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
I like to use the analogy of a fishing net to tackle your point about why we might apply this principle to not write off the possibility of aliens while still writing off the possibility of a god.
You can imagine our understanding and observation of the universe being like a fishing net, where it works at catching fish of a certain size, but fish that are too small for the net will slip right through.
The concept of a god seems like a big fish that our net would definitely catch if one existed, while aliens are like tiny plankton that can easily slip through our net.
So, for a big fish, like a god, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence in a way that it isn’t for aliens.
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