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
You’ve said multiple times in this thread that Sagan was “adamant” that God didn’t exist, this is inaccurate. In fact, he applied the exact principle you describe when thinking about God: “To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.” He didn’t call himself an atheist, since an atheist is confident there is no God. Further, he said “But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”
Which is all to say that your confusion comes because you assume Sagan was an avowed anti-God Atheist, he was not. He viewed the lack of evidence that a God exists and the lack of evidence that one does not exist as equally unconvincing, and chose a third path.
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