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
Carl Sagan is being “philosophical” here in that he’s discussing topics that you would find in a Philosophy class and not a Physics class. I guess this branch of philosophy is called metaphysics so there is the link.
A lot of Cosmologists get philosophical quite a bit as they are seeking to understand the origins of the universe and the laws that govern it so they end up asking questions like “what is the universe” and “where did it all come from”. They especially get like this when they are narrating television documentaries aimed at a more popular audience.
The branches of metaphysics you want to look into are Ontology (the nature of being) and epistemology (the nature of knowledge). Philosophers for centuries debated how to know if God exists if there is no direct evidence.
So there is the concept of “proving a negative” and the “absence of evidence” which each have their own Wikipedia pages. You might be able to prove that a jug contains no milk because there is an absence of evidence that there is any milk in that jug. But you can’t prove that I have never committed a murder simply because there is no evidence of me doing such a thing. When is it OK and when is it not? You can spend years studying that in college.
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