Argument is Not Evidence

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So the Mr. Deity video, part two of his new series has an interesting point. The point is that arguments are not evidence. He says that in all of the debates that he seen between atheists and theists he's never seen anyone bring up this idea which really should show that the theist has lost the debate from the beginning. I mentioned it here when I was looking at Blake Giunta debate with Matt Dillahunty.

There are some things that you can learn from proofs - such as mathematical proofs. For example you may find a relationship between two things that was unintuitive at first. However I think in the case of the existence of an actual thing then you can gain no knowledge from philosophy or argumentation or proof. You really need something that's demonstrable, that's repeatable, something that gets around the biases and failings of the human thought process.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr Deity in stating that science is simply the process people use to bypass the failings of human biases. I also agree with the idea that the argument is the start, not the end, of the discussion - the argument serves as a hypothesis.1 Given that there are a million different intuitive, simple, logically consistent, wrong hypotheses out there the effort must be made by anyone making a claim to find alternate ways of confirming the claims.
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  1. I never know whether to use “an” or “a” with hypothesis, either in written form or spoken. It sounds weird to me either way. ↩