Saturday, February 19, 2022

Aaron Adair on When an "Argument from Silence" is Valid

  

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)