is one of those stupid tropes that have gained currency among the sort of people who value cleverness over wisdom. It sounds great and is routinely trotted out to smack down anybody who argues for things like the existence of God or the reality of a miracle.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s only one problem: it\u2019s meaningless crap.<\/p>\n
There is no sliding evidentiary scale whereby claims of factuality require more and more astounding evidence until the biggest claim of all requires and infinite amount of stupefyingly awesome evidence to establish the claim. We do not require a tiny amount of evidence for petty theft, but virtually incredible evidence for murder.<\/p>\n
What we requires is sufficient evidence. Produce the purloined necklace from the suspect\u2019s pocket with his prints on it and that\u2019s enough. Produce the corpse with the bullet from the .45 belonging to the suspect, give motive, and demonstrate that he was seen by witnesses shooting the guy and you\u2019ve got a conviction. Nobody says, \u201cThe charge of murder is more extraordinary than the charge of petty theft, so in addition to this normal evidence we will need something extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
All this stupid meme really means is \u201cI dislike claims of the supernatural, so I\u2019m going to lard on a bunch of unreasonable demands in order to make fend off the obvious evidence. Is there a documented medical miracle? I won\u2019t pay attention to the evidence. Instead, I will demand to have such miracles occur in a laboratory (even though I would never demand that all murders and thefts occur in laboratories). If the evidence is overwhelming that the miracle, say \u201cgiving the gift of sight to a woman who had no pupils in her eyes<\/a>\u201c, took place, I will demand to know why the miracle does not occur to *everybody* and why all blind people are not healed.<\/p>\n