I assumed it was a joke when the name “Father Dowling” first came up in this thread.
Anyway, wouldn’t a 5’6", 200 pound guy look quite different to that picture? Actually, having seen a real picture of Father Dowling, it sounds like the description given on the Fox News article (“dark complected”?) was pretty much just made up anyway.
I hope if that happens to me, no one will waste time praying while my brain is being starved of oxygen.
Well, yes, they have.
Though it looks more like the head of a Labrador retriever to me.
Really? I’m thinking more “greyhound with a Julian Assange wig”…
Stretching? More like fabricating. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Plain and simple.
I don’t think “fabricating” means what you think it means.
Apart from that, it’s a web comic making an observation about how we ought to see more documentary evidence of these kind of events now that digital video recording is ubiquitous.
So what conclusions can we draw from the fact that the number of people who always carry a camera has exploded, yet there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in photographic evidence of certain phenomena? Do sasquatches have some kind of property that blocks digital imaging equipment? Do Verizon towers repel ghosts?
I agree it doesn’t conclusively disprove anything, but it’s certainly a factor to consider.
“Fabricating” in this case I am using to mean “making up out of whole cloth”
What we ‘ought’ to see is impossible to determine as we have no evidence from which to reason.
There’s an absence of evidence. That does not imply evidence of absence.
Unless your sample size is large enough so as to have have high power. In that case absence of evidence can rule out the possibility of an effect larger than a given magnitude.
Not at all true. Absence of evidence never becomes evidence of anything.
But feel free to believe it does. Either way we should stop jacking this thread. 
I think you’ve nailed it. 
So, for example, when we look across 10 population cohort studies from multiple countries covering 10 year periods, and see that the rate of vaccinations is not correlated with the rate of autism in any way, we can thus conclude nothing about the relationship between vaccination and autism?
How do you make any meaningful advances under that paradigm?
That statement stands for itself: research has shown no correlation between vaccines and autism.
Not that there’s a lack of evidence. There is evidence, and that evidence shows no correlation.
What’s that got to do with, say, bigfoot? Or angels?
Let me ask it a different way: how many zeroes do we need to add up to get a sum of 1?
0+0+0… never equals one, no matter how many zeros you add. In the same way, absence of evidence never adds up to evidence of anything.
Fair point. The problem is that 1) there’s always some relationship between variables. Statistical analyses tell us when we can infer that the relationship is just due to chance or not. We make an inference there in a similar way to which we make an inference about there being a billion active cameras (I’m fabricating that number of course) and no pictures of UFOs. 2) it also seems like a matter of semantics when we are talking about the absense of statical relationships being affirmative evidence of something. A whole bunch of 0s denoting the relationship between vaccines and autism sure do add up to a meaningful inference, but we would never say that any individual study proves there’s no relationship.
There’s an absence of evidence of voter impersonation fraud.
You should read, your Holmes, specifically Silver Blaze
If the presence of something is correlated with a potential piece if evidence, then the absence of evidence is evidence of absence of the thing.
Godzilla appearing in Tokyo would be correlated with smashed buildings. If you go to Tokyo, the absence of these is strong evidence for the absence of Godzilla, at least in the recent past.
I’ll put Sagan up against Holmes in any discussion of factuality.
Common counter example: a woman skipping periods is correlated with pregnancy.
But an absence of periods is not evidence of pregnancy.
It’s good that you endorse Carl Sagan, but I do wonder if you actually read “The Demon-Haunted World.”
I say this because you seem to have Carl Sagan exactly backwards on this particular matter. He is much more in agreement with the Holmes quote than he would be with your position.
In fact, Sagan does reference “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” in Chapter 12: “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.” He does so to elaborate on his description of the logical fallacy of the appeal to ignorance. He suggests as an example of this fallacy the statement “There is no evidence that UFOs are not visiting the earth; therefore UFOs exist…”
Certainly there is some complexity around the idea; you are applying it in a particular way that is inconsistent with the primary theme of “The Demon-Haunted World.”
It is likely that Sagan felt that people who actually read “The Demon-Haunted World” would not encounter such a pitfall with the concept, since he wrote a whole chapter (Chapter 10) that should have clarified his intent. Chapter 10 is called “The Dragon in My Garage” and is all about evaluating a claim for which there is an absence of evidence.
He walks the reader through the evaluation of his claim that there is a dragon in his garage. Of course, when you look there’s no dragon; he explains it is invisible. For every suggestion to test it (flour on the floor, infrared sensors, spray painting the area) he has an explanation as to why the dragon cannot be detected that way.
Ultimately, Sagan says: “Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.”
It’s a great book with much to say on the subject of evaluating claims of miracles and other supernatural experiences. Given that you have referenced his chapter entitled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” I hope you will reconsider your position.
So you don’t know anything about Bayes theorem. Sorry, but you’re out of date. The more often we don’t observe something, and the more likely it would be that we would observe something, the less likely it becomes that said something exists. This is inductive logic, and is a basic part of science now.
This all or nothing thinking is part of the foolishness of the past.
Yes, it is. It really is. It’s not proof, but it does make it more likely you are pregnant than you would be if you were not skipping periods. In fact that inductive logic is used every day–that’s why a skipped period is when a lady does a pregnancy test.
Post #23 should have been…
