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To: Junior
No, I mean the fact that even if there *were* angels, they would have been dismissed out-of-hand, because "there are no such things as angels."

Circular reasoning.

The problem is that some insist that angels submit themselves to a rectal probe, biopsy, and samples taken for GC/MassSpec and other tests, or else "they don't exist."

There *is* such a thing as varying degrees of evidence, varying degrees of reliability of witnesses, and the like.

History is *full* of uncorroborated accounts, and just to say that "the evidence is weak, therefore this didn't happen" is not logically sound.

The reason people do it is to exclude many false positives -- you know, the null hypothesis, and all that.

But nobody ever addresses the possibility of false negatives, because they combine the approach with naturalism implicitly.

Hence, circular reasoning again.

The canonical response seems to be, "FSM".

But just because you allow for the possibility of anything "rum" or "uncanny" does not mean that you are required to admit or accept all of them.

Cheers!

...oh, and Merry Christmas.

812 posted on 12/24/2006 12:43:41 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: grey_whiskers
No, I mean the fact that even if there *were* angels, they would have been dismissed out-of-hand, because "there are no such things as angels."

You sound a bit like a UFO conspiracy theorist.

813 posted on 12/24/2006 12:48:33 PM PST by Junior (Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.)
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