Monday, February 15, 2010

Catholic creed is actually falsifiable

A bit of logical trivia: the creed of the Catholic Church is falsifiable; that is, it's possible (at least in principle) to disprove it. Here's why.

The Catholic creed is a set of dogmas, i.e. propositions that every Catholic is required to believe. This set is unchangeable, and Catholics cannot "pick and choose" which dogmas to believe; if you doubt even one of them, you cannot call yourself a Catholic. Now one of those dogmas states that it is possible to prove the existence of God "by means of unaided reason." What this means is that it's possible to carry out a purely logical proof of the existence of God, one that does not contain any ethical or empirical propositions.

Many such proofs were attempted, by many great philosophers (St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant among them), but without success. That is, all known purely logical proofs of the existence of God are flawed. This does not mean that such proof is impossible, of course. But if anyone showed that the existence of God is impossible to prove by means of unaided reason, it would become logically impossible to be Catholic.

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