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Total Members Voted: 49

[GlyphGryph]

Hey, guess what! An absence of evidence where evidence should exist is actually evidence of absence! If someone tells me the world is just chock-full of white llamas, and I've looked around for them my whole life and not managed to find a single one, it is not faith to believe they are wrong.

Omg, no No NO. This is the #1 source of the public screwing thingsa up about science, hands down.

Not only is this wrong, but the exact opposite is one of the basic catchy rules of thumb of science, the equivalent of "correlation is not equal to causation" etc.: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

You make a lot of posts that are factually wrong, you know that?

Evidence of Absence is one of the central tenants of empirical science. Modus tollens is an important argument in propositional logical argument. Your denial of these central components of both science and logic makes your argument here laughable.

Maybe you should try basing your statements on actual scientific and logical arguments rather than pop-sci "catchy rules of thumb"

Gnosis is in its simplest definitional sense "knowledge" (albeit, I must add, one with particular connotations pertaining to spiritual and self-knowledge in common usage), and one that has far greater scope than the particular Christian sects commonly referred to as gnostic (just as catholic is, in its simplest definitional sense, "universal").

This is really it. "Gnosticism" is about knowing god, "Theism" is about believing in god. A gnostic theist believes they know/understand what god is and that they exist. A gnostic atheist believes they know/understand what god would be, and said being does not exist. (Basically everyone on the planet is several dozen shades of gnostic atheist, so we generally take this to indicate something more powerful, that they know understand all possible gods and that those gods cannot exist). Agnostic theism says they believe a god exists but do not understand and it's nature, and agnostic atheism does not believe a god exists but but that they have no knowledge of what that god would be like.

[Angle]

we're talking about the common conception of god

The most people who have lived and believed in gods in history are likely polytheistic believers of natural totem-type gods, like raven gods, etc., as this was extremely common throughout accounts of stone-bronze-iron age people in far flung diverse places around the world. Not what you just described.

Those people are dead. Their beliefs don't matter. I'm concerned with the people who are living now, who use their beliefs as justification for dickery.

[GavJ]

1) Modus tollens is only valid if there's a specific requirement that must be implied if such and such thing exists. That's not very relevant to this discussion, because there is no such thing with God. Plenty of people and whole religions view God as an entity who largely just performed creation and that's it. Therefore the only implied necessity is creation existing, which you obviously cannot disprove. And that's even assuming that creation is a constant attribute ascribed to God(s), which it probably isn't.

2) More importantly, you can't ever prove that there ISN'T an effect in modern science, so the "not Q" part of modus tollens is almost or entirely insurmountable. This isn't just statistics (although partially that, but if you only look at it from that angle, it eventually degrades into solipsism IF AND ONLY IF you have overwhelming avalanches of evidence not showing an expected trend). It's also just because the experimenter may simply not have thought of the correct experiment or measurement, in which case no sized avalanche of evidence is even relevant, and you can't even know for sure which scenario you are in!

Which is why all or nearly all modern journals and universities, etc. proceed based on a model of positive effects, not negative ones. Otherwise able to be stated as "an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

if you disagree, find me a few articles in Science or Nature that revolve around nothing but null effects as their data.  Have fun with that.

Those people are dead. Their beliefs don't matter.

This is ridiculous for several reasons, the two most important ones being:
1) Polytheism is still believed by easily a billion+ people. Including many who believe in exactly the sort of thing I just described as a flavor of it.
2) ALL of the above religions, monotheistic and polytheistic alike, all claim their gods to be IMMORTAL. So why does it make any difference when the believers were alive? Those religions would have claimed that the Gods would still be alive in 2014 just as much as in 3000 B.C. so the timeline is irrelevant...

[Dutchling]

I can't be arsed to get the exact numbers, but the amount of dead people around from thousand of years ago isn't that impressing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Angle]

I'm not concerned with what people believe, I'm concerned with what people do. Arguing with their beliefs is only a means to to an end.

I suppose you're more interested in arguing for it's own sake. Which is fine I suppose, but it does rather annoy me- I'm trying to argue with this dude that, no his completely non-invisible unicorn does not exist and it does not give him justification to stab people, and you keep busting in with - "You can't disprove my invisible perfectly stealthy unicorn that doesn't tell me to do things!" No, I cant, and I really don't care.

[GlyphGryph]

if you disagree, find me a few articles in Science or Nature that revolve around nothing but null effects as their data.  Have fun with that.

Every single peer review that couldn't duplicate the findings of the initial experiment. Come on dude, this is pretty trivial, do you really want me to bother even linking that shit?

