Australia! Land of myth and legend! A land filled with convicts and crocodile related personalities (five pop culture references in two sentences, I’m impressed with myself). But does this land really exist? Could there really be a land where the reply to ‘which animals here are not dangerous’ is “Some of the sheep.”
Why am I asking whether Australia exists? Well in a recent “discussion” with someone, regarding my requirement for evidence and proof for the things that he was claiming, He decided to pull out the tried and un-true argument that all a skeptic is is a doubter. That unless I have seen it with my own eyes I cannot say it is real (I actually treat my own eyes as not very reliable as I believe that human perception is fallible.) and since I have not been to Australia I must not believe in it either.
Well there is a lot of evidence that Australia does exist. I know people who have lived in Australia, seen countless images of the place, and can even view it from space using Google. So why do I accept this evidence that Australia exists when I have never been there, and even if I had couldn’t it have been an elaborate hoax. Couldn’t it have been a Truman Show like conspiracy to keep me from knowing? Where do I, or anyone else for that matter, set our bar for acceptable evidence?
I set my bar depending on what the claim is. It’s that simple, and while this may sound like a double standard, bear with me for a second and I can explain it. We judge a claim first by it’s plausibility, the claim that there is a piece of land called Australia is completely plausible. There is nothing that breaks my worldview in this assertion. So the bar for evidence is very low. Make a claim about a continent called Atlantis and the bar is also low. Make continued claims that Atlantis had lasers and used crystals to harness the energy of the cosmos and the bar of evidence shoots right back up again. The difference between Australia and Atlantis is that there is ample proof to exceed my evidence bar for Australia, and not enough (none) for the existence of Atlantis. The existence of Atlantis is further complicated by the size it is claimed to be in Plato’s writings (larger than all of northern Africa) A mass of land this big in the Atlantic would have profound implications on our current theory of continental drift.
Is the claim that an island once existed that has now been lost to the waves as ludicrous as claiming that a teapot floats between mars and the earth? No, it isn’t. It’s the other claims that surround Atlantis that make it ridiculous. If someone claims something extraordinary they better be able to back it up with some proof.
I have heard the argument against this reasoning, people claiming that if we required proof of all claims that we would believe nothing and things like Newton’s laws would be ignored by science. This is ludicrous. Newton did not come up with the how of gravity. if he had only come up with the idea that everything with mass was attracted to each other thing, both in the heavens and on the earth, then his ideas would have been shelved until he had some proof. He came up with the math to prove it (and with few exceptions the math did hold very true).
So it is because of this that I do accept that Australia exists. There are literally millions of pieces of good evidence that Australia exists, and none that Atlantis exists.
Hey, I made it an entire post about the requirement for evidence without quoting “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Well, almost a full post I guess…
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