Peanut Gallery

What is the reason for this unnecessary complication?Evidence of four lights is sufficient to conclude there are four. Unless our conclusion contains some sort of 'and no more than four' clause, there is really no need to get involved in the matter of whether there is evidence pertaining to the non-existence of a fifth (or more) light, or whether the absence of evidence for the fifth (or more) light constitutes sufficient evidence to conclude there is no fifth (or more) light. Of course we could, because the English article 'a/an' makes no implications of exclusivity; only if the speaker intends some sort of exclusivity do we encounter the problem you describe. And even then, the absence of evidence may be sufficient for drawing a tentative conclusion, even while it does not support an absolute one.Besides, general answers to questions such as 'how many X are there?' aren't expected to be the product of any sort of mental or scientific rigorwhich is what is really the topic here; your appeal to societal and linguistic conventions to support your position is misguided.JonEdited by Jon, : clarity

---

Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

If we do not accept the evidence of absence of additional lights, how can we say there are only 4? Why would the conclusion not contain some sort of "and no more than four" clause? Isn't that generally included when counting?If I turn on a bunch of lights, and ask you how many there are; and you tell me "4". Are you saying this doesn't include a "no more than four" clause?
This is a general assumption made when speaking plainly about counting (as I was). Sometimes, and sometimes it does. I suppose I hoped it was obvious that I intended a value of 1 here, my mistake. Yes. This is exactly what I'm saying. Are you disagreeing with me by agreeing with me? In that case... I accept your disagreement as being absolutely correct!

Hi, ICANT. I don't see how you get Pangaea out of this scripture. No one else seems to have a problem with it, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious; but I don't see any indication in this scripture that all the dry land was gathered in one place.Rather, I see indications that this was a two-step process: (1) let all the waters be gathered; then (2) let the dry land appear. It sounds like God was taking a bunch of water from somewhere "under the heaven" and pooling it into an ocean, and then causing the dry land to appear out of the ocean. I don't really see much reason to assume that this means all the dry land was formed into a single landmass.To suggest this as evidence that the writer knew about Pangaea before it the existence of Pangaea was discovered by science is, at best, highly tenuous.Of course, everybody else is probably just avoiding this line of argument because they don't want to get into a discussion about how prepositions are used in Hebrew and what the Hebrew verb translated into English as "let" actually means.

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

You're talking here about Occam's Razor - extraneous terms (unevidenced entities) are most likely to be at best irrelevant and at worst nonexistent.RAZD's line of reasoning essentially says that Occam;s Razor is wrong, because you aren't sure. Maybe the pen "is somewhere you don;t expect and doesn't follow your rules." We can apparently never draw any conclusion about the absebce of anything, even a discrete well-defined physical opbject within a finite easily-searched space, because regardless of our observations and searching the probability is always 50/50 or at least exactly evenly split between any possibilities RAZD can conceive of.It's absurd. Apparently, according to RAZD, there's a 50/50 chance that my post continues beyond this sentence, because even though you can't see any additional words, those words might be near this post, or in a related thread, or otherwise be "not where you expect and not follow your rules."Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

The author of Genesis knew the specific composition of the human body in relation to dirt in exactly the same way that "psychic" John Edwards "knows" the specific names and birthdates and such from his audience.ICANT, like the gullible fools who fall for cold reading psychics, see verification of specific knowledge in statements so vague they would fit damn near anything."Earth" or "dirt" or "soil" or "dust" in the colloquial usage are so general and vague that it's difficult to determine what would not be comprised of at least some of the same elements. Genesis could just as easily have claimed that air or water or buildings or plants or geese or moons or asteroids or stars were wrought "from the earth" with the same degree of accuracy, as the same elements present in the Earth are present in all of those other things as well.

