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
The burden of proof lies on the one with the extraordinary claim. It’s nearly impossible to prove a negative, so if someone has a claim to existence, they need to prove the existence.
Sagan’s claim is simply the other side of that coin. Just because we haven’t found evidence doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Einstein predicted gravity bending light, black holes, and gravitational waves with general relativity in 1916 with no evidence of them happening in the real world. Those were all observed for the first time in 1919, 1971, and 2015 respectively. If we had dismissed general relativity just because we had not seen any of these phenomenon, we would be a century behind in our understanding of physics.
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