The Importance of Background Knowledge

In some cases, background knowledge is enough to disprove a claim. Seeing everyone in Arlington National Cemetery rose from the dead contradicts our background knowledge that those bodies are still in the ground. Evidence is not always proof, but it does make something more likely to be true. A proposition or what can be the case is not evidence; there's an infinite number of propositions. But when a person asserts a proposition is true, that is evidence for the proposition. It might be bad evidence, it might be irrefutable evidence, but it's evidence that needs to be judged on its own merits and not dismissed through faulty epistemologies like claims are not evidence.