My understanding of "evidence" appears to differ from everyone else's.

My understanding of the word "evidence" seems to differ from almost everyone else's. I thought "evidence" meant any empirical data that increases the chance of a hypothesis or theory being true. Such evidence need not make a hypothesis likely. The evidence might, for example, increase the likelihood of a hypothesis being true from 1% to 2%.

I also specifically don't think arguments are evidence. Arguments are employed to reason something through, but they are not evidence as I conceive it.

Finally, evidence isn't just confined to scientific evidence. For example, any personal experiences of a phenomenon are evidence for its existence.

But, as I said, everyone else seems to employ a different conception of the word "evidence". They appear to think it means scientific proof, and paradoxically, that reasoning is evidence!

Bill Nye, life after death, evidence

Bill Nye says there is no evidence for a life after death.

[Bill Nye] is bound by truth and science, and admits that there has been no evidence for [an afterlife].

All materialists/skeptics tend to say this. Obviously there's a great deal of evidence (NDEs, memories of previous lives, mediumship, apparitions, phenomena near death etc). Perhaps he means as in the sense that an afterlife doesn't play any role in our scientific theories? There again, unless we presuppose materialism, neither does embodied consciousness. But, even if materialism were intelligible, that would of course beg the question.

Let's imagine that every one of us could remember an apparent past life with the emotional identification to that past person and the memories mainly checking out. Let's also imagine that every single person that dies gives evidence of experiencing a deathbed vision, and that every one that nearly dies experiences a near-death experience.

If what we currently have constitutes zero evidence, so too must there be zero evidence in the scenario painted above since that just represents the same type of evidence -- albeit more extensive -- that we currently have ( 1,000 times 0, is still 0).

But, then it seems to me saying that there is zero evidence fails to convey anything. The problem here is that Bill Nye and other skeptics are defining the word "evidence" in an unreasonable manner. See my previous post what is evidence?