People aren't usually going to bother writing a paper about an absence of evidence unless there's already a claim made about the existence of evidence, because the vast bulk of science is going "Oh, that didn't work, I guess I should try something else."

Or, in the words of Thomas Edison - “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Even if there weren't any papers about it, your argument is like some sort of crazy assumption that every time a scientist thinks up or investigates anything they are always 100% correct from the get go, which is absurd. When most people find evidence of absence, they don't write a paper about it, they come up with an alternate hypothesis.

When they don't, when they keep pursuing something despite no evidence that it works, well... How would you refer to all the perpetual motion machine people? Would you consider them scientists? After all, perpetual motion machines might still work!

[GavJ]

Every single peer review that couldn't duplicate the findings of the initial experiment. Come on dude, this is pretty trivial, do you really want me to bother even linking that shit?

I dont think you're quite understanding the concept I'm asking for.

A non-replication is not an example of this, because people who publish non-replications do not claim or intend for them to be "evidence of absence"!  Non-replications are intended to do one thing and one thing only: cast doubt on pre-existing positive evidence published earlier, and to convince readers to return to a state of agnosticism regarding that data, NOT to prove any actual claim or counterclaim about how the world works.

If you attempt to publish an article that has non-replication alone, and in that article claim to have therefore proven anything about the way the world works based on that, it not only will not get published, it will not even make it past triage, and the chances are high that it would additionally significantly hurt your career reputation as well, by word of mouth.

Additionally, in my 10 years of getting paychecks exclusively to read and write papers and conduct research, guess how many publications I've come across whose only data was a non-replication? Out of hundreds of articles a year read?  Precisely ONE.  I published it myself, and it wasn't even a full article (virtually NO chance of that happening in academia, unless the thing you're not replicating is like, a Higgs boson or cold fusion or something). It was a 1 page invited comment on another paper, and the only conclusion from it was "these guys don't have as much evidence for their effect as they claim they do." That is all.  So not only is this evidence of what you're trying to argue, but it itself pretty much never happens, either.

99% of the time, when somebody publishes non-replicating data, it is Experiment #1 out of 7 or something, and serves only as a justification for having done the additional experiments and having found whatever positive evidence they found later, which is what the paper is invariably actually about. Most often, it is non-replication of a competing theory's experiment, then filled in with replacement positive evidence of one's own theory. (do you see a trend here?)




What I'm asking for (and what is necessary to prove your point as something actually in practice by the scientific community) are examples of articles in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, where:
1) The evidence is purely null result experiments
2) They use those null results to conclude something about the way the world works, NOT to conclude something about the confidence one should place in earlier researchers' (positive evidence) work.

Even if there weren't any papers about it, your argument is like some sort of crazy assumption that every time a scientist thinks up or investigates anything they are always 100% correct from the get go, which is absurd. When most people find evidence of absence, they don't write a paper about it, they come up with an alternate hypothesis.

No! You do NOT abandon theories based on null results. That's terrible practice, and anybody teaching that to new researchers should frankly be fired.
Yes, researchers are wrong all the time, of course. But you abandon theories based on positive evidence that runs contrary to the predictions of the theory, only.

For example, "All grass is red!" is my theory/hypothesis.
If I live in a desert and walk outside and can only find sand and end up with a null result, that is not a reason to abandon my hypothesis... I MIGHT decide this experiment isn't worth it and the plane tickets would cost to much to go find grass, or whatever, but that's not the same thing as proving something. That's just being too poor or having better things to do.
If however, I walk outside and find samples of green grass, then I have collected concrete, positive evidence that runs contrary to my hypothesis, so I abandon it and adjust to a new one.

the vast bulk of science is going "Oh, that didn't work, I guess I should try something else."

This is also true. Null results will routinely encourage scientists to go try some other tack, for practical reasons and time constraints, etc.

That has nothing to do with it being actual evidence of a theory being wrong, however, and everything to do with efficient time management of wanting to make the most amount of discoveries about the world (all of which involve positive evidence) as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible.

[GavJ]

I can't be arsed to get the exact numbers, but the amount of dead people around from thousand of years ago isn't that impressing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1) Right now, today, ~50% of the world is monotheistic, and ~25% is polytheistic (the remainder non-religious, or things like Buddhism that are neither poly or mono) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#Adherent_estimates
2) The graph is not helpful for looking at relative milestones in history with actual amounts. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx is more useful and shows that approximately 1/2 the people who ever lived, lived before 1 AD, obviously before either Christianity or Islam. (Judaism has never been a significant population amount).

So well over half the people who have ever lived were polytheistic (nearly all of the 1/2 of total folks before 1AD + large proportions of those after), and 1 out of every 4 people born today continues to be.

