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
To some degree, this comes down to prior probabilities and direct and indirect evidence. So, there’s an absence of direct evidence of aliens, but we know that we exist, and there are many stars, with new exoplanets being discovered practically daily, so the indirect evidence of at least the preconditions for life is pretty high. When it comes to gods, there seems to be a lack of direct evidence, and the indirect evidence doesn’t seem, well, evident. So, the phrase “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, when placed in a larger context, makes more sense, to me at least.
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