Big fan of Carl Sagan, he was like a father figure to me, I’m partially molded by him.
That said, something he used to say all the time really baffled me, still does:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
He said this when talking about aliens.
However: Sagan was a famous non believer.
How does this aphorism reconcile with the existence or non existence of a god?
If “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” does that apply to a god as well?
Is there a god even though there is no evidence of him/her/it?
In: 95
It’s about the specific claims made.
Absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence when someone makes a claim that includes evidence as part of the position or evidence could be reasonably expected if true.
Claiming that “prayer works” means that if true, one particular religious group would be richer, healthier, luckier etc. than everyone else. We don’t have any evidence of that. Every study of prayer concludes that it’s no better than chance. If true, we would expect this evidence to be in abundance but it’s not. Lack of evidence that the claim is true could reasonably lead you to conclude that the claim is false.
Claiming that aliens exist somewhere we would not expect evidence if true because they may be too far away to ever make contact. Lack of evidence here leads you no closer to concluding if the claim is true because we don’t expect evidence to be abundant.
ETA: Atheists are (for the most part) Agnostic about *any* god that could exist, but Atheist about the *specific* gods claimed to exist. The Same as Sagan not believing that aliens visit earth and abduct people in the mid-west but open to the idea about life somewhere in the universe.
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