How should we decide?
A short essay by Ollie Killingback, Chair of Northants Secular Humanist Society
Examine these two statements:
- President Bush speaks French
- President Bush has been taken over by aliens
Statement a. can be tested, at least in principle. You might think it is false, because Mr Bush is believed not to value things European. But maybe he loves Pascal's books and learned French to enjoy them more. Even if Mr Bush wishes to keep the facts secret a test can be devised.
Statement b. cannot be tested, neither verified nor falsified. We have no knowledge of aliens. We cannot test for something we don't know about. If alien possession caused physical changes how would we tell them from disease? If it brought about strange thoughts how would we tell them from mental illness?
Public policy must be based on testable things. For example, stem cell research can potentially save lives, so the decision to allow or forbid it must be based on things that can be known. Statements like "the soul enters the foetus at conception" are not testable. "A blastocyst (a very young embryo) is not sentient" is testable in principle, even if hard to devise.
Secularists believe policy decisions must be made on testable, rational, grounds, not on untestable, religious, ones.
