eli5: Carl Sagan’s absence of evidence

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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

147 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – aliens could exist. In the case of aliens, we can think of all kinds of excellent explanations why we haven’t found any evidence for them.

In the case of a deity, I cannot think of any good explanations for the lack of evidence. Not even one.

Anonymous 0 Comments

dude was just pushing science.. you can’t make a claim without evidence.

i’d say an good addendum to that concept would be “great claims require great evidence” and so in the context of god, you would need some insane proof or reason to think we were put here by a man in a cloud and that one day we will roam golden streets and have 72 virgins to fuck whenever we want(bible is bible to me). the claim that aliens could exist is pretty easy to prove in that you can just look at the size of the universe and point to the possibility that other life would be so .. alien.. that we would not recognize it. again not proof of anything, but it puts your assumptions in check.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What that phrase means is not that something exist if you can’t disprove it but that the fact you can’t prove the existence of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, using the god example what he means is that even if there’s no direct evidence or proof that god exist, that lack of evidence doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. Carl was a non believer but he was also willing to accept the possibility, as a man of science you can’t reject something entirely simply because it goes against what you believe

Anonymous 0 Comments

dude was just pushing science.. you can’t make a claim without evidence.

i’d say an good addendum to that concept would be “great claims require great evidence” and so in the context of god, you would need some insane proof or reason to think we were put here by a man in a cloud and that one day we will roam golden streets and have 72 virgins to fuck whenever we want(bible is bible to me). the claim that aliens could exist is pretty easy to prove in that you can just look at the size of the universe and point to the possibility that other life would be so .. alien.. that we would not recognize it. again not proof of anything, but it puts your assumptions in check.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What that phrase means is not that something exist if you can’t disprove it but that the fact you can’t prove the existence of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, using the god example what he means is that even if there’s no direct evidence or proof that god exist, that lack of evidence doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. Carl was a non believer but he was also willing to accept the possibility, as a man of science you can’t reject something entirely simply because it goes against what you believe

Anonymous 0 Comments

We don’t know if aliens exist, because we have no real evidence to suggest if they do or don’t. We don’t know if any god exist but we do know that humans evolved over billions of years and that the Big Bang occurred even further back. Life was not created in six days 6,000 years ago. We know this, so any faith that depends on that belief is false.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What that phrase means is not that something exist if you can’t disprove it but that the fact you can’t prove the existence of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, using the god example what he means is that even if there’s no direct evidence or proof that god exist, that lack of evidence doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. Carl was a non believer but he was also willing to accept the possibility, as a man of science you can’t reject something entirely simply because it goes against what you believe

Anonymous 0 Comments

We don’t know if aliens exist, because we have no real evidence to suggest if they do or don’t. We don’t know if any god exist but we do know that humans evolved over billions of years and that the Big Bang occurred even further back. Life was not created in six days 6,000 years ago. We know this, so any faith that depends on that belief is false.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is just a generalisation of the fact that it is usually very very hard to prove that no sollution exists at all to a given problem.

We can safely say that we dont have a sollution, but to say for certain that there is none is next to impossible usually.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We don’t know if aliens exist, because we have no real evidence to suggest if they do or don’t. We don’t know if any god exist but we do know that humans evolved over billions of years and that the Big Bang occurred even further back. Life was not created in six days 6,000 years ago. We know this, so any faith that depends on that belief is false.