Principals on theories: Conjecture, hypothesis, Theory
Framework: Archeological, Biblical, Historical, and Scientifically
1. Fundamental: Empirical proof helps us validate what we should and shouldn’t believe, but sometimes cold hard facts just aren’t available. Even when we don’t have solid proof, however, humans still tend to extend their sense of belief to certain phenomenon. From things we could never see with the human eye to life forms that have yet to be verified, here are the top things we believe despite a lack of verifiable proof. Aliens, Astrology, Ghosts, Karma, Intuition, Fate, Religious Texts, God.
Data Dog.
To have a discussion or debate within your narrative, we would first have to admit however you view the discussion the end game would be the same. The variations on arguments would lead to more questions than answers. The medium you placed at hand has several analogies’ that must be adhered to 100%. That scenario is not probable unless you equate man to Christ. I understand you wish to have a Jehovah’s Witness defend its credo, but under that framework, it would be impossible for any religion to defend its faith 100%. Should this discussion also include associations of Jehovah’s Witnesses that have been acknowledged but not representative of, on present doctrines?
Include: Bible Students, Bible Student Association, International Bible Student, International Bible student association, Standfast Movement, Pastoral Bible Institute, Laymen's Home Missionary Movement founded by P.S.L. Johnson, and Dawn Bible Students Association.
The representation on arguments the JWN makes falls within all these association plus a few more. The principle seem to imply guilt by association. Would the JW have to defend previous works not related to present times?
Check these Idealisms and fundamentals. Please keep in mind the principles and framework above.
Let’s begin with past Vision: Mark Twain versus the Bible
The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes …The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession – and take the credit of the correction.
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry … There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
Now let’s see within the realm of Science through astrology.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!"
-- Carl Sagan, Astronomer
No, the paraphrase is utterly wrong -- evidence isn't knowledge or proof, not even remotely! We can have evidence of things that aren't true. Why is it so hard for people to grasp this obvious fact? And absence of evidence can pertain to any empirical claim; it doesn't have to be an existence claim. If you're going to set up a topic for discussion, just state it as is; don't seed it with your own harebrained misunderstandings.
Some people do the same with a great many things. "I've never successfully used (single or multiple) inheritance without always running into problems, therefore the problem must be that inheritance is bad (and not simply that I used it badly), despite the fact that others talk of using it successfully. They must just be fooling themselves." Or replace "inheritance" with "O-O" or "C++" or "pair programming" or "parallel development" or anything else that is the subject of many popular raging debates on both sides of the continuum.
It's all too easy to jump to that wrong conclusion when it's a case of blaming something other ourselves. It's so much easier to point the finger at "O-O" or C++ or inheritance or parallel development, etc., than it is to point the finger in the other direction (just remember when you point your finger the other way, all the other fingers on that hand are pointing back at you ;-)
The context here has to do with lack of awareness. When people dismiss that possibility simply because they weren't aware of it, or haven't made the attempt to explore it, or haven't looked beyond their own personal usage/viewpoint -- then they are all too frequently jumping to conclusions based on lack of information rather than the presence of it. It may be that the conclusion was correct after all, but that doesn't make it any less premature at that time, before it was adequately explored.
A lot of the comments here are just plain wrong and wrongheaded, feeble and flawed attempts to make a false quote not false. But the quote IS false, an absence of evidence IS evidence of absence, by the proper understanding of evidence as being an observation that lends support to a proposition. The only case in which absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is when no attempt whatsoever has been made to obtain evidence ... that's not merely absence of evidence, it's absence of investigation.
his page is full of StrawMan arguments, so I'm listing it in the FallaciousArgument s.
Which arguments? How about the misstatement at the top, that AOEINEOA "means that if we don't know that something exists, it doesn't mean that it doesn't" -- it doesn't mean that at all. The latter is true, but AOEINEOA is false.
