I gave you a scientific observation.
Yeah. You’re responding to an edit I made before I read that observation - looking out the window and so forth.
Your initial response - the one the edit was responding to - is quoted in that same post, so I think you knew what I was talking about, unless you aren’t reading.
Lets clear up that confusion right now for the sake of other readers and move on.
If we are looking at a lighter, then we must conclude that it is a lighter. It is actually the burden of the naysayers who are saying that the lighter is actually something else in disguise who will have to show otherwise.
You’re half right.
The first part, you’re correct. It’s an incomplete analogy.
If I’m NASA, and the lighter is the globe earth, and you refuse to believe it’s there, you’re under no obligation to just take my word for it. Nobody would blame you for saying something like, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” That’s only rational. Here’s the problem.
If you just stop there, and don’t add more information to the analogy, it’s reasonable for you to at least take the agnostic position - “I don’t know/I’ll believe it when
I see it” - as you presently do. Frankly, that bolded half of the quote is more solipsism than agnosticism, but I digress...
With nothing but you, me, and my claim about a lighter, as I said, you’re under no obligation to believe me.
But just like globe earth, or any claim for that matter, if you just stop at the claim, you aren’t getting the full picture.
How might your opinion about the lighter change, for instance, if you and I are co-workers, and you’ve seen me smoking, and you’ve smelled the ash and the tar on me when I come back from breaks, and you hear me coughing of early onset emphysema, and you know my other smoker friends? Bear in mind; you still have never actually seen me use or show the lighter, you only have my claim and the circumstantial evidence... also I don’t smoke in real life, but this is just a thought experiment, I’m a smoker and we’re co-workers in it, work with me.
Add to this that there are other people in the office who know both of us. They also know what you know because they’ve seen it and smelled it and heard it as well. They’re also aware that I say there’s a lighter in my pocket, and most of them believe it. You know this because they’ve told you so; you still haven’t seen the lighter with your own eyes.
Once again, you're still under no obligation to believe my positive claim about a lighter in my pocket. However, once we add the context of all of this circumstantial evidence, suddenly your position of “I’ll believe it when I see it" doesn't seem quite as rational as it did before we took a look at all the evidence.
After we finally have a complete picture, or at least a more complete picture than we had previously, do you still feel as certain in your disbelief - or at the very least, agnostic dismissal - of my claim that there’s a lighter in my pocket? What do you think your odds are of being correct if you say I’m wrong, versus simply taking my word for it?
Of course, I could always be lying, but unless we’re two friends and I’m playing perhaps the lamest April Fools joke ever, you’re going to start grasping at straws and alleging all kinds of things to try and rationalize some kind of motive, so you can then ascribe it to me as an post-rational explanation for wanting to lie about the lighter. At that point, we’re treading down the path of conspiratorial thinking. I have plenty to say on that subject as well, but as I said, that’s not the topic of this thread. More importantly, it’s completely irrelevant to the question of how we compare and contrast the two models against reality and each other - or the evidence that there's a lighter in my pocket, versus a grenade, for that matter.
Again, you can apply this frame of thinking to just about ANY truth claim. Clearly we believe things even if we don’t have direct proof in front of our eyes, and that’s not irrational.
So I say again, you’re right with respect to my analogy in its original form... but you’re wrong for stopping there, just as you’re wrong for simply stopping at the authoritative claim about the globe model.
Your second part about the burden of proof is also half right.
In general, anyone making any claim, positive or negative, carries a burden of proof. It’s just considered good etiquette to not force someone else into making a positive claim before the first one has been fully vetted.
When you say, “The earth IS a flat, motionless plane in a dome,” and I say, “The earth IS NOT a flat, motionless plane in a dome,” those are two competing claims. The former is positive, the latter negative - naysayers, etc.. At that point, you don’t have to DISPROVE globe earth, you just have to PROVE flat earth. Likewise, I don’t have to PROVE globe earth, I just have to DISPROVE flat earth.
When you make a positive claim, your job is to present evidence supporting your hypothesis. My job, by contrast, is to point out inconsistencies, incongruencies, and other things that complicate or otherwise cast doubt on your hypothesis. You may object to my objections and so on, but the idea is - at least in an HONEST dialogue - I am only playing the role of skeptic so that we can challenge the strength of your claim. Likewise, we may switch roles to challenge the strength of my claims, and so on. In that process, we may in fact go over some information that IMPLIES the inverse - me making the positive claim and you negative, or vice versa - but this is incidental and unavoidable in a binary polar dichotomy, and so irrelevant to the initial claim.
Like I said, it's simply considered good etiquette to observe the initial positive-negative dichotomy and do things one at a time, not turn the tables on a dime in a vain attempt to trip up your opponent. You're free to ignore that just as readily as you are to deny the globe earth model.
But, in general, when you make a claim, you should stick to providing supporting evidence until it has all been ferreted out and fitfully scrutinized. That only makes sense for the sake of having a structured, productive conversation. To turn around and say to your opponent, “Well tell me why the earth IS a round, oblate sphere spinning on its axis in a void, Mr. Smarty Pants,” would be nothing short of premature (and immature, in that context and most times this writer has observed people fail to avoid this particular fallacy).
So again, you’re right when you say that the burden of proof rests on the naysayers... you’re wrong to forget that it rests first on the proclaimers.
As for the grenade analogy, that goes back to invoking conspiracy.
You’re saying the grenade represents your claim that there’s a conspiracy, and the “lighter” and me are therefore dangerous and not to be trusted. This is what you mean, no? Correct me if I’m missing something; I want to communicate effectively and be sure I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not here to fuck with you.
If I’m correct, this aspect of the analogy which you’ve added is, I’m afraid, nothing to do with presenting evidence that the earth IS a flat, motionless plane beneath a dome, nor is it defending against objections that it IS NOT.
And caveat: I have no idea what YOU personally believe about the flat earth model, I just used those descriptions as an example.
Would you like to move on to a discussion about your observations regarding the horizon?