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cousin_it comments on Rationality Quotes November 2011 - Less Wrong
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The argument was wrong even by the standards of the time. You just misunderstand the concept of divination :-) It doesn't rely on the bird consciously knowing anything. In fact, instead of watching the bird, you can kill it and inspect its entrails. Divination works (or doesn't) because the will of the gods leaks into the pattern of visible things (or doesn't).
You can patch the argument easily; either the gods want their will known or not. If they don't, then the augur is screwed; if they do, then they want the bird to survive (to the point where the augur can figure out what was meant); and so on.
The gods are not required to be helpful, especially to the sacrilegious.
No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.
Deorum iniuriae Diis curae. This was not sarcastic or mocking in the slightest bit, as Marius points out and a reading of Herodotus will remind one.
It seems that any wrong argument for a correct conclusion has a decent chance of being patchable into a correct argument by a sufficiently smart patcher, so arguing about patchability of such arguments doesn't make much sense.
Such runs an argument against the principle of charity, indeed, that it licenses special pleading or endless special-casing.
Nice connection! I see we had a post about that recently.
I'd just shoot the bird and carry it with me. Then whichever way I went was the right one!