Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Marriage of Science and Religion 189
tion, but it was torn apart by Karl Popper. Popper pointed out that science
cannot actually verify anything except possibly the most trivial of individual
facts. It relies on abstract theories that cannot be verified because
they are complicated systems of inference, and it has been understood, at
least since Hume, that no inference can ever be made with absolute certainty.
But science does have an effective means of testing hypotheses. While it
cannot verify, said Popper, it can falsify. No theory can be absolutely verified
because a single counterinstance can always disprove any theory. The
theory that perpetual motion is impossible could be disproved, for instance,
with the construction of a single perpetual motion machine. This
provides science, however, with a criterion for distinguishing a good scientific
theory from a bad one: a good theory is one that is easily subjected to
potential falsification and has actually survived many attempts to falsify
it. A bad scientific theory is one that is immune to falsification, one that
provides an answer to any possible set of circumstances. Freudian psychology
is, by this standard, a bad theory because it provides an answer to any
conceivable objection by its critics. If you protest that you do not harbor
homicidal feelings toward your father or lustful ones about your mother,
the Freudian can smile a superior smile and say: “Of course not: You have
repressed these desires and forced them into your unconscious.” There is
no way to prove him wrong. When Creationists dispute the fossil evidence
for the age of the earth or the evolution of life by saying that God placed
misleading evidence in our way as a test of our faith, they securely protect
their theory from falsification. But such theories should not be automatically
dismissed as “nonsense,” as the Logical Positivists insisted, for they
may have important heuristic value; they may lead us toward truths that
are presently inaccessible to more rigorous methods. Indeed, they may
even be perfectly true; they merely are not scientific.
While Popper’s observations may seem like a warning to science against
assuming to know too much, in another way they flattered the scientists
by reinforcing part of the scientific myth. That is the myth that science is
profoundly skeptical, always doubting, probing, and testing its own theories,
ever ready to discard its most cherished beliefs without hesitation at
the moment, like Andrew Undershaft with his experimental weapon, if it
turns out the least bit wrong. The theory of scientific falsification allows
scientists to think of themselves as intellectually humble, courageously
open-minded, and ruthless with respect to the flaws in their own thinking—quite
unlike the traditional authorities on the nature of the cosmos,