Having worked in lexicography in a professional capacity in the past and having taken several philosophy courses in university, perhaps I can clarify a few things.
1. “What is wrong vs right” or how we can know what is true.
Hoo, boy! That’s a very good but very complex philosophical question.
We could be here all night. Literal books have been written on the subject.
If you’re interested in reading on the subject, I strongly suggest looking up epistemology (the study of knowledge).
Feel free to ask me for more resources if you’re interested.
In this instance, when they say “being right” they are using the scientific definition, which roughly boils down to someone’s claim being “a claim about reality that can be independently verified and which has not been falsified by any other claim which has been independently verified”.
In other words, someone’s claim can be potentially tested by anyone, and when someone else follows the same set of steps they get the same results (or something pretty close to it, to account for slight variations), and which no other known testable claim contradicts the explanation about how/why you get XYZ result.
For example, we know the theory of air drag is right because anyone can test it and it consistently proves to be true.
If you get two Kinder Surprise plastic containers and leave one empty and fill the other up with rice so that it weighs heavier then seal both up with tape and drop them, the heavier egg will fall at the same speed as the empty one because they are the same shape.
Galileo Galilei first proved this using a wooden ball and a cannonball of the same size and dropping both from the top of the Tower of Pisa at the same time.
Since he had just proven it isn’t weight that makes things fall at different speeds and that things of the same shape fall at the same speed regardless of their weight, he rightly concluded that what causes things to fall at different speeds is their shape.
He hypothesized that if you were to drop a feather and a hammer at the same time in an environment without air that the two objects would fall at the same speed because air drag was no longer an issue.
Granted, he had no way of testing that hypothesis in his time... but then we went to space and found an environment with no air.
Enter the Apollo 15 crew, stage left:
Claims which are “right” in the aforementioned sense are both verifiable and falsifiable.
That is, people can replicate your results to prove they weren’t a fluke and you can provide people with ways which your claim could be shown to be false.
In the case of Galileo’s claim, for example, if anyone were to drop two identical objects of different weights at the same time and they fell at different speeds, his claim that the shape is what affects the speed at which an object falls would be proven false.
Another way that it could have been proven false is if when the Apollo 15 crew dropped the hammer and the feather still fell slower than the hammer.
So far, no one has been able to falsify Galileo’s claims, so we say that they are right.
So how do we prove that something is most likely to be wrong?
There are several ways, which all pretty much boil down to providing verifiable evidence that contradicts the claim and/or being unable to replicate the results despite using the same steps/methods the other person used.
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, then a doctor, published a study claiming there was a causal link between measles vaccines and autism (he also did several other studies afterward, all of which have since been debunked).
Everyone was intrigued/kinda surprised by his findings, because twin studies in the 1970s had shown that autism is genetic, a result which had been repeatedly confirmed by similar results in similar studies the world over for decades since the original studies had come out.
So, naturally, various doctors around the world took it upon themselves to attempt to replicate Wakefield’s studies to double-check if his studies had maybe had a false positive (it happens, at no one’s fault, which is why replication studies are done to double-check results) or maybe come across a secondary aspect to what causes someone to be autistic.
What happened is that nobody was able to replicate anything close to his results. They all got similar results to each other, but not to Wakefield’s results, and the result that kept being found in attempted study replications was that there ISN’T a link between measles vaccines and autism.
Something was clearly iffy.
So there was an investigation into Wakefield’s studies.
They found several issues regarding his methodology, such as misleading readers about how children were chosen for the study: “His conduct resulted in a misleading description of the patient population. This was a matter which was fundamental to the understanding of the study and the terms under which it was conducted,” said Britain's General Medical Council.
This was why nobody was being able to replicate his study -- he hadn’t actually followed the steps he said he did.
The fact no one was able to replicate anything close to his results led to us questioning the validity of the study, which in turn led to us finding that his methodology had not been as sound as he had presented it to be, which is how we know his study results were wrong (the fact that he had violated a bunch of ethics codes was just the icing on the cake).
4. When we say that something is “right” in this sense, we aren’t talking about absolutes.
You see, in science when we say someone is wrong or right, it’s not intended to be an absolute. It’s a tentative position based on the best explanation for the collective evidence we have thus far accumulated on a subject.
For example, when we say we know the Big Bang is right, it’s said with an understanding that it’s the best current explanation for the observed facts about galactic redshift and Olber’s paradox (to name but two of the various bits of evidence that point toward the Big Bang) but that this may change if we discover information which falsifies something major in the current model.
However, until we find something that contradicts the model, we have no reason to think it’s wrong when we have found nothing that contradicts it and only found things which confirm it.
In fact, for something to be considered scientific it has to have a way for it to be falsifiable.
That isn’t to say that if we find out that a detail about the theory was inaccurate that the whole thing immediately collapses. It’s expected that details will need to be tweaked as we learn more, but it’s expected that the gist of the theory remains the same.
Darwin’s version of the Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection, for example, isn’t the model we currently use.
Because certain aspects of Darwin’s model have been falsified by new information we learned over time (e.g. the existence of DNA and genes).
So his exact model wasn’t right, but the gist of it was.
And we know the gist of it was correct because every bit of new info we find, such as the discovery of genes or fossils like Tiktaalik, fit in perfectly with the kinds of things we would expect to find if the gist of his model was right, which is why even though the model has changed since Darwin’s time he’s still credited as being the one who came up with it (it’s worth noting that his own theory was ultimately a conglomeration of various hypothesis from scientists across various places and time periods, but that’s a story for another post).
It’s entirely possible that one day someone finds something that turns all of modern biology on its head (more unlikely with every discovery that supports it, but not impossible).
But until that time, it’s logical to assume that since all the information we currently have supports the Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection and we have not found a single shred of evidence that contradicts it, that the theory is correct.
Because the time to believe something is when it has been proven to exist/be true.
Which leads us to my final point:
4. What claim is being talked about in the OP.
Ultimately, the claim itself isn’t the point, but rather whether there is a way for your claim, whatever it might be, to be proven false.
For example, Let’s say your claim is “A god exists”.
How could you prove that claim to be true or false?
If it’s a non-personal deistic god (that is, a god which does not interact or interferes with our world), it’s indistinguishable from a god which does not exist, and as such cannot be proven to be true or false.
And something that is neither unverifiable or unfalsifiable cannot logically be believed to be true.
If your god interacts with the world around it, however, it should be able to be verifiable/falsifiable, the exact manner of how to verify/falsify it being dependent on how it interacts with the world.
If your god is said to answer prayers, for example, then one could set up a prayer study to see if prayer really does get results.
In the case of intercessory prayer (prayer on behalf of someone else) some studies have found no major difference, some have found a small positive effect on the mood of the person being prayed for (if they know they’re being prayed for), and some studies have actually found intercessory prayer to have a negative effect on the person’s health/recovery if they know they’re being prayed for.
@religion-is-a-mental-illness, please correct me if I misconstrued your meaning. I don’t wanna be puttin’ words in your mouth that you didn’t mean. :)
