Comments on: Happy Happy Joy Joy

By: rpl

rpl — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:06:51 +0000

When I said “you could hardly have picked a worse example” I was referring to your pointless and irrelevant swipe at atheists. While there may indeed be some theists who limit their speculations to “open questions about the nature of the Universe,” the overwhelming majority of theists claim that God has communicated to them detailed knowledge of His preferences on human behavior. Observing that theists cannot possibly know the things that most of them claim to know is hardly an “absence of evidence” fallacy.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:53:55 +0000

There’s a huge difference between thinking you have a hotline to God and having genuine open questions about the nature of the Universe.

I do think this is a classic example of the absence of evidence fallacy. As it turned out, we didn’t have the data to constrain this problem. Yet, huge books were written about it. Policy was promoted based on this. Massive volumes of ink and electrons were spilled trying to puzzle it out.

By: rpl

rpl — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:47:02 +0000

“It’s a beautiful example of how absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence (you paying attention, atheists?)”

Yeah, I’m paying attention. I’m paying attention to how I’m the only one who *doesn’t* think he has a hotline to creator of the universe. Really, if you were looking for an example of the “absence of evidence fallacy,” you could hardly have picked a worse one.