To paraphrase the Hitch again, you can’t dent a rationale that sees a baby fall from a first floor window, bounce on a lawn, and roll unharmed into the road, and declare “it must be a miracle.” Then when a baby falls 6 inches and fatally strikes it head on the corner of a table, blithely state that, “god works in mysterious ways.”
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Good old Hitch, well here he is stuttering, evading and digressing his way through an attempt to answer a rather simple question that was repeatedly put to him:
He actually ends up stating he believes absence of evidence is evidence of absence, I wonder what evidence he has for that…
Gotta love him!
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It can be? It may not always be conclusive evidence of course, but you seem to want have your magic unevidenced cake, and eat it.
Also did you have a point beyond pure ad hominem?
Also he tears WLC a new one in that debate, you must have watched another debate to the one you posted if you think otherwise? WLC doesn’t even know what atheism means, I can see why you’d admire his nonsense. Note WLC pontificating that the infinite is impossible, while simultaneously insisting the deity he imagines to be real has always existed, you have to laugh.
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Are you saying it is not? So unevidenced anonymous hearsay, written decades after the events it claims to describe, that contradicts known scientific facts is evidence, but a dearth of evidence means nothing at all? Priceless…
Note that @Sherlock-Holmes’s definition of evidence is as malleable as it needs to be to squeeze his own beliefs under the low bar he sets for credulity, but for everyone else evidence or the lack thereof means nada. Science doesn’t have facts, thousands of years of navel gazing produce not one shred of objective evidence and it means nothing. This is simply risible…
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Absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence. It is in fact good evidence. If I tell you I have a dead body in my car, and we run out to look, and there is no dead body, the absence of the dead body is the first bit of evidence that something is not quite right. Next we get a forensics team to go over the car. They find no hairs, no crushed carpet, no fingerprints but mine, no body fluids, no DNA. They find absolutely nothing that would indicate a body had been in the trunk. Not a speck of dandruff, flaky skin cells or sweat molecules. NOTHING. The evidence has piled up, and we can be pretty-certain that there was never a dead body in the trunk of that car. Absence of evidence is certainly evidence of absence. It is evidence of absence when we would expect evidence to be present.
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It means there is no evidence.
I’m strongly convinced you don’t know what evidence is. That’s okay, most Christians can’t comprehend it. @Cognostic stated it best.
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This is the crucial part. For example, take Joshua 10:13:
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
That the sun and the moon stood still is a spectacular phenomenon that would certainly be noticed all over the world, in all cultures and would be written down wherever there were people who could write. But can we find any mention of this in other culture spheres? Nope. Thus, we can conclude that the absence of evidence that this had actually happened (i.e. was not noticed in other parts of the world) is certainly evidence that it never happened.
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You’d think there would be a massive gap in the records of ancient civilizations that existed when the planet was supposedly flooded to the highest mountain. Somehow they managed to continue on without noticing they were dead and under a mountain of water.
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Not to mention this global flood 20ft above the earth’s highest peak, leaving nary a trace in the fossil or geological records?
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I like how the ice core records survived.
The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica . Ice cores contain information about past temperature, and about many other aspects of the environment.
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Yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If it was then you’d be in a position to state “God does not exist” because you’d have the evidence for it wouldn’t you, but you don’t assert that.
The NT (if that’s what you are alluding to) is evidence of something, it is what it is evidence of that we disagree on Sheldon, it is with respect to the interpretation of said evidence that we differ on.
What kind of body? a fly’s body? an ant’s body? See, you need to be very clear on what it is you are expecting to find when you search. You are not, none of the atheists here have the slightest idea what it is they are looking for and how to recognize if they did encounter it yet insist they can’t find it!
Your analogy is frankly embarrassing to read. Comparing a search for something you cannot and do not define to a search for something you can very clearly define shows everyone the true shallowness that is “atheism”.
Debating with you guys is amusing, like shooting fish in a barrel!
What evidence do you have for that claim?
Your posts are evidence enough. 
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I’m not here to defend young earth creationism but want to point out that the oldest living things are about 5,000 years old, kind of around the time the YEC advocates claim the deluge took place, just sayin…
Very well then, so lets see if we can define “evidence” and agree on what it means, then we can proceed on that basis, fair enough?
Read this article on this very question and tell me what you think? Since you feel you do know what evidence is, tell me that definition, where you got it from.
Truly hilarious.
No, and no. Unless one was so ill informed they though evidence is an absolute, otherwise absence of evidence would be evidence of absence, but need not be sufficient to make a contrary claim. Though if you’d bothered to read Cognostics example, you’d have learned that context determines when it is sufficient to do so. Or maybe not, given your aversion to learning and listening, and how closed minded you are it’s possible you wouldn’t, which is a shame, for you anyway.
Yes, just as absence of evidence is evidence of something.
I don’t interpret it, I merely note the facts, the extraordinary nature of the claims which no one can demonstrate are even possible, and some of which run contrary to scientific facts, and the extremely weak nature of unevidenced anonymous hearsay, coming as it does from an epoch of extreme ignorance and superstitious credulity.
I imagine that is always the impression of an utterly closed mind.
Your posts and claims about evidence, for example in this post where I quoted you above, you have made the hilarious assertion that if an absence of evidence is evidence of absence it must be conclusive, only someone with a very closed mind on the subject, and a very facile understanding of the nature of evidence would make such a claim unabashed.
Wow, roughly you say, no arguing with that kind of logic is there. FYI, the geological record demonstrates unequivocally that no global flood has ever occurred. Oh and that would be an objective scientific fact, you know, the kind you said science doesn’t help us with.
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You don’t act like it. However, I’ll stick with the court of law definition of evidence, thank you very much.
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THIS coming from the same guy who REFUSES to describe to us the type of god/entity in which he believes. Ho-ly FUCK! My irony meter is really getting put to the test. Having to send it in for recalibrating once a week now.
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I am in a position to say nearly every god I have ever heard of does not exist. There were a few deist gods that got away, but they didn’t really matter, In addition to not being there, they had no influence on anything. They made themselves completely irrelevant. So do you have a god that exists? Is it relevant to anything? Why should I care?
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