The "simply put" is simply mistaken; it doesn't mean that at all. The paraphrase is certainly true, and expresses the fallaciousness of argumentum ad ignorantiam -- absence of a proof is not proof of absence. But AOEINEOA says something different entirely; it is quite wrong, and indicates a misunderstanding of evidence and empirical science. Absence of evidence certainly is no proof of absence -- there aren't any empirical proofs in the mathematical sense -- but it is evidence of absence. That is, it does not falsify absence, and in fact gives reason to suspect absence. Just how good evidence of absence it is depends on how hard evidence of presence was sought. If we try really really hard to find evidence of life on Mars, using every technique we can think of, and yet we fail to do so, this is strong evidence that there is no life on Mars.
It is evidence of absence, true, but very, very weak evidence. To become a proof, one must exhaustively search all possible locations and establish absence in each. This is only rarely feasible, though it does happen. In those cases, AOEINEOA is a fallacy. Far more often, though, absence is established in some vanishing fraction of the possible locations of some phenomenon and that is held up as a proof. So the vast majority of times this saying is trotted out, the point holds. Compare "evidence of existence", where one good piece of evidence establishes the point beyond all doubt.
This misses 99% of the point I made, as it talks repeatedly about proof, which is not the subject at hand. A fine example is William Safire's claim that absence of evidence of WMD's in Iraq isn't evidence of absence -- he's just plain wrong, and the evidence isn't "very very weak", in fact it's very strong, because of the effort to find evidence and the eagerness of the searchers to find it. That I can't find any elephants in my living room is overwhelming evidence that there are none because they ought to be easy to find.
Don’t want to argue that I checked all possible locations because that's not my point. We're talking about evidence, not proof. Talk about "all", "100%", and "possible" is always talk about proof. Evidence is simply something that contributes to belief. Absence of positive evidence of elephants is a reason to believe there are no elephants, because of the obviousness of elephants. In the absence of reason to believe there are elephants in your living room, I have reason to believe there are no elephants there.
The case for evidence of absence depends upon whether or not evidence of any kind exists. If none exists, then absence of evidence is neither, evidence of absence or of existence.
Finally, an essence from modern time
Ken Ham and Bill Nye debate Science vs. Fiction
Mark Joseph Stern
One is fact, based on empirical scientific evidence; the other is fiction, based on biblically inspired fantasy. Nye is an earnest educator; Ham is an exploitative fabulist. What substantive issue could the two possibly debate?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is absolutely none at all. In fact, the Nye vs. Ham showdown simply illustrated why challenging creationism is so frustratingly futile. Creationists begin with their conclusion—the text of Genesis is the literal history of the world—then work backward to find their justifications. It doesn’t matter if this leads to bizarre, preposterous pseudoscientific theories; logic, for creationists, can always be sacrificed on the altar of blind faith.
And there was a lot of blind faith on display at the Creation Museum on Tuesday night. Ham opened his presentation by whining that those of us who accept evolution are “secularists hijacking the word science” and “imposing the religion of naturalism—atheism—on generations of students.” Evolution, Ham asserts, is “based upon man’s ideas about the past”—but “we weren’t there, and we didn’t observe it.” It’s hubristic, Ham claims, to accept a human-developed theory about the origin of life; the only reliable source of such information is “the biblical account of origins.”
Ham supports this strange and sinister version of creationism with a pet theory of bifurcated biology. According to his opening remarks, science is actually composed of historical science and observational science. The only apparent distinction between the two categories? “We observe things in the present; we’re assuming that that’s always happened in the past.” In case you didn’t get that point, Ham drives it home again: “There is a difference between what you observe and what happened in the past.” And because we can’t “directly observe” evolution in action, we must instead trust God’s word (as interpreted by Ham, of course—the authors of the Bible were surprisingly silent on the subject of dinosaurs).
This isn’t a retort, or a theory, or a philosophy, as Ham repeatedly insists. It’s an inane and baseless fallacy, a conclusion with no reasoning, a judgment with no facts. Yet every time Nye presented a careful explanation of evolutionary processes, Ham responded with the same smug line: “You don’t know that. You weren’t there.
What would your conclusion be? DD
