eli5: Carl Sagan’s absence of evidence

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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?

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147 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

We don’t know if aliens exist, because we have no real evidence to suggest if they do or don’t. We don’t know if any god exist but we do know that humans evolved over billions of years and that the Big Bang occurred even further back. Life was not created in six days 6,000 years ago. We know this, so any faith that depends on that belief is false.

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