Talk:The Dragon in My Garage

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Surely the title should not have all those capital letters in it? ħuman 00:59, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Surely it should. It is the title of a chapter in the Sagan book, and is capitalized as such in the book itself. Aboriginal Noise ^{Theist, barely hanging by a nail} 01:13, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I made that clear in the article. ħuman 04:52, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

And don't call him Shirley. SJ ^Debaser 01:27, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

You bastard! Aboriginal Noise ^{Theist, barely hanging by a nail} 01:31, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Off with her head! ħuman 04:52, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing up the analogy/chapter confusion thing. --^{Ask me about your mother} 13:59, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

No problem. Once I understood the situation it was easy. ħuman 22:12, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Exoplanets as yesterday's dragons

It seems to me that people accepted the existence of exoplanets, an idea propagandized by science fiction and certain cults, as a faith position based on no evidence before the 1990's. Yet skeptics seem to have exempted the exoplanet claim from dragonhood even though it used to meet Sagan's criteria. Why did exoplanets receive special treatment?

Advancedatheist (talk) 05:52, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

We (well, people who were actually around at the time, unlike me) didn't accept them on faith, but because there was reason to expect their existence. Similarly, I am of the opinion that there is 'reason to expect' there to be complex chemical interactions occuring in the universe that could be argued to be categorised as life, I don't have 'faith' in it. Peter ^{Monomorium antarcticum} 06:04, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

This misses the point of the Dragon parable entirely. While we technically had an absence of evidence of exoplanets until recently, we didn't effectively have a method for gathering said evidence anyway, so it couldn't really inform our decision either way. Our only evidence was that our star has planets, and the assumption that we're not particularly special. The garage dwelling dragon is about someone doing extremely fast footwork to exempt their hypothesis from evidence no matter what is suggested - even to the point where you know they must have an internal model in their head that is equivalent to "the dragon does not exist". Exoplanets, on the other hand, people actually said "we can look for this or that, now how do we do that?". No one pulls the "but you can't test for them that way but it still exists" trick that the dragon parable involves. ^sshole 11:24, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Catholic section

Is the Catholic section really an example of this? The article talks about suggesting real-world tests and getting given reasons they won't work. The Catholic example talks about getting given two contradictory attributes, pointing out that they are contradictory, and getting given reasons they're not contradictory. 2.31.1.116 (talk) 08:34, 10 March 2019 (UTC)