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

dude was just pushing science.. you can’t make a claim without evidence.

i’d say an good addendum to that concept would be “great claims require great evidence” and so in the context of god, you would need some insane proof or reason to think we were put here by a man in a cloud and that one day we will roam golden streets and have 72 virgins to fuck whenever we want(bible is bible to me). the claim that aliens could exist is pretty easy to prove in that you can just look at the size of the universe and point to the possibility that other life would be so .. alien.. that we would not recognize it. again not proof of anything, but it puts your assumptions in check.

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