Faith?

[Eilonnwy]

And you continuously miss the point.

First, if you will notice, Sagan does not address my question. Had an answer to my question existed, I would have confronted it. That is why I posed my question to you in the first place. "Tell me what evidence one should expect, given a dragon that is invisible, floating, and transcendent?"

None, since the Dragon has been defined out of science. That's the point. The story of the dragon is part of a larger book that deals with these evasions in evidence to prop up an unsupported position.

Second, notice too that Sagan supports my position. While you proposed that one would be "justified in saying there really isn't a dragon" based on the absence of evidence for it—which I said is fallacious rather than justified—Sagan writes that "the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis." There is your fallacious assertion of ¬P ("there really is not a dragon") on the one hand, and Sagan's sensible rejection of P on the other.

As I said previously (Msg. #61), not accepting the claim P (the position Sagan espoused) is very different from asserting the claim ¬P (the position you espoused). The former does not commit the fallacy, but the latter certainly does. The difference between your position and his can be seen in the following: while he wondered what the difference is "between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all," you went the whole way to assert there is no difference and the dragon does not exist. Sagan saw in the circumstance reason to formulate a question, while you thought one could formulate an answer.

Man, I really miss Carl Sagan.

I do not think it unreasonable in the slightest to say something probably doesn't exist when it's been defined out of scientific inquiry and every attempt has been made to prove it's existence, as long as you are willing to change your mind should better evidence come around. That is an entirely reasonable stance to take, and there's nothing fallacious about it. In some cases, absence of evidence DOES mean evidence in absence.

You're parsing words to stretch this into a fallacy that it is not.

As I quoted Copi for a reason, and I'll quote it again:

A qualification should be made at this point. In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence despite searching, as positive evidence towards its non-occurrence.

Maybe the problem is you're stuck in your BS philosophical reasoning, and I'm talking about the real world here.