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
My answer is, it kind of depends on definitions, and our ability to examine whatever evidence is there (or isn’t).
If you want to claim as a fact there are no aliens anywhere, you would need somehow to observe every part of the universe across all time, which isn’t even remotely possible. But if you want to claim that there *are* aliens, or *have been* aliens somewhere, all it takes is one verifiable piece of evidence and that claim is proven.
The place where gods are different from aliens is in how the concept is defined. Alien life is pretty easy to identify: a living organism that originated outside of Earth. There are some quibbles about what actually constitutes “life” — after all, we’ve only seen one example of it — but I think most scientists and philosophers agree in broad terms that “we’ll know it when we see it.”
Gods, not so much. Even Earth’s various religions don’t really agree what the nature of a god would be. But we could limit the definition to the Abrahamic God as described in the Bible — that’s the most common definition in the culture that Sagan lived within. Assuming that definition, which includes the idea that God created the universe, then it seems that god would have to exist at least partly outside of the universe. And that’s a place (??) that our science can’t reach. And that’s an even harder proposition than looking for aliens. Science can’t observe “outside” at all, whatsoever, so that claim will remain purely philosophical rather than scientific.
One thing Science *can* do is examine certain behaviors of God as written in the Bible. For example, did God send a worldwide flood that killed all life on Earth except for eight people and a bunch of animal pairs that he saved on the Ark? Geology and genetics both can say: absolutely not, that never happened. But they say nothing about whether or not there’s a different kind of god who *didn’t* do that.
TLDR: define what a god is in a way that scientists can test, and then scientists can have that conversation. Until then, it’s not a scientific question.
Latest Answers