Just to add to that, most hardcore Hindus nowadays actually disencourage people from reading the more mythological type-texts in favour of the more philosophical texts such as the Upanishads. The myths are seen as 1) A way of talking about things that can’t be talked about in human terms, ie, a lie to try and help humans understand the non-human; and 2) Meant for people not yet in a stage that they’re ready for religious truths. Comforting myths, then. Literally readings, in any event, are heavily discouraged by most swamis. I doubt we really have to worry about Hindu creationists any time soon.

I always thought thought that the best argument for creationism not being science is that the ‘so it must be Christian God’ thing is not open to any kind of negation. According to Popper, anyway, a theory *partially* is testable in that we can ask “Why is it not true?” by testing it against empirical evidence. We can provide profs to argue for or against evolution (or relativity,etc), even if we can’t replicate it in a laboratory. Thus it’s a very strong theory (as, in principle if not in detail it has held up to negative tests), but not a law. On the other hand, ‘It was Christian God’ can’t be tested against anything emperical by asking ‘why is it not true?’. Thus it is falls outside the realm of science – science does not prove or disprove it, but simply has nothing to say about it – if we accept this definition of the natural sciences.

Of course, if we approach it that way, String Theory and and a whole lot of other theories aren’t scientific whatsover. If we’re going to allow our physicists to mentally masturbate and fund it and call it natural science, I’m afraid we’ll have to allow the fundamentalists to as well.

Ahh, but the math thing in itself is a problem evildon. Math in itself can be vague, such as the 0.999… = 1 thing. There’s nothing to say that 1+1=2 except that humans understand a concept of ‘2’. It’s two because human brains see things as being two, but weather the universe sees things as two I couldn’t say. Math is useful to us in that it does seem to be a way to consistently *measure* the physical universe and make accurate predictions about those measurements, and thus theories that can be supposed to be accurate, but people are notoriously creative about interpreting the numbers. I’ll take falsifiability any day.

Anyway, Illuminatus, I used the term ‘mental masturbation’ to talk about something entirely different from what you’re talking about. I was just saying that falsifiability should be our #1 way of defining science. If Miller et al can prove that evolution is possible, yippee. But that doesn’t prove that evolution happened in the past in a way that Miller can replicate. What is sufficient evidence of evolution to me is that I can think of conditions that would disprove evolutions (“There are living things that are not observably the product of evolution”). When I take particular examples (animals, plants, fossils), I find in every instance that they cannot disprove evolution: They are all adapted to their environments, and have conditions found in other species, etc.

It might sound obvious, but I think that falsifiability is the only way to make science useful. I can say that God exists, and I can think of proofs that God exists, but I cannot think of any statement which could observably disprove that God exists (except sarcasm). That is, I want to create some kind of statement whose condition would negate the existence of God, and prove or disprove that statement. Likewise, I can prove that a lot of things exist which I do not believe do. I could say that the universe is made up of invisible grapes which are impossible to observe in any way. I can’t disprove that. I believe there are moral principles one should follow, but observation gives me results that there is no clear model of interpreting, as I can animal physiology.

So natural sciences, I think, should be about what we can fail to disprove in obvious ways, like evolution. For questions like God, some other method of addressing those has to be devised. If we restricted science to things that can be falsified, then creationists would have no ammo. But then scientists would have to stop fucking around with theories like “The universe is made up of strings bending around membranes which move between ten dimensions, because a hypothetical model of movement which has not been observed ever and cannot be proved because the dimensions are unobservable could potentially exist according to numbers and thus exists” to be a legit theory just because it can’t be disproved.