standard of evidence

[Rational AKD]

You can try to define it however you like but even Kenneth Kitchen - who invented the stupid phrase - did not mean what you want it to mean.

We get this shit all the time from jesus freaks who insist that the failure to find "evidence" of David's marvelous empire simply means that we haven't looked in the right place. "Absence of evidence" shout the fucking lunatics.

But it doesn't apply at all in the case of Jerusalem where there is no absence of evidence. Instead, there is ample evidence that 10th century "Jerusalem" was, at best, a minor little shithole of a village and more probably not even that.

And again comes the chorus: "ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE!!!!!" shriek the jesus freaks who, like you, do not know what the fuck they are talking about.

look, you can argue against the scholars of philosophy who support the Argumentum ad Ignorantiam fallacy all you want since you seem to know way more than them.
and you're still straw manning my argument. yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but that doesn't make the proposition true either. absence of evidence for a proposition doesn't make a proposition true or false, it simply shows a lack of establishment for that proposition. and it also doesn't make it less likely or more likely either.