No, because here you're immediately again injecting YOUR (or some presumed GENERAL) understanding (in disguise of the "you") into a sentence that deals exclusively with "them".

If you believe in the death row and I don't believe you have convincing arguments, I'm making a wrong statement if I say that you don't put forward any arguments. This is very simple - that you continue to argue it doesn't make it more controversial.

You're not going in circles, you're trying to avoid owning up to a problem of language and phrasing by pointing to the world and say "But look, there are many ways in which what I said wouldn't technically be wrong".

It is irrelevant to the former statement of yours and whether that statement was a strawman or not.

Suppose I held that faith is simply a way to pass time and direct your concentration towards something (similar to meditation). Suppose I held that it has no relevance to the concept of evidence at all. Then what? We'd be still stuck with a statement of yours, that is misrepresenting what religions do. So whether I believe that faith is a way to pass time or whether that's a sensible position is entirely besides the point. Trivially so, by the way, as the statement that I've called you out on doesn't even use the term "faith". In each case we're dealing with the same statement of yours.

WRONG. We got here because of a specific sentence of you which I called out as a strawman. We weren't discussing anything. You made an assertion about what religions do. I called you out on it.

I'm fairly certain you're wrong here. Whatever gets admitted as evidence COUNTS as evidence. It may not prove whatever point is under discussion, but once it's admitted, it's evidence.

But even besides that, note that you simply assumed the defendant wants to prove his innocence (to the court). This is an assumptionj - very often true, but not simply a given. This defendant, for example was trying to prove something else and had convincing evidence for that - his silence. The judge, looking for different evidence, found his silence unconvincing proof for what he assumed the defendant wanted to show, and sentenced him. Similar examples can, likely, be given by reference to Anti-Nazi activists and the like. In each case both sides sit in the same building, both deal with evidence, yet both the intnetion of presenting it and the goal of what to actually demonstrate with it, differ.

Re-applying this to religion and evidence: That you "as judge" dismiss any evidence "religions" present to you, does not mean that they don't have evidence, and it does not mean that they don't engage in the acts-commonly-called-presenting-evidence. It might simply be the case that they want to prove a point quite different than what you are willing/qualified to rule on. Hence, they present evidence, knowing that you'll will dismiss it. That doens't mean that they never presented anything. It only means they never presented anything to "prove their innosence". You're only justified in saying that they never presented evidence if "proving their innocence" is the only possible intention they can have in court and that all the evidence they tried to submit, was turned down (meh - the analogy is getting rather strained) before being admitted as possible evidence for examination. Which is obv. not true.

Tell me you have never seen Perry Mason discredit a witness (or show that a knife from the crime scene with the right prints and blood on it does not indeed represent a smoking gun). He's still a witness, but not admissible. Does he suddenly vanish from the court registers? Does the entire actions BEFORE him being dismissed suddenly become incomprehensible movements and utterances of people talking to a random person that inexplicably sits on the chair normally reserved for witnesses? No, of course not. He's a discredited witness, very simple. You want that to mean "the other side never actually had a witness" - but you wanting doesn't mean that it's true.

And I think we've belabored this long enough. You're a grown man, you're very well aware that people have motives that may be unintelligible to you and that therefore their actions may make no sense - to you. You're also aware that this is not at all the same as saying that these people are just engaging in unintelligible actions. If you say so, you're stating something factually wrong. Whether we're talking about your kid chasing an invisible bunny, or a student arguing with his prof about scripture evidence or an attorney presenting a knife that ends up prooving nothing - you're equally wrong in all cases.

No, you missed my point which was that my answer was simply repeating what I've said before but that I would go into more detail lower in the post.

Unlike you (apparently) I have no problem admitting errors of language so take my word for it that I'm arguing this because I don't agree with you and for no other reason. I simply haven't yet agreed with your view of what is evidence and what isn't.

No, it's very relevant because my (alleged) strawman was made as part of a discussion about how faith has become a substitute for evidence and how religions pass that off as a good thing. I'd really like to get back to that if we can ever get past this disagreement about what constitutes evidence.

If you'd answer my question about faith, I could figure out how you think religions have evidence but still require faith to operate. It seems a contradictory position and I think it forces a re-examination of how you think that what religions believe is evidence actually is evidence, in light of the requirement for faith.

And suppose I held that faith is something equally unlike what it actually is. That wouldn't get us anywhere either.

There must be a standard for what is deemed evidential, I don't find credible that 'I believe this' would be considered evidence and that's basically all that religions have. This is what I hope to check out.

Another false analogy, witnesses, arguments, they're not the same as evidence. A witness can't be anything but a witness good or bad, ditto for an argument, but evidence has to prove or disprove something, it can't simply exist without purpose.

