Demands for Particular Proof: Appendices
Appendices to: You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
(The main article was getting long, so I decided to move the appendices to a separate article which wouldn't be promoted, thus minimizing the size of the article landing in a promoted-article-only-reader's feed.)
A. The absence of unobtainable proof is not even weak evidence of absence.
The wise will already know that absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence; and they may ask, "Since a time-lapse video record of apes evolving into humans would, in fact, be strong evidence in favor of the theory of evolution, is it not mandated by the laws of probability theory that the absence of this videotape constitute some degree of evidence against the theory of evolution?"
(Before you reject that proposition out of hand for containing the substring "evidence against the theory of evolution", bear in mind that grownups understand that evidence accumulates. You don't get to pick out just one piece of evidence and ignore all the rest; true hypotheses can easily generate a minority of weak pieces of evidence against themselves; conceding one point of evidence does not mean conceding the debate; and people who try to act as if it does are nitwits. Also there are probably no creationists reading this blog.)
The laws of probability theory do mandate that if P(H|E) > P(H), then P(H|~E) < P(H). So - even if absence of proof is by no means proof of absence, and even if we reject the philosophy that absence of a particular proof means you get to discard all the other arguments about evidence and priors - must we not at least concede that absence of proof is necessarily evidence of absence, even though it may be very weak evidence?
You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
Followup to: Logical Rudeness
"Modern man is so committed to empirical knowledge, that he sets the standard for evidence higher than either side in his disputes can attain, thus suffering his disputes to be settled by philosophical arguments as to which party must be crushed under the burden of proof."
-- Alan Crowe
There's a story - in accordance with Poe's Law, I have no idea whether it's a joke or it actually happened - about a creationist who was trying to claim a "gap" in the fossil record, two species without an intermediate fossil having been discovered. When an intermediate species was discovered, the creationist responded, "Aha! Now there are two gaps."
Since I'm not a professional evolutionary biologist, I couldn't begin to rattle off all the ways that we know evolution is true; true facts tend to leave traces of themselves behind, and evolution is the hugest fact in all of biology. My specialty is the cognitive sciences, so I can tell you of my own knowledge that the human brain looks just like we'd expect it to look if it had evolved, and not at all like you'd think it would look if it'd been intelligently designed. And I'm not really going to say much more on that subject. As I once said to someone who questioned whether humans were really related to apes: "That question might have made sense when Darwin first came up with the hypothesis, but this is the twenty-first century. We can read the genes. Human beings and chimpanzees have 95% shared genetic material. It's over."
Well, it's over, unless you're crazy like a human (ironically, more evidence that the human brain was fashioned by a sloppy and alien god). If you're crazy like a human, you will engage in motivated cognition; and instead of focusing on the unthinkably huge heaps of evidence in favor of evolution, the innumerable signs by which the fact of evolution has left its heavy footprints on all of reality, the uncounted observations that discriminate between the world we'd expect to see if intelligent design ruled and the world we'd expect to see if evolution were true...
...instead you search your mind, and you pick out one form of proof that you think evolutionary biologists can't provide; and you demand, you insist upon that one form of proof; and when it is not provided, you take that as a refutation.
You say, "Have you ever seen an ape species evolving into a human species?" You insist on videotapes - on that particular proof.
And that particular proof is one we couldn't possibly be expected to have on hand; it's a form of evidence we couldn't possibly be expected to be able to provide, even given that evolution is true.
Yet it follows illogically that if a video tape would provide definite proof, then, likewise, the absence of a videotape must constitute definite disproof. Or perhaps just render all other arguments void and turn the issue into a mere matter of personal opinion, with no one's opinion being better than anyone else's.
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