[MrsCogan]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

And Mrs Cogan, stop it. It's painful, the way you embarrass yourself.

I'm ok. Don't worry.

Kraft is not a scientific institution. An opinion poll is not scientific research. And the statistical reliability of a proposition is an entirely different matter from its scientific falsifiability or non-falsifiability.

Kraft doesn't need to be a scientific institution. Anybody can use the scientific method, even you. It's open source.

I think you are under the false impression that science produces certainty. It doesn't. You said the chicken stew hypothesis wasn't testable. It certainly is and I showed you how. It produces results that seem to verify your assertion about how great the stew is. That's all science ever does. Sometimes it does that so well that you can rely on the data without question (Theory of Evolution, Theory of Gravity, Germ Theory of Disease, Atomic Theory, etc). Sometimes not. But all tests produce data. And that's all the test is really for.

I could convey a survey on anything - for example:

"Is my mother's chicken stew delicious?"
"Is Mrs Cogan a silly person?"
"Do you believe in God?"

Given a sufficiently large sample size, I can always draw a statistically reliable conclusion from the raw data. This is not the same, however, as saying that my mother's chicken stew is scientifically proven to be delicious, or that Mrs Cogan is scientifically proven to be a silly person, or that God is scientifically proven to exist.

science doesn't prove things. It only creates a high (or low) degree of confidence that a hypothesis is true. With the theory of gravity the confidence is so high they can easily land a little toy robot on Mars. With remote viewing the confidence is so low the CIA is embarrassed they ever considered it.

And no amount of asking people if they believe in God will prove that God exists. You're right about that. It just tells you that a lot of people believe (or won't admit atheism to a stranger with a clip board). Richard Dawkins thinks there's a potential scientific test to prove the existence of God. I disagree with him. I think God's existence is untestable.