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
Think of something that is very hard to prove false. My favorite example is that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth.
We currently have no evidence that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth. But the earth is already being orbited by tons and tons and tons of debris, from fragmented satellites, etc. It would be very hard to spot a bowling ball amongst it and we currently have no efficient way.
Science says there’s no way to prove a negative, in that we ought to go only off of affirmative tests — Not that there is no bowling ball in orbit around the planet, only that none of our current technology sees one. You only further and further corner possibilities, but much like dividing a number by half, you never reach zero.
If you extrapolate that to something like an omnipotent power, it is hard to research far and wide and deep and thoroughly enough to be conclusive enough, so you cannot prove that god doesn’t exist. However, you can instead scrutinize all existing reason to believe it to begin with as incredibly fallible, all of it being human-sourced, and thus victim to all the reasons for human error. None of it holds water. Science prefers things we cannot yet explain, of which there are many many things not related to religion at all, to human word, IE., ‘Trust me, it happened’, because one can be narrowed over time with affirmative tests, and the other only gets more doubtful as further evidence never arrives.
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