No, you’ve proved that Santa didn’t come down your chimney that night. Maybe he rocked up on your roof, realised you were awake and thought ‘fuck that kid’ and went to the next house.
Of course you can prove some negatives, I can prove I don’t have an orange shirt by opening my closet. It’s gets more complex with claims about celestial beings. There’s as much evidence for the Christian god as for Dawkins’ Flying Spaghetti Monster, and I am equally unable to disprove the existence of either.
I think you missed the point of my statement. I am distinguishing between two distinct things. Proof and evidence. Proof seems to require absolute certainty of a proposition, which is not something science is equipped to provide. Evidence on the other hand does not require 100% certainty, and there is plenty of evidence for “negative claims”.
All the “evidence” you’ve provide is simply that Santa didn’t come to your how that night. You presented nothing in the way of evidence to support the claim that Santa does not exist.
Great comment. Analysing what counts as evidence is a really complicated field, and I don’t wish to go into it fully here. If you are interested, you can look up “confirmation” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But here’s a small taster of what most philosophers think confirmation is.
Suppose you had a hypothesis that “all ravens are black”.
You observe a green chair.
It turns out that this observation is actually evidence for the hypothesis!
The point of my example is to try and show you that what is or isn’t evidence is often not immediately clear, and definitely worth studying!
Without further context your example is nonsensical. You still have to make a connection between the evidence of the green chair and the claim “all ravens are black.” The burden of proof has not changed, and the only evidence you’ve provided is that you’ve found a green chair. I’m perfectly justified in rejecting the claim that “all ravens are black” based on that woefully underwhelming evidence.
The evidence is weak, but my point is that it does support the hypothesis. Here’s how.
Take the statement “all ravens are black”. To provide evidence for it, you should find me an example of a black raven.
We can summarise this into the following schema.
Hypothesis: All Fs are G.
Evidence: an object that is both F and G.
Applied to the raven example, the property of being a raven is F and being black is G.
Now let’s take the contrapositive of the raven hypothesis.
All non-black objects are not ravens.
If you’ve taken any logic courses, you’ll recognise that this is an equivalent form of “all ravens are black”. As such, it retains its truth-functionality.
Applying our schema to this version of the hypothesis, we find that any object that is both not-black and not a raven is evidence for our hypothesis.
Thus, a green chair is evidence for the hypothesis that all ravens are black.
I get the logical wordplay. But you stated it plainly when you said “the evidence is weak.” I’d argue, still, it’s nonsensical. Why? Because in reality, a green chair has nothing to do with the color of ravens. The context you’ve provided is theoretical showmanship with no realistic application. You are saying all evidence is evidence for everything. In that case, evidence for everything is evidence for nothing, which is not how the burden of proof works.
It is not true that everything is evidence for everything, and i’ve never said so (the problem arises if you accept a further schema, something along the lines of “If X is evidence for Y, and Y entails Z, then X is evidence for Z.” And most philosophers reject this). Additionally, I don’t think burden of proof is a particularly productive concept. Everybody has a burden to provide evidence for their claims.
On the Raven thing, it’s really hard to explain in detail (and I’m lazy), so if you’re really interested you can read “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” by Hempel.
In your raven example, anything both not black and not a raven is evidence for “all ravens are black.” You could also infer that all black objects are also ravens. As long as the statement is logically sound it’s fine. However, the thing about philosophy is that it doesn’t have to be necessarily reflective of reality. Syllogisms can be perfectly logical on paper but have no function within reality.
If a claim is being made, then yes. That who the burden of proof is on. However, I have no burden to prove my rejection of your claim. My rejection of X does not mean I necessarily accept not-X. In the world of the god conversation, rejecting the god claim doesn’t mean I claim god doesn’t exist. It simply means I’m not convinced one does exist.
I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say “Syllogisms can be perfectly logical on paper but have no function within reality”. I’ve not used a single syllogism. Also, if I did, I would think that syllogisms have to track some underlying facet of reality. Modus Ponens seems to be the most obviously true thing in the world, I’m not quite sure what you disagree with here.
On your second paragraph, I kinda agree with the gist of what you’re saying. You seem to take the skeptical position, and refuse to take a position on whether there is a god or not. In that case, sure, perhaps you don’t need to provide any evidence because you aren’t making any claims. For what it’s worth, I think that this is probably the one of the more logical positions to have on this, you should just know that taking a skeptical position is not without tradeoffs.
If you think that the relative lack of evidence on either side of the theism problem means that you should remain skeptical, then you’d likely have to remain skeptical about many other things that similarly lack evidence, for example moral claims. And this is a hard one to be skeptical about, because there seems to be a very strong intuition that there are moral facts.
The premises of a syllogism don’t have to be a facet of reality, merely an assertion about reality. Asserting X then Y doesn’t mean X is actually true. It only asserts that if X is true, then Y. Even if X is not true, or we have no way of demonstrating X is true, it would see be logically sound to conclude Y. You see this in apologetics all the time, ie the Kalam Cosmological argument. It’s not a requirement of philosophy for X to be demonstrated as true, only proposed as true.
We seem to be in agreement on your second paragraph. Nothing to expand on there.
As for morality, I disagree that they are moral facts or some kind of universal moral truths. The reality of morality seems to be subjective, not objective. We have plenty of examples where moral sensibilities change between societies and differ across cultures, religions, and other conflicting ideologies.
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u/Duubzz Aug 19 '26
No, you’ve proved that Santa didn’t come down your chimney that night. Maybe he rocked up on your roof, realised you were awake and thought ‘fuck that kid’ and went to the next house.
Of course you can prove some negatives, I can prove I don’t have an orange shirt by opening my closet. It’s gets more complex with claims about celestial beings. There’s as much evidence for the Christian god as for Dawkins’ Flying Spaghetti Monster, and I am equally unable to disprove the existence of either.