> Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.
That depends on how they are falsified. If your "new physics" is just a minor tweak to the Standard Model -- a new particle, say -- then you're right. But if you can demonstrate something observable that isn't made of matter then that would falsify secular materialism.
Dark matter and dark energy could potentially do this. Notwithstanding that we're calling them "matter" and "energy" the truth is we have no freakin' clue what they are.
> > Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.
> Not in any non-physical sense.
Sorry, I have no idea what that means.
> Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism
Not true. It just happens to be the case that everything we observe appears to be reducible to a physical mechanism. But that's not an a priori assumption, it is an a posteriori observation. And it's also a pretty recent development. For example, whether or not life could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Darwin. Whether altruism could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Dawkins and Axelrod. The jury is still out on abiogenesis, but again, I'll give you long odds that that, too, will turn out to be physical.
> it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such [predictable] relationships
Again, not true. A phenomenon does not have to be predictable to be amenable to scientific inquiry. There are hard limits on our ability to predict, say, the weather. That does not mean that weather is beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. Quite the contrary, it is because of science that we know that there are fundamental limits on our ability to predict the weather.
BTW, weather presents the perfect example of how secular materialism could be falsified: if tornadoes, all else being equal (i.e. controlling for things like geographic location and construction quality), selectively destroyed the houses of worship of one denomination over another.
That depends on how they are falsified. If your "new physics" is just a minor tweak to the Standard Model -- a new particle, say -- then you're right. But if you can demonstrate something observable that isn't made of matter then that would falsify secular materialism.
Dark matter and dark energy could potentially do this. Notwithstanding that we're calling them "matter" and "energy" the truth is we have no freakin' clue what they are.
> > Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.
> Not in any non-physical sense.
Sorry, I have no idea what that means.
> Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism
Not true. It just happens to be the case that everything we observe appears to be reducible to a physical mechanism. But that's not an a priori assumption, it is an a posteriori observation. And it's also a pretty recent development. For example, whether or not life could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Darwin. Whether altruism could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Dawkins and Axelrod. The jury is still out on abiogenesis, but again, I'll give you long odds that that, too, will turn out to be physical.
> it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such [predictable] relationships
Again, not true. A phenomenon does not have to be predictable to be amenable to scientific inquiry. There are hard limits on our ability to predict, say, the weather. That does not mean that weather is beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. Quite the contrary, it is because of science that we know that there are fundamental limits on our ability to predict the weather.
BTW, weather presents the perfect example of how secular materialism could be falsified: if tornadoes, all else being equal (i.e. controlling for things like geographic location and construction quality), selectively destroyed the houses of worship of one denomination over another.