I've been blogging so long I remember the good 'ol days of fighting with other bloggers about orthopraxy and fundamental beliefs. Remember the spaghetti monster? Remember the uber-rationalists who read their Dawkins and Sam Harris and argued that religion is a matter of taste, like what flavor ice cream you like, not knowledge, because religion does not make any claims that are falsifiable. You can't test belief like you can test a scientific hypothesis, so it cannot be fact -- it's just an opinion.
Well times change quickly, as I discovered when I read this article. "Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them." (bolding done by me) Falsifiability is no longer considered the only grounds for defining a valid theory, or accepting it as true.
As scientists search for a grand unified theory that ties together everything, they move further and further away from assertions that can be tested in a laboratory and closer and closer to the realm of what is rationally compelling, but empirically unverifiable. In other words, they move closer and closer to reaching the point that we've been at for 3300 years. Let me go out on a limb and suggest a name for that grand unified theory that they one day might find: G-d.
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Yes, those were the days. Most of them are gone for a simple reason: they had only one message. It was never about building a new philosophy but tearing down an old one. As a result, once they got that out of their system all they had left was "And this week we'll say the exact same thing about a different religious figure". Even they got bored of it.
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