The important thing is that you should expect, with very good confidence, to have found the toxic effects of the drug if there were any. If it is so, then not having found such effects is good evidence. You do not expect to have a proof that ghosts do not exist, if they don’t, that’s what makes ‘because’ be a fallacy. You do not expect to have a proof the pills are unsafe, before you did proper testing, either; and even after testing it may easily be unsafe and there’s certain risk remaining. The reasoning about pills used to be every bit as fallacious as the reasoning about ghosts—and far more deadly, before the mid 20th century or so, from which point we arranged the testing as to expect to find most of the toxic effects before approving drugs.
re: circularity
Well, if there weren’t any other claims about electrons or god, those two claims would not even be claims but simply word definitions. The ‘entity we think we seen everywhere and call electrons leaves tracks because of such and such’ is the real argument, and ‘god the creator of the universe personally wrote the bible’ is the real argument. If we actually expected bible to be less likely to exist without God, then the bible would have been evidence, but as such I’d say the likehood of bible-like-religious-text is at very best entirely unrelated to existence or non-existence of god.
That’s btw the way my atheism is, except other way around: nothing in religion is coupled in any way what so ever to existence or non-existence of god; i don’t need to know if god exists or not to entirely reject religion and be strongly anti-religious. If anything, existence of multiple religions and the evil things that religions did and how they clashed with each other, would seem like a kind of thing that would be less likely in universe that has the creator god who watches over it, and constitute a (weak) evidence against existence of god (and fairly strong evidence against existence of god that intervenes etc). For me the existence of religions (the way they are) is a weak evidence that God does not exist.
re: pill.
The important thing is that you should expect, with very good confidence, to have found the toxic effects of the drug if there were any. If it is so, then not having found such effects is good evidence. You do not expect to have a proof that ghosts do not exist, if they don’t, that’s what makes ‘because’ be a fallacy. You do not expect to have a proof the pills are unsafe, before you did proper testing, either; and even after testing it may easily be unsafe and there’s certain risk remaining. The reasoning about pills used to be every bit as fallacious as the reasoning about ghosts—and far more deadly, before the mid 20th century or so, from which point we arranged the testing as to expect to find most of the toxic effects before approving drugs.
re: circularity
Well, if there weren’t any other claims about electrons or god, those two claims would not even be claims but simply word definitions. The ‘entity we think we seen everywhere and call electrons leaves tracks because of such and such’ is the real argument, and ‘god the creator of the universe personally wrote the bible’ is the real argument. If we actually expected bible to be less likely to exist without God, then the bible would have been evidence, but as such I’d say the likehood of bible-like-religious-text is at very best entirely unrelated to existence or non-existence of god.
That’s btw the way my atheism is, except other way around: nothing in religion is coupled in any way what so ever to existence or non-existence of god; i don’t need to know if god exists or not to entirely reject religion and be strongly anti-religious. If anything, existence of multiple religions and the evil things that religions did and how they clashed with each other, would seem like a kind of thing that would be less likely in universe that has the creator god who watches over it, and constitute a (weak) evidence against existence of god (and fairly strong evidence against existence of god that intervenes etc). For me the existence of religions (the way they are) is a weak evidence that God does not exist.