> There's really only one thing that separates truly scientific claims from truly spiritual claims, and that is the requirement that scientific claims be falsifiable.
>...
> I think many religious and nonreligious people would agree with at least a lot of what I just said, but who knows, maybe not. Anyways, I have more.

Your position is interesting and consistent and certainly has a healthy amount of precedent. Still, I come at it from a different perspective.

Firstly, I think the *best* things to believe are those which are unfalsifiable yet for which we have very strong feelings, essentially, that they are true. Obviously, one has to tread carefully here. Automatic rejection of unfalsifiable propositions would require us, for example, to reject the validity of reason and logic, our own existence, cause/effect thinking, that our sensory experiences aren't lies, etc. There's simply no possible way to test any of those without assuming them to be true. (Although there is more to this argument, this is in a nutshell why I think Christian epistemology is more reasonable than most varieties of athiest epistemology--every belief ultimately does rest on faith, pure and simple, no exceptions.)

Therefore, in this view the fundamental difference between scientific claims and spiritual claims is that scientific claims are based reasoning from observation while spiritual claims are based on reasoning from revelation. Even if you happen to not believe in supernatural revelation, you can still accept the validity of this perspective.

Falsifiability depends on testability, of course. Yet there are correct scientific claims that are testable and also correct scientific claims that are untestable. Physics is an example of the former, praxeology of the latter. One *can't* test whether humans act on the basis of their strongest preference, and yet it is necessarily true and not tautological. (See the first part of "Human Action" by Mises, available online, if you've never heard of praxeology and actually care.) A less airtight but more common example would be matters of probability of occurrences--if the probabilities don't pan out as expected, it's a suggestion but no proof of incorrect expectation or belief.

Furthermore, there are spiritual claims that are testable as well as others that are untestable. The most obvious case would be if a miracle happened. That would be decisive proof of the supernatural, although not necessarily more than that. Given historical claims of miracles, one may examine them with the usual historical methods to determine a rough likelihood of fact or fiction. (OK, so that would be a mix of scientific and spiritual--the miracle being observed, the meaning being revealed. The point of a miracle is that the two are tied together.) Many spiritual claims can be evaluated with reason and thus have a limited amount of falsifiability. One early Christian controversy was between those who claimed Jesus had a fully human nature and another fully divine nature and others who claimed that Jesus had a single nature partially human and partially divine. As the latter is a logical impossibility but the former is not, the latter claim was shown to be false and was rejected.

> There have been many many many religions in the past.

Yeah. Since I'm not a fundamentalist (I'd say I'm too orthodox for that. :) ) I'd say all of them had some measure of the truth and certainly all of them had sufficient grace from God, such that many of those ancient people no doubt are in heaven now. Some of the ones I've studied--Viracocha worship among the Aztecs, ancient Egyptian religion, periods in Zoroastrianism--were shockingly close. The Hebrews were always a special people, entrusted with huge parts of God's plan. They were never entrusted with all of it, however. Christianity is the fulfillment of all that was true in all religions. As C.S. Lewis would put it, it is the One True Myth, the same myth that has been told in all times and places, but finally acted out in a real, physical, historical person.

Regardless of how or if you take any of the above, I'm curious about your criticism of science.