Why is this the case? Wouldn’t a lack of evidence hint at, but not necessarily prove that this could be the case?
In: Biology
I have ten boxes sitting on the table in front of me, and I tell you that one of them contains a valuable gold bar. You’re not entirely sure you believe me. So you open each box and look inside, and you find no gold bars. You now have firm evidence that there isn’t a gold bar.
But let’s say I have 100,000 boxes in front of me and tell you that at least one of them contains a gold bar. There’s absolutely no way you can check every single box for a gold bar. You can check 10 boxes, find no gold bars, and assume that there’s less than a 1:10 chance of any given box to contain a gold bar. You can check 1,000 boxes and assume the chance is less than 1:1,000. But short of opening every single box there’s no way for you to state with certainty that there are *no* gold bars in any of the boxes.
Most things to which your statement apply resemble the latter case (100,000 boxes) more than the former (10 boxes). It’s impossible–or at least infeasible–to examine every single possibility so there’s always a chance, however small, that there’s something there to find. That something might be wildly improbable or uncommon, but that’s not the same thing as impossible or nonexistent.
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