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 rephrase the quote…”just because there is no reason to believe something is true, that doesn’t mean it *isn’t* true.”
Atheism is commonly defined as the belief that no gods exist. A truer definition is the rejection of any claims that any gods *do* exist. These are distinct positions. It is similar to a jury in a trial: if a jury finds you “not guilty,” that doesn’t mean it finds you “innocent,” it just means they found the prosecution didn’t adequately make the case that you were guilty. This was generally Sagan’s position on the subject of gods, with the occasional variance.
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