Who says we have to conclude there are only four based on the evidence of four lights?As I already stated, so long as there is no 'and no more than four' clause (and that is what an 'only' modifier is, really), then we don't even need to concern ourselves with the issue of evidence for no more than four or no evidence for more than four. Thus, the addition of 'only' simply complicates the matter unnecessarily, and worse, removesin the technical senseany ability we may have to evidence the conclusion. Not really my burden to bear. I'm pleased with leaving off such a silly clause; if you'd like to include it, provide some evidence for itor admit it is unevidenced. As I already said, 'your appeal to societal and linguistic conventions to support your position is misguided'. We're not interested in 'plain speak' here; your position should be somehow linked to the rigors of logic that this topic requires. You may have intended a value of 1; but that is not what you said. You claimed that people could not say 'there was "a" pen on the desk' if 'the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence', which is clearly bullshit and an equivocation with 'it's [the pen is] there' if you indeed meant 1 by 'a'. Is it? I didn't notice.Jon

---

Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

I'm not RAZD.

---

Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

I may be wrong, but I think there's more to it than that.Its not that we simply have an absense of evidence for the pen, its that we have evidence of the empty desk.This picture has the exact same amount of absence of evidence for the pen: So is there a pen on the desk in that picture or not?You can't tell from a simple absence of evidence of a pen. What you need, is the positive evidence of the desk with no pen on it. You get that by being able to see all the parts of the desk with none of it being blocked by a pen.

I'm not sure how to respond. I can't seem to find any question or comment in your post that's actually attempting to forward any sort of discussion. I don't see how I can make my post better other than to change "a" to "1", which I've already acknowledged to you that I should have done...So,I accept all your quibbly nitpicks as valid, pedantic issues.
I will apologize for all of them and just pray that people can use their intelligence in order to follow what I'm trying to say. Hopefully others can wade through the shallows of my post in what must seem like lowly grammatical skills in comparison to the shining examples you have provided.Thank-you for your patience in helping with my corrections.

Well, but that's the point of contention, here. What would be "positive evidence" of a pen not being on the desk, besides an absence of evidence that there's a pen on the desk?You're assuming what you've been asked to prove, in other words. What constitutes evidence of no pens except a lack of pens? What else could there be?

Being able to see the entire surface of the desk being unblocked by any pen.

...in other words, the absence of an observation of a pen.You're playing semantic games. Seeing a desk devoid of a pen is the very definition of an absence of expected evidence pertaining to a pen's presence on a desk. Restating it in a different way does not change what is or is not being observed - this is still absolutely a case where an absence of evidence is and can only be evidence of absence.Your blank picture from a post or two up, btw, is irrelevant- there's no desk in the picture. You can;t search a desk for a pen to determine whether the expected evidence is present of absent without seeing the desk. In a case of having no desk to search, RAZD's opinion of a 50/50 "I have no idea" response would be totally appropriate. I can't tell you if the desk has a pen if I have never seen the desk, that would require drawing a map without having ever observed the territory, in other words blind guessing.But the scenario in question has a specific desk to search. The presence of a pen would suggest that you would observe the pen visually if you searched the desk. If you search the desk and do not observe the pen, then the absence of expected evidence tells you that there's probably not a pen on the desk, and if you need a pen you should look elsewhere.

No, because my black picture also contains an absence of an observation of a pen but doesn't tell us whether there is a pen on the desk or not. You need more than that. You need to see the desk having no pen on it. No, you are. I disagree. Its not the absence of evidence of a pen that leads us to the conclusion that there is not pen on the desk. Its the desk with no pen on it that tells us that. The relevence is that it contains the same absence of evidence of a pen that you're claiming your picture provides us with and allows us to determine that there's no pen on the desk.If you were right, then you'd be able to tell the same thing from my picture. But you can't. That's because you need more than the absence of evidence of the pen. Its the desk, with no pen on it, that tells you there's no pen on the desk. Its not the absence of evidence of a pen.

Hi, Stile. You know they were just copying a famous scene from the novel 1984 by George Orwell, right?

---

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

And why do you think there's no pen? And why do you think there's no pen?