The Human Eye: A Double Standard?

[Mudhammam]

Absence of evidence is not proof of absence.....it sure as fuck is evidence of absence.

Not necessarily. That's a classic example of an argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Carl Sagan explains in his book The Demon-Haunted World:


Appeal to ignorance: the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa. (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore, UFOs exist, and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.[3]


For instance, absence of evidence that it rained (i.e. water is the evidence) may be considered positive evidence that it did not rain. Again, in science, such inferences are always made to some limited (sometimes extremely high) degree of probability and in this case absence of evidence is evidence of absence when the positive evidence should have been there but is not.

Arguments from ignorance can easily find their way into debates over the existence of God. It is a fallacy to draw conclusions based precisely on ignorance, since this does not satisfactorily address issues of philosophic burden of proof. But null results are not ignorance and can be used as evidence to achieve a given burden of proof.

(bold mine)

You must define what causes or outcomes you would expect to observe if such-and-such were to exist in order to use the absence of those features as evidence that such-and-such does not exist.

[I_am_not_mafia]

If, as theists tell us, the human eye is so complex a structure that we are forced to provide ontological explanation for its design, is god so much more simple that he needs no designer?

God is magical

I'm coming to the conclusion that physicists research Quantum Mechanics are literally wizards working with magic.

Hear me out on this one.

I don't mean Arthur C Clarke's idea that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When we think of magic in fantasy films and novels, magic is basically the very fabric of nature that wizards can work with but don't actually understand. The wizards in Harry Potter never actually understand why their potions work. They just follow recipes. JK Rowling even features a specific logic test at one point because Wizards never have to use logic. In the Discworld novels you have the colour of magic which is Octarine. Terry Pratchett even has the younger wizards working like scientists but they don't understand why things work the way they do. Nor is magic ever explained in the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. People just learn how to use the essence of reality to craft rings of power and such. It's the equivalent of us discovering electricity but not understanding that it's the movement of electrons between atoms.

Which is basically what physicists do with their calculations on quantum mechanics. No one ever explains why a random event occurs and it's not assumed by everyone that it's just a lack of understanding on our part. Logic doesn't work either (e.g. superposition with a particle existing in more than one state at the same time). Saying that a random event can happen and not being open to the possibility that we can understand and explain the cause is an anathema to the scientific method which assumes that absolutely everything can eventually be explained even if it is not practical for us to do so. Quantum physics is not science, it's magic.

We do not know that the electron or quark is indivisible and that we're just limited by our ability to measure at a smaller scale so we can't say for sure that what we are seeing isn't the result of emergent phenomena with a deterministic explanation. Isn't this why string theory exists? To provide an explanation? Although it does make one wonder at what point can you stop finding something smaller explaining the next level up and how that would work.

Assuming that the very nature of reality is stochastic and that things can just happen without a cause is not scientific in my view because it means that we're saying that it cannot ultimately be explained given a better means of measurement.

[robvalue]

I'd say it's more accurate to say it seems like magic. I'd agree. Our understanding is just getting started and even the basics seem ridiculous when approached with an everyday mindset.

[I_am_not_mafia]

I'd say it's more accurate to say it seems like magic. I'd agree. Our understanding is just getting started and even the basics seem ridiculous when approached with an everyday mindset.

I'd agree with that. And it's obviously very useful for the moment to treat it like magic. I just think that sometimes some physicists may need to appreciate that the we'll need orders of magnitude more energy / ability to measure / technology in order to begin to find an explanation rather than think that one does not exist. I'm very wary that I may be committing terrible strawman arguments here but that's just the impression I get.

[Rhondazvous]

Absence of evidence is not proof of absence.....it sure as fuck is evidence of absence.

Evidence of absent-mindedness, perhaps.

It is evidence that no being outside nature gives a damn what we believe The theists certainly care more about their respective  god than he cares about them or about himself.  Man, we talk to them more than their god does.  Maybe that's why they keep coming here. They secretly like hearing their dead-beat daddy cut down.