> When you "require new physics" you have falsified the old physics.
Sure, there lots of things that could falsify our current understanding of physics (and elements of that understanding are falsified all the time without any negative impact on Secular Materialism).
But all that says is that the current models of physics are falsifiable, which wasn't in question. Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.
> Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.
Not in any non-physical sense.
> Science does not rule out that possibility a priori.
Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism, nor does it need to admit any such entity since its framework allows explaining any predictable relation between observable cause and observable effect as such a mechanism, and it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such relationships.
(Whether this is all there is "in truth" is a question that goes beyond science -- secular materialism is the affirmative answer to that question -- and which is irrelevant to science.)
> 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.
Sure, there lots of things that could falsify our current understanding of physics (and elements of that understanding are falsified all the time without any negative impact on Secular Materialism).
But all that says is that the current models of physics are falsifiable, which wasn't in question. Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.
> Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.
Not in any non-physical sense.
> Science does not rule out that possibility a priori.
Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism, nor does it need to admit any such entity since its framework allows explaining any predictable relation between observable cause and observable effect as such a mechanism, and it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such relationships.
(Whether this is all there is "in truth" is a question that goes beyond science -- secular materialism is the affirmative answer to that question -- and which is irrelevant to science.)