Dean Radin, one of the world's leading experimental parapsychologists, has provided a cogent explanation of the scientific structure and properties of valid and invalid criticisms. In this article, Radin comments:
It is commonly thought that all criticisms in science are equal. This is not so. In fact, criticisms must have two properties to be valid. First, it must be controlled, meaning that the criticism cannot also apply to well-accepted scientific disciplines. In other words, we cannot use a double standard and apply one set of criticisms to fledgling topics and an entirely different set for established disciplines. If we did, nothing new could ever be accepted as legitimate. Second, a criticism must be testable, meaning that a critic has to specify the conditions under which the research could avoid the criticism, otherwise the objection is just a philosophical argument that falls outside the realm of science.
Keep in mind that Radin is postulating two properties which are necessary and sufficient for a criticism to be valid, namely, that it be controlled and testable. As consequence, a criticism will be invalid it doesn't satisfy at least one of both conditions.
So, Radin comments "Some skeptics have protested that “It’s impossible to distinguish between psi and chance effects even in a successful experiment without the use of statistics.” This criticism is invalid because the same can be said for almost all experiments in biology, psychology, sociology and biomedicine"
Technically, we could define the concept of an invalid criticism like this: A criticism is invalid, if and only if, it is uncontrolled and/or untestable.
It is uncontrolled if the criticism also applies to well-accepted scientific disciplines or hypotheses.
It is untestable if it doesn't specify the conditions under the which the criticism would fail.
Most of the professional skeptics' objections to the scientific evidence for psi are invalid criticisms. The most egregious example of this is Richard Wiseman's concession that the evidence for ESP satisfies the standards of any other are of science, but it is still unacceptable to parapsychology. (See more evidence in this link)
INVALID CRITICISMS IN OTHER FIELDS OF RESEARCH AND INQUIRY
Radin's insight also applies to other fields of rational inquiry, for example in philosophy. Here I'll mention just one example:
Richard Dawkins' "main" criticism against the hypothesis "God explains why something exists rather nothing" is an egregious example of invalid criticism, because it is "uncontrolled", namely, it also applies to many well-accepted scientific hypothesis.
Dawkins' criticism is that if we posit God as an explanation for the existence of the universe (or for the complexity or apparent design of it) we explain absolutely nothing, because the existence of God himself remains unexplained. Watch it for yourself:
Dawkins' criticism implies that no scientific hypothesis could be ever accepted, because each time you posit some explanatory entity E for explaining the fact X, you will need an explanation for the explanation (otherwise, your explanation couldn't be accepted). This is obviously false, and if accepted, it would lead to an infinite regress of explanations and science would be destroyed.
Sophisticated philosophers have exposed Dawkins' invalid criticisms. For example, Daniel Came, an atheist philosopher from Oxford University, comments "Dawkins maintains that we're not justified in inferring a designer as the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe because then a new problem surfaces: who designed the designer? This argument is as old as the hills and as any reasonably competent first-year undergraduate could point out is patently invalid. For an explanation to be successful we do not need an explanation of the explanation. One might as well say that evolution by natural selection explains nothing because it does nothing to explain why there were living organisms on earth in the first place; or that the big bang fails to explain the cosmic background radiation because the big bang is itself inexplicable."
On Radin's criteria, Dawkins' criticism is demostrably invalid, because it is uncontrolled.
Radin's thoughtful insight about the structure of invalid criticisms is a fruitful one. It doesn't apply to science alone, but also to other fields of rational inquiry, like philosophy or history (for example, atheist Richard Carrier's obscurantist views on the non-historicity of Jesus is an invalid criticism, because it is uncontrolled: most of such skeptical criticisms also apply to other individuals in ancient history, like Socrates, Buddha or Julius Caesar, individuals that no serious professional historian or scholar denies).
If you master the structure of invalid criticisms, you can easily recognize that most of the common objections posed by atheists and "skeptics" are demostrably invalid criticisms and hence worthless.
I suggest you to think in deep about the structure of invalid criticisms, and find your own examples of them in the atheistic and pseudoskeptical literature.
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