Why religion plays no useful role in the making of public policies

It seemed that NMP Thio Li Ann had expressed an opinion, in a special article in ST, that religion has a role to play in public policy making. If she thinks that this is for the general benefit of Singaporeans, then once again, I'm of the opinion that she isn't very bright. Not impressed at all. The reason is simple: A religion is essentially an unfalsifiable belief. Not a great idea to make decisions based on such beliefs, especially if it concerns the general public.


So what is an falsifiability? According to wikipedia,


"Falsifiability (or refutability or testability) is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that it is capable of being disproved under hypothetical circumstances."


Yeah, so why is falsifiability important? To illustrate this, let's take a look at Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is actually a simple game theory in decision making, put forward by Blaise Pascal, a 17th century mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher. In essence, Blaise Pascal posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing (which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing.



In the form of a decision matrix, the possibilities and consequences are listed out.

Basically, it means that if you lived as if god exists and god does indeed exists, then you go to heaven, a reward of infinite value. And if god does not exist, you lose nothing (or at least not too much). However if you lived as if god did did not exists, you find yourself going to hell, a punishment of infinite value. And if god does not exist, you lose nothing (or at least not too much).

For argument's sake, let's take it that the values of rewards and punishments assigned in the matrix are accurate. Then it seems like it's the smart decision to believe in god doesn't it? Well, it seems that way until you realise that the existence of god is unfalsifiable and that you can similarly come up with an unfalsifiable belief that god will send you to hell for believing in him and send those who did not believe in him to heaven. Why would he do that, you ask. Well, maybe he's trying to weed out those dummies <----------unfalsifiable as well.

All this leads to is just an intellectual dead-end. You can get no useful conclusions out of it.

Issac Newton seemed to have gotten the hang of this idea around 300 years ago.

"All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction." - Issac Newton's third law of motion

Well, I have my version of it too

"All unfalsifiable beliefs occur in pairs, and the conclusions drawn from these beliefs are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction." - IMBS

Well, decisions must obviously based on reality and not unfalsifiable beliefs, if you ask me.