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

As an agnostic scientist: I’m agnostic because the scientific method works on things being disprovable. There is no evidence, IMO, that God exists – but likewise I can’t disprove that He does in some form. So I can’t, as a reasonable scientist, insist that there is no God. But I CAN demonstrate that the Bible is wrong about certain things (Noah’s flood, Evolution, etc).

So in my view, you have three options: (1) Believe in God as long as your beliefs don’t conflict with science. (2) Decide not to believe in God, since there’s no good proof either way. (3) Be Agnostic, where you kind of decide to sit on the fence of uncertainty and be okay with that.

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