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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Anonymous 0 Comments

What that phrase means is not that something exist if you can’t disprove it but that the fact you can’t prove the existence of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, using the god example what he means is that even if there’s no direct evidence or proof that god exist, that lack of evidence doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. Carl was a non believer but he was also willing to accept the possibility, as a man of science you can’t reject something entirely simply because it goes against what you believe

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