Preachin' to the choir here, buddy. My whole rant that you took that line out of was just some supporting arguments for empiricism being unfalsifiable; asking for evidence of solipsism is pretty much identical to asking for evidence for atheism. That was the point I was making (and to no one in particular).
So it doesn't matter? Good.
Axioms are things that we claim to be self evident. I think you're confusing those and hypothesis, because that's what you're describing in the first part.
I don't want to get into a semantics argument, though. I've had enough of those.
Then we won't need to go over the technical definition of axiom. Good.
- Religious axioms are unfalsifiable (such as "god exists")
I accept this one.
This isn't true in all cases - some religious people take perfectly falsifiable axioms and then ignore the evidence to the contrary (see: creationists). But this is true for the cases we're talking about (gods who do not do anything that can be observed or tested) so this one's fine.
- Empiricism as an axiom is unfalsifiable
I reject this statement. Or at least I think it's poorly defined enough to be problematic.
Empiricism isn't really an axiom or an assumption. It's a method of working out the nature of the universe that depends on certain assumptions: specifically, that there's an objective and consistent reality. This is the actual axiom/ assumption/ whatever that you're claiming is unfalsifiable here, as far as I can tell, unless you want to clarify what you mean by empiricism.
I do not see how this assumption is unfalsifiable - it makes a clear prediction as to the nature of the universe. If reality is not objective or consistent we could easily notice when it behaves in radically inconsistent ways (note: quantum mechanics doesn't really count here - the outcome of individual events may be random, but if you take many events they conform to a consistent probability function).
Compare this to statements along the lines of "god exists but he does not interact with the universe in any way" - these can't be falsified as they make no testable predictions.
- Being unfalsifiable brings cause for doubt
Kindof - I'd go further than "brings cause for doubt". If a theory is unfalsifiable
even in theory (ie, something that is currently unfalsifiable due to us not having sufficient technology to test it isn't included in this statement) then it's actually not making any claim about the universe as it exists at all. Thus the "theory" can be rejected as an irrelevant non-theory.
This is my conclusion. Point out any logical fallacies if you disagree with it, assuming you have no problems with the premises:
- Any argument built upon the assertion that "unfalsifiable is bad" must necessarily affect empiricism as well as any religious axiom, up to and including full rejection of the unfalsifiable.
The sticking point that I think kills this conclusion is that empiricism isn't an assumption/ axiom in itself - it's a method built on a necessary assumption, yes, but that assumption
is falsifiable. I have explained earlier why I think other assumptions that people cite as pre-requisites for empiricism (like "how do you know reality is
real") are not in fact necessary.
- Any argument saying "unfalsifiable is neutral" does not provide supporting evidence for anything.
- Any argument saying "unfalsifiable is good" must apply to all things unfalsifiable, which is demonstrably false as most are mutually exclusive.
We should definitely try having a debate sometime with one of these assumptions as given. The results would be pretty funny.