I think you're perceiving consistency and predictability in a retroactive fashion that creates an illusion of consistency where it doesn't actually exist. For instance, say Marx died in a pandemic before publishing Das Kapital. Say Lenin died of a sexually transmitted disease in his teens, and Stalin got his neck broken by a bully on a trip to a northern city in Siberia that was latter to become a part of his gulag archipelago?
No as far as consistency and predictability are part of the foundation of Methodological Naturalism, and the ability of science to falsifiable theories and hypothesis. With science it not retroactive in fashion.
As far as Popper's own words on his views of religion and theology the following may be revealing.
Karl Popper on Religion, Science and Toleration.
Karl Popper on Religion, Science and Toleration
Posted on
10:33 pm, July 14, 2015 by
Rafe Champion
“I have insisted that we must be tolerant. But I also believe that this tolerance has its limits. We must not trust those anti-humanitarian religions which not only preach destruction but act accordingly. For if we tolerate them, then we become ourselves responsible for their deeds.”
That comes from a lecture by Popper on science and religion, delivered in 1940 in New Zealand as a contribution to a series of ten university extension lectures on ‘Religion: Some Modern Problems and Developments’. Popper gave four lectures and the others were delivered by religious ministers. Much of the text turned up in
The Open Society and its Enemies and some that did not has been reprinted in Aft
er the Open Society edited by Jeremy Shearmur of the ANU and Piers Norris Turner at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A summary of the main ideas in the book
can be found here.
One of the themes is Popper’s desire to bring together rather than divide people of good will. This does not mean glossing over differences or holding back from criticism of mistakes but it does mean taking a stand on common ground when it exists. I think that Popper would be surprised and disappointed by the militant atheists. He was a secular humanist, however he argued that the dispute between religion and science in the 19th century was a thing of the past because it was based on each side trespassing on the territory of the other. Science is concerned with the way the world works and it does not presume to answer questions about morality or the purpose of life. Religion is a rival for science when it tries to trespass on the territory of science to describe how the world works. The antagonism is intensified when each side thinks that they have hold of the criteria to decide the issue with certainty.
For Popper, science is not about certainty and it is not about consensus. It is about for ever improving conjectural theories. Still, because science evolved out of the religious mythology that men first invented to explain the world, and because most religions are “true belief” religions, there is a strong and unhelpful tradition of “true belief” science. The result is an awful lot of dogmatism in both science and religion.
Popper’s views on religion
It is necessary to make it quite clear that I am speaking here about religion in a very general way. Although I always have Christianity in mind, I want to speak in sufficiently general terms to include all other religions and especially religions like Buddhism, Islam or Judaism. Everybody agrees that these are religions. I shall…extend the term even further.
He suggested that a person can be considered religious if he or she has some faith that provides a basis for practical living, in the manner of people who appeal to an orthodox religious faith to guide their moral principles, their actions and their proposals for social improvement.
He insisted that science has no answers in the search for these principles, though of course science and technology become all-important once we have decided on our aims.
By invoking the idea that we are all motivated by some kind of faith (which he chose to call our religion) he hoped to get over the dispute between the militant atheists (who he regarded as proponents of the religion of atheism) and people of orthodox religious beliefs. He wanted to get past the issue “Have you a religion or not” to address the question “What are the principles of your religion?” – “Is it a good religion or a bad religion?”
He was in favor of “good” religions, including the faiths of secular humanists, which promote the core values of the great religions – honesty, compassion, service, peace and especially the non-coercive unity of mankind. Against these good religions he identified the evil religions of totalitarianism (communism and fascism), and the persecution of heretics. He pointed out that even as science can be misused, so can religions, including Christianity.
This lecture was delivered when the greatest evil in the world was the National Socialism of Germany. Militant Islam was not in the picture, but his thoughts on the limits of tolerance should exercise our minds as we contemplate the world today (see the extract at the start of the post). How do we take a stand and where do we draw a line against the intolerance of the various bad religions such as militant Islam and the degenerate form of left liberalism that has become prominent among the Western elites and political classes?
A good summary of Karl Popper's life and scientific philosophy:
Karl Popper - Bibliography - PhilPapers
Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher who for the most significant period of his career held a position at the London School of Economics. Popper was a philosopher of science, who also made contributions in epistemology, philosophy of mind and social and political philosophy. He argued that scientific theories are distinguished from non-scientific theories and pseudo-science by being falsifiable claims about the world. Popper proposed a "solution" to the problem of induction by arguing that there is no need for induction in the scientific method. The method of science is to propose conjectural theories which are then submitted to rigorous tests in the attempt to falsify them. Theories which fail these tests are to be rejected. Theories which survive attempts to refute them may be accepted tentatively, but are not proven to be true. At best, they may be highly corroborated. This "falsificationist" philosophy of science has a more general application beyond the method of the sciences. The attempt to falsify a theory is an attempt to criticize the theory. For Popper, criticism lies at the heart of rational thought, which he took to consist in the method of critical discussion and reflection. The resulting general position is known as "critical rationalism". Popper extended these ideas as well into the social and political realm. He introduced the distinction between open and closed societies. Open societies welcome and foster critical discussion and change whereas closed societies, which are usually tribal societies, are based on unchanging social custom and ritual.
