what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

What can be asserted without proof can be dissmissed without proof.

Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Absence of Evidence does not mean Evidence of Absence

The elementary rules of logic: that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Sitting in a Court of law, I can receive no evidence but what comes under the sanction of an oath.

Appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g. There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.