And it is almost a logical necessity that polytheistic gods not be omnipotent (lest they paradoxically conflict), and nearly always the case that they are not omniscient (since polytheistic mythology tends to rely heavily on gods not knowing about other gods' schemes and such, at the very least), as well as falling on a huge variety of places on the scale from omnipresence to "not that concerned about us" often varying significantly within a single pantheon. As well as varying widely on benevolence to malevolence.

[GlyphGryph]

So let me see if I can get your argument straight.

Someone tells you, 'there is a cow in that field eating grass."

You look at the field, and see no cow.

To you,
1. This is NOT evidence as to the absence of a cow in the field. (The absence of visual evidence of there being a cow where one would expect to see one, were the claim true, is not evidence of absence of the cow from the field.)
2. You would then fall back to a position of agnosticism - rather than saying that based on the evidence you have available of there not being a cow in the field (presumably because you have no such evidence), you simply respond that you do not know whether or not there is a cow in the field, nor anything about the nature of the cow.

Because people often don't publish articles solely about how a claim is false in the science journals you read.

Is that about where we are, then?

[GavJ]

Nothing in science ever works like that. In approximately 0% of scientific situations ever are you able to exhaustively search 100% of the entire possible realm of a theory fully and empirically.
And of course, in the case of an existence of God, this is also equally farcical nearly 100% of the time, since you cannot simultaneously search all of creation on every possible bandwidth of every measurement type, etc. to check for God.

Setting aside various reasons why you may not notice a cow in a field even if there, yes, perhaps in the strawman analogy of a single, limited, easily simultaneously scanned field with no obstructions and an alleged cow, you can (maybe) do that.

But in the actual appropriate analogy to what we're talking about (existence of god(s) and/or the institution of science), it is always something more like "cows exist in fields" that people care about, and due to the infeasibility of measuring every field exhaustively and simultaneously, negative evidence is practically useless.





More explicitly: if a religion claims that a god did something specific, like "made some water turn into wine on such and such a date" on a scale simmilar to your cow, and you go in your time machine and observe no such thing happening, then this might be sufficient evidence of that story being wrong, but not of the god not existing... Any proof of the being not existing would necessarily require completely impossibly extensive, comprehensive, confident, simultaneous search.

Unless of course, you're aware of any major world religions that advocate(d) something like "God only existed for 30 seconds on Friday July 7th, 1762, in London, at a southwest facing bench in Whittington Garden" in addition to multiple eyewitness accounts and full spectrum sensor analysis on hand of said bench showing nothing there.

[penguinofhonor]

So the scientifically correct opinion on the existence of, say, mythical creatures is to hold no opinion until we search every inch of the earth for them?

[GavJ]

Yes absolutely. Science has in no way disproven unicorns or similar and likely never will.

I have participated in several conversations about this sort of thing at home with academics and at conferences, generally begun by some tipsy person thinking they will start a lively argument, but then finding out it is uninterestingly universally agreed on by everybody 5 seconds later.

Nor, importantly, is there any particularly good reason to need to disprove the existence of unicorns. If some dude wants to devote a bunch of tax dollars or something to a unicorn reservation, or some situation where it actually might matter, all you need to do is ask him for his positive evidence of them. If he does has convincing, strong evidence, well then great, unicorns apparently exist, and give them their wildlife refuge.  If he cannot produce such information, then you can discredit and disapprove of his plan and not spend those important tax dollars.

At no point in this process (or almost any other one like it) do you need to claim to have disproven unicorns in order to decide on a useful or efficient course of action. Merely that they have not been positively proven and thus do not justify investment.

[Graknorke]

At no point in this process (or almost any other one like it) do you need to claim to have disproven unicorns in order to decide on a useful or efficient course of action. Merely that they have not been positively proven and thus do not justify investment.

So what is everyone arguing about again?

[GavJ]

So what is everyone arguing about again?

I believe the original reason for this topic was people stabbing or shooting other people and claiming justification by God.

The way that you would evaluate this from a scientific standpoint would be:
"Well alright, setting aside for a moment the question of whether God's will actually is a justification for something anyway, do you even have proof that it is God's will in the first place?"
"Not really."
"Okay, well that's irrelevant, then, even within the context of moral arguments."

and proceed to prosecute on the basis of other, provable things instead. Again, just like the unicorn, this process does not require disproving God at any point.

[Angle]

Well no, the discussion started because there a thing to detect philosophical contradictions, and one of them was about atheism or agnosticism, and people started talking about how atheism was a religion, and then people were talking about science and how we can know things, and I was arguing with GavJ about what conceptions of god were worth discussing.