Separate oven and hob on one circuit?

[JohnW2]

1) That is not what stillp believes, and for which you have expressed your support.

I can't speak for him, and it does seem that he may take the very 'academic' view and believes that absence of evidence for existence can never be taken as evidence for non-existence. If that is the case, then, as I have indicated in my exchanges with him, I do not support that aspect of his belief - for reasons I have explained. As I have also said to him, if that is his position (and he wopuld prefer to call that a 'logical deduction', rather than evidence', then I would say that is essentially semantic. ....

.... I think he is probably far too intelligent and sensible to not accept that if evidence for something's existence would be 'glaringly obvious' if that something existed, that the absence of such evidence then essentially amounts to 'proof' of non-existence, whether one calls it 'evidence', 'a logical deduction' or anything else.

2) I refer you to the original subject of existence, and invite you to to apply that logic to it.

As I said near the start of this tangential discussion, I didn't want to get involved in 'it' in an Electrics forum. However, as so often happens, I allowed myself to get drawn into ongoing, albeit fairly non-specific, discussions - but seeing where this page of the thread is now going, I think it's probably time for me to be true to my initial intent. If anyone wants to discuss religion with me 'off-list', they know where to find me!

Kind Regards, John

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I can't speak for him, and it does seem that he may take the very 'academic' view and believes that absence of evidence for existence can never be taken as evidence for non-existence. If that is the case, then, as I have indicated in my exchanges with him, I do not support that aspect of his belief - for reasons I have explained.

OK - fair enough.

I guess you confused me by expressing approval of things with which you do not agree.

 

[JohnW2]

OK - fair enough. I guess you confused me by expressing approval of things with which you do not agree.

Apologies for confusing you. As you will have seen, when you threw out an extreme example, I immediately realised that my 'approval' needed qualification, which I then presented, I think pretty clearly.

In real-world (rather than extreme hypothetical) scenarios, I don't think it is all that common that evidence that something existed (if it existed) would be so 'obvious' (or, at least, easily obtained) that the absence of such evidence can reasonably be taken as 'proof' of non-existence. In most situations, I would therefore 'approve' (without qualification) what stillp actually wrote. However, I agree that I should not have 'approved' (without qualification) his statement unless it had been written as "Absence of proof is not necessarily proof of absence".

However, if 'proving' is taken to mean "100% certainty" then, as I have said, 'proving a negative' (such as proving absence) is very often impossible, so, as per what you have been saying, the best one can do is to show 'absence of proof' (of the corresponding 'positive'). Given the absence of alternatives, that's what we have to content ourselves with, and (as I've said) all it needs is a slight moderation of language - i.e. whilst, in that situation, it is not strictly correct to say "X does not exist", it will very often be possible, reasonable and correct to say things like "It is incredibly unlikely that X exists". In 'tangible' situations, it will often even be possible to give an approximate quantification of "incredibly unlikely", and that is what is generally done, whenever it can be, in a scientific context.

Kind Regards, John

 

[ban-all-sheds]

The problem with that is that it means that anybody can invent a claim of the existence of absolutely anything, even if there is no evidence for it's existence, there are no unexplained phenomena which it could explain and there is no known mechanism by which it could possibly work, and nobody can say "No - you are wrong, there is no such thing".

 

[EFLImpudence]

I believe such is the case in the US.

For very little finance one can invent and register, if that's the right word, another religion - or anything called a religion (e.g. scientology) and then it is protected under the freedom of religion amendment.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I wonder what it really is about Scientology which has so many people so alarmed.

It has to be more than just a scheme to separate gullible fools from their money - there are lots of those, and there are lots of organisations which are "a potential menace to the personality and well-being of those so deluded as to become its followers".

 

[JohnW2]

The problem with that is that it means that anybody can invent a claim of the existence of absolutely anything, even if there is no evidence for it's existence, there are no unexplained phenomena which it could explain and there is no known mechanism by which it could possibly work, and nobody can say "No - you are wrong, there is no such thing".

Anybody (including yourself) is obviously free to make such a statement if they so wish. However, as I have said, if they want to stay on the right side of 'scientific correctness' (and assuming that we are not talking about one of those situations as described in my 'qualification'), they only need to 'water down' their statement very slightly, so that they are not asserting an absolute truth - e.g. something like "You are almost certainly wrong, it is incredibly unlikely that there is any such thing.".

Kind Regards, John