formed and cooled a bit. Life was then pretty much bacteria until the Cambrian era which was a few billion years later! So the history of life on Earth, in short is first 500 million years, nothing. Then very simple, bacterial and archae life for the next 3.5 billion years. Then the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago and then life becomes var more varied and interesting.