Consensus as Constraint: How Unfalsifiable Agreement Hinders Scientific Progress

Science fails when consensus constrains challenging evidence. In such cases, agreement does not represent convergence on truth, but alignment around interpretation. This paper argues that unfalsifiable consensus suppresses scientific progress by insulating assumptions from contradiction. Using cosmology as a primary case study, and extending the same logic to other foundational areas of physics, it demonstrates how early agreement hardens into doctrine when mechanism is absent. Through detailed examination of the technological constraints that shaped early 20th-century cosmological observations, the theoretical frameworks that emerged from limited data, and the modern observations that now challenge those frameworks, this paper establishes that consensus formed in the absence of mechanism becomes indistinguishable from theology. When contradiction is no longer permitted, science gives way to belief. Axiom: Unfalsifiable consensus is theology, not science. Constraint: Without a mechanism, there is nothing to contradict.