You didn't answer my question so I'll repeat it:

At what point do you move from considering the evidence for both sides as being potentially convincing and equal in value, to deciding that one side's evidence is actually false and proves nothing. At that point do you still consider it evidence? If so then what is false evidence? Is it still evidence or is that just a term for something that turned out not be evidence at all?

lol at 'grown man'. You'll probably argue that isn't an ad hominem too and there's no negative implication there (like- you're a grown man, so act like one and stop being silly?), you're just remarking on my age right?

ok, if you've had enough then we're done. At this point I have more questions than answers though.

Yep. As has been pointed out to you by OrP,

At that point, I wasn't making an argument, certainly not attacking your person in order to make a point, I was appealing to your common sense.

Fine. Go to your law forum, and reproduce our conversation regarding all the legal stuff. Reproduce your stuff in particular and verbatim. See what they say.

Exactly, you're saying that if I don't agree with you then I lack common sense but if I do have common sense, then surely I'll see the logic of your position. Text book ad hominem.


lol @ 'your' law forum, honestly Fret, for an intelligent guy you act like a 5 year old sometimes. Also lol (with reservation this time) at your concern that I would deliberately misrepresent either of our view points. Frankly, I plan not to mention this discussion at all.

Why do you have a problem with me asking people more qualified than either of us to comment on what constitutes evidence?

I amazed at how many of my questions you've refused to answer ITT, I'm pretty sure that if I did that I'd be accused of some kind of dishonest tactic. The funny thing is that what constitutes evidence doesn't even matter in the discussion that I'd prefer to have which why religions need faith if faith is a belief without evidence. The nature of that evidence is irrelevant.

Arguing that they do have evidence negates the need for faith... oh wait, I'm repeating a point that you've already ignored.

MB consider your OJ example for a minute, there was not sufficient evidence for the jury that tried him to find him guilty. A civil court subsequently awarded > 30m against him for the wrongful deaths of the two people a criminal court acquitted him of the murder of.

Does this mean that there was 0 evidence in the criminal trial but there was 100% of the evidence in the civil case?

There was still evidence it just wasn't sufficient for the first jury.

This is a very important distinction. It also highlights a major flaw when people say something like "you can't justify moral axiom X because someone might not accept X". Justification and persuasion are separate issues, even though we might expect a justified position to also be more persuasive.

There was no evidence that he murdered them but there was evidence that he was responsible for their 'wrongful' deaths', where's the problem?

So I would ask you then, what was it that the prosecution brought to the criminal trial that they thought was evidence of murder but turned out not to be (since it failed to prove his guilt)? The important part of that is that they said it was evidence, but it clearly wasn't.

The catholic church had evidence that the universe revolved around us but in the end that 'evidence' was shown to be incorrect, so what is it now? Is it still evidence?

What do you consider 'evidence' to mean? Can something be evidence if it fails to prove or disprove a conclusion?

So this is where we disagree, evidence can exist and not be sufficient it not being sufficient for a conviction doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Consider the verdict of Not Proven in Scotland, when a jury returns a verdict of Not Proven does it mean neither side had sufficient evidence or that neither side has any

It can and I'm not sure that's worthy of dispute.

As far as I can tell, what you have outlined here is not an ad hominem. Ad hominem says nothing about what you are if you agree or disagree with the person. Ad hominem is saying because that person is X, we should disagree with his argument, where X has no input to the argument.

so if freteloo says " X is true, any grown man can see that " then thats not an ad hominem.

but if he says " MB says X is true, but hes a Y, so we can say hes wrong about X" then that would be ad hominem.

It means that neither side has evidence that supports or disproves a conclusion. In OJ's case, there was no evidence of murder. What evidence there was may have proven something else entirely but it didn't prove murder. So, no evidence of murder. Now, what was it then that the prosecution thought that they had if it wasn't actually evidence of murder? When they walked into the court they said that they had evidence of murder, they clearly didn't, so were they simply mistaken or did they label something 'evidence of murder' when in fact it was not anything of the sort?

I'm going to feel like such a tit if I'm wrong about this but I haven't yet had the chance to ask someone qualified to give a definition, and that's assuming that there is just one and that it doesn't differ depending on context. Philosophical evidence may mean something entirely different to legal evidence.

Isn't there some lawyer in the politics forum or something. This is such a simple point - should be able to be cleared up in one post.

None? At all?

Hurry up and become a tit, then. Stop talking about talking to someone and take care of business. Your position is nonsense and you're making it worse by insisting on your position without giving it even a cursory evaluation.

You are one person. Depending on the religion in consideration, there are hundreds or thousands of people.

ok, it's not an Ad hominem.

