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To: LogicWings

I like all your fallacies, but they are not necessary.

Any thinking person can see the virtual impossibility of proving a negative. Even with one variable, the number of possible permutations that would require testing become enormous and thus practically impossible.

That's why scientists always design their experiments to produce positive evidence for something. Creationists are always saying that Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation. But that was not his experiments. He proved that broths became turbid with bacterial growth because bacteria were present in air. That is a positive proof, not a negative one.

The only thing that can ever be proved about spontaneous generation is that it exists. When some scientist shows a process for "life" appearing from "non-life" then spontaneous generation will become fact. It will never be disproved, because it is impossible to test every possible scenario.


739 posted on 11/12/2005 8:41:19 PM PST by furball4paws (One of the last Evil Geniuses, or the first of their return.)
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To: furball4paws
I like all your fallacies, but they are not necessary.

But they are. They are the root of rational thought. As you next said:

Any thinking person can see the virtual impossibility of proving a negative.

Any thinking person. And that thought requires logic. That specifically is what is lacking, the ability to think logically, to be redundant.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post. But cutting the legs out from under a faulty proposition means that you don't have to go any further. If an assertion is Fallacious then it can be dismissed at that point. No further discussion is needed.

That is my point.

742 posted on 11/12/2005 9:15:22 PM PST by LogicWings
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