Often the argument from silence is
said to be invalid, but this is not quite true. Rather, it needs to be in a
particular form to be valid and useful. Namely, the silence has to be
unexpected if the event had taken place; that is, one would expect someone to
have written about something if it had been the type of event that would have
caught people’s attention. For example, entering a room and not seeing an
elephant inside is good evidence that there is no such animal there, because if
there were an elephant in the room, you would certainly have seen it;
conversely, if you never went in to look, then the failure to see an elephant
is not evidence that there was not an elephant inside the room. ON the other
hand, if you enter the room and do not see a flea, it is not strong evidence
that there is no flea in the room, because it would be hard to observe; not
seeing the flea is almost expected, whether or not there is such an insect in
the room. (Aaron Adair, “A Critical Look at the History of Interpreting the Star
of Bethlehem in Scientific Literature and Biblical Studies,” in The Star of
Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the
Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy, ed. Peter
Barthel and George van Kooten [Leiden: Brill, 2015], 68 n. 78)
