How can you say it’s a coin flip, but also “the people saying there’s no evidence [of the affirmative] have no leg to stand on”?
Sure, literally speaking, there is some evidence.
But as far as I can tell, when people say ‘there’s no evidence that x’ they don’t mean that there is literally no evidence. There is some shred of compatible evidence with almost everything- with all sorts of ridiculous things that no-one rational believes.
As far as I can tell, when someone says there is ‘no evidence for x’ they mean that there is no evidential basis to believe x. The evidence doesn’t give you any reason to prefer the hypothesis.
That seems to me like a vaguer, and probably less useful, way of taking essentially the same position as yours. It kind of proves the benefit of putting concrete probabilities on things, but I don’t think it’s all that substantively different from your position.
How can you say it’s a coin flip, but also “the people saying there’s no evidence [of the affirmative] have no leg to stand on”?
Sure, literally speaking, there is some evidence.
But as far as I can tell, when people say ‘there’s no evidence that x’ they don’t mean that there is literally no evidence. There is some shred of compatible evidence with almost everything- with all sorts of ridiculous things that no-one rational believes.
As far as I can tell, when someone says there is ‘no evidence for x’ they mean that there is no evidential basis to believe x. The evidence doesn’t give you any reason to prefer the hypothesis.
That seems to me like a vaguer, and probably less useful, way of taking essentially the same position as yours. It kind of proves the benefit of putting concrete probabilities on things, but I don’t think it’s all that substantively different from your position.