General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT trump is going to lose in November. [View all]qazplm135
(7,447 posts)on one side of the scale is your theory, on the other side is the evidence to support your theory.
If there's no evidence, then the scale keeps your theory down, with no support.
If there's some evidence, then the scale lifts your theory up to the plausible, the possible.
If there's a lot of evidence, then the scale lifts up your theory so high that it becomes a very likely "way things are."
To your "Example" the "evidence" for the lack of a certain kind of ape, I'm assuming you mean an ape that was thought to be extinct but was later determined not to be was probably the fact that we saw that it used to exist but then saw that it was no longer present in the biosphere. We used absence of evidence to prove evidence of absence which is often a logical fallacy.
Then evidence came along that they existed.
Put another way, the reason I am an agnostic and not an atheist is because I don't believe in the idea that you can KNOW that God doesn't exist. You can REASON that there is no evidence for God. You can BELIEVE that God doesn't exist. But you cannot KNOW that God doesn't exist. You cannot PROVE that God doesn't exist. What you can do is prove (given enough time and knowledge) everything that happens in the universe and the mechanisms and reasons behind it.
But don't listen to me, listen to Carl Sagan:
"Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?"