Technically, couldn't it could be a reverse Ad hominem if Fret really believes that I'm a grown man with common sense and that therefore I should agree with his point of view?

Of course, I wouldn't go out of my way to show that Fret is deluded on that issue

You really don't like to admit that you're just wrong...

And no, this is not even close to a reverse ad hominem (which is more of a flawed appeal to authority -- "He's a nice guy. You should listen to him.").

lol

1. It is possible to have a conclusion that requires 2 pieces of evidence to directly prove. The first one you acquire is still called evidence even if you haven't found the second.

2. If conclusion A can be indirectly proved by showing sufficient conditions B and C, then evidence that proves B is transitively evidence of A that acts only as partial proof of A.

3. Example regarding 'evidence must prove something' definition - remember that larger claims can be broken into smaller claims. Gun shot residue tests don't prove guilt of murder, but they do prove firing a gun. So, even by that definition, a gsr test is evidence because it does prove 'something', its just that the something is only a partial proof of the larger claim. Its considered evidence of murder because firing a gun is one of the sufficient conditions of guilt in this particular example. If you prefer, consider the phrase "evidence of murder" could be equivalent in this context to "evidence relevant to the murder" if they are attempting an indirect approach with smaller claims.

--

in short: Whether attacking directly or indirectly, there is such a thing as partial evidence, everyone just calls it evidence though.

Isn't that what I've been saying? Your gunshot example is exactly what I said in my answer to Dereds, that it might be evidence of something but it's not evidence of murder. Now taken with other pieces of evidence, it might add up to become evidence of murder, but taken separately they're not. In other words, if the evidence doesn't prove the conclusion then it's not evidence of that thing even though it might be evidence of something else entirely.

Evidence relevant to murder isn't evidence of murder. In the context of murder, murder being the required conclusion, it's therefore not evidence.

None of this has any bearing on the issue that faith replaces the requirement for evidence, which is actually the conversation that I'd like to have although this discussion about whether religions have evidence, simply because they have something that they themselves call evidence, has proved kinda interesting.

Somewhere in the meantime you forgot that all I need you to admit, in order for the statement of "Religions have created the appearance that a confidence in something without any evidence is virtuous." to be wrong is that religions use (and value) ANY evidence.

So, by maintaining that evidence relevant to murder isn't evidence OF murder, you're still admitting that it is evidence, treated as such, filed as such etc. Another way of stating that is that there are formal requirements that something needs to be considered evidence and we then see where it takes us. Whether it ends up -- how often have I said that now? -- proving murder, or not, is immaterial to it being considered evidence. We don't present the jury with all kinds of stuff, hope that something sticks, and scrape everything that ended up being inconclusive, useless, flawed or merely suggestive from the books. Which is what you'd need for your argument to hold.

Hence, if religions present and utilize evidence -- any evidence, that is all I need. They do.

And just to give one example: Here's the Tel Dan Stele. It is still under some dispute, but it is being argued that the "bet dod" mentioned in it is the consonant-form of "beit david", meaning "House of David", i.e. the first mentioning of the davidic monarchy. If that were the case, then it could be considered archaeological evidence for the veracity of the biblical claim that there was a King David, for example. It would -- by extension -- be a claim as to the bible's general trustworthiness as a testament.

It IS still under dispute and even it the rendering "House of David" is actually correct it's certainly not watertight evidence for pretty much anything, but it's not no evidence at all for nothing either. Hence, u wrong.

Sure, I'm not disputing that religions have evidence where the criteria is 'evidence of anything'. What I've been saying is that whatever evidence there may be for something like Jesus having existed, is not evidence that there is a god. In the context of god, that god existing is the required conclusion, there is no evidence. (And that you don't need faith if you have evidence and belief in god requires faith)

Which is why earlier I tried to distinguish between a claim that religions 'have no evidence' and 'religions have no evidence that any of their gods are real'. I don't think that religions have any evidence to support their supernatural claims.

Just my usual lack of specificity causing all kinds of problems. No hyperbole in evidence though.

Since this is the first time itt that you even mention Jesus, I doubt that, but w/e. So the claim that I took issue with was, indeed, a strawman.

[elementary-teacher-voice] And what have we learned today!?!? YOU'RE RIGHT!! Repeat after me: "There is no evidence that I find compelling/is universally accepted/passes the test of scientific scrutiny. MB, you are such a bright kid. <ruffles hair>[/elementary-teacher-voice]

I thought you mentioned Jesus down thread, so I used your example.

Whatever, have I cleared up the confusion over my claim?

It would appear that in order for MB's position to be valid, circumstantial evidence could not be counted as evidence. This is the only way I can imagine that "evidence relevant to murder" could not be counted as "evidence of murder."

Either that, or his position really does boil down to being complete nonsense.