Do you get to decide for yourself what is evidence and what conclusion that evidence supports?
Or is there a standard that something must surpass to be considered evidence and a methodology to showing how the evidence necessarily supports the conclusion being claimed by it.
For example, is the Bible evidence of the existence of God?
Is the Bible evidence because I say it is evidence? Or is the Bible evidence because surpasses a standard of evidence necessary to be considered evidence.
And, if we except the latter, is it evidence of God's existence because I say it is or because I have methodically show that it necessarily leads to that conclusion?
Bonus question: If you think there is a standard that must be surpassed for something to be considered evidence, what is it and does the Bible meet that?
Evidence is like the raw material that is processed by our critical thinking and reasoning skills, allowing us to reach conclusions. The problem is the less evidence you have, the harder it is to converge your reasoning to a single steady state conclusion. The Bible has more than one piece of evidence from Prophets and history, over thousands of years, helping to converge the conclusions of the faithful.
As an example of not enough evidence to converge to one conclusion, even with the best logic; say we met a new person at a restaurant and they are eating. It was a blind introduction date. Seeing them eating is a piece of sound evidence, so what can you conclude from this one piece of evidence? We know they did not wait for us to eat. Maybe they have an eating disorder. Maybe they were so hungry they could not wait. Or maybe the food is so good that explains why they could not wait and now eat so fast. Or maybe they do not have much time and are trying to multitask lunch and this introduction blind date. That evidence is not enough to converge to any one conclusion. We need more evidence to narrow these options down, to one conclusion than can combine all the evidence, and make it hard or impossible to diverge.
Manmade climate change has never before happened on the earth. Science did not start keeping records until about 1880 and few if any even notice or considered this possibility of man made global warming until a few decade ago. It surprised me how some were able to draw such a dogmatic conclusion with one occurrence of a phenomena that has not even finished one cycle, while never happening before.
We have a lot more evidence of the earth naturally causing climate change over the past billion years. We are still warming from the last Ice Age. The glaciers have been melting for some time. This bulk of natural evidence makes it easier to converge to the conclusion the earth can and has caused climate change. But we are supposed to ignore all that natural evidence, in favor of a conclusion that came from the first occurrence of a postulated global man made phenomena.
Less evidence opens the door to fantasy and money making scams being sold as science. This is made easier, if you can make it harder for others to use any convergent conclusions based on large evidence sources. Those deniers of the first occurrence of evidence, need to be dealt with if they show all that natural evidence. Minimal evidence can be twisted, with the natural divergence, scammed into a fake convergence, with political games.
Remember the Russian Collusion Scam. There was minimal circumstantial evidence but a very bold dogmatic conclusion, reinforced by a large propaganda team. The same team is in charge of this first occurrence evidence of a man made theory that moves a lot of tax payer money to allies in the Private sector. The international community also has it hands outs, with skim along the way.
