Friendly Atheism

[John 6IX Breezy]

And I think most people believe vaccines work because the death rates for certain diseases have dropped like a paralyzed falcon since the vaccines became available.  No one needs to do biomedical research to judge whether or not vaccines work, any more than one has to research physics to understand that hammers are heavy.  Your appeal to anti-vaxxers is misplaced.  Most anti-vaxxers take the position they do, not because they believe that vaccines don't work, but because they think vaccines lead to autism.  In the scientific community, this is known as 'being mind-wobblingly stupid'.

Of course, if you're going to appeal to miracles, then the virgin birth is possible.  But belief in miracles IS inherently irrational, so we're back where we started.

Boru

To know that death rates have dropped you need access to those statistics. Once you have those statistics you need to run some kind of correlation to establish that a relationship exists between vaccination rates and death rates; you also need to rule out any confounding variables, such as other medical advances (e.g. the emergence of antibiotics, etc.). And even after you have done all that, you've only established a correlation not a causation for the death rates. So, I disagree that no one needs to do biomedical research to judge whether or not vaccines work; at the very least statistical analysis is required that is above most people's capabilities.

The virgin birth has been attributed to a miracle since its inception. So it seems we agree that virgin births are not inherently impossible or irrational, and now disagree on miracles. But miracles are also not inherently irrational, they are dependant on the existence of God. You would need to go one more step up the latter and say beliefs in God are irrational.

---

---

You just continue to be incorrect:

An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/phobia

a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it.: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/phobia

Hmm I see. I wouldn't use a regular dictionary for discipline-specific terminology; you are bound to get definitions that are descriptive of colloquial usage. The DSM is going to have more authority in this regard.