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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine a person in Europe in the year 1000 AD. They had no evidence that kangaroos existed, no European would visit Australia until 1606 after all. But kangaroos still existed.
They also had no evidence that Bigfoot existed in 1000 AD, but that doesn’t mean Bigfoot does exist.
Sagan is talking about what we can prove, and that’s it. Lack of proof something is real is NOT proof it doesn’t exist. It’s also not proof it does. Lack of proof is simply that, lack of proof.
Beyond proof which is what you can demonstrate with evidence, you have belief, belief is what you think to be true or not true based on your own best judgement. Evidence can help inform your beliefs but it’s almost always incomplete at best.
Imagine my neighbor is a 7 foot tall man. I know my neighbor is tall. I can prove it just by looking at him. If he let me I could even measure him to prove exactly how tall he is. I believe my neighbor is a good person. I base this on my interactions with and observations of him. But what if he’s secretly a serial killer? He could be! It seems unlikely so I believe he’s not, but you never know….
Imagine a person in Europe in the year 1000 AD. They had no evidence that kangaroos existed, no European would visit Australia until 1606 after all. But kangaroos still existed.
They also had no evidence that Bigfoot existed in 1000 AD, but that doesn’t mean Bigfoot does exist.
Sagan is talking about what we can prove, and that’s it. Lack of proof something is real is NOT proof it doesn’t exist. It’s also not proof it does. Lack of proof is simply that, lack of proof.
Beyond proof which is what you can demonstrate with evidence, you have belief, belief is what you think to be true or not true based on your own best judgement. Evidence can help inform your beliefs but it’s almost always incomplete at best.
Imagine my neighbor is a 7 foot tall man. I know my neighbor is tall. I can prove it just by looking at him. If he let me I could even measure him to prove exactly how tall he is. I believe my neighbor is a good person. I base this on my interactions with and observations of him. But what if he’s secretly a serial killer? He could be! It seems unlikely so I believe he’s not, but you never know….
Imagine a person in Europe in the year 1000 AD. They had no evidence that kangaroos existed, no European would visit Australia until 1606 after all. But kangaroos still existed.
They also had no evidence that Bigfoot existed in 1000 AD, but that doesn’t mean Bigfoot does exist.
Sagan is talking about what we can prove, and that’s it. Lack of proof something is real is NOT proof it doesn’t exist. It’s also not proof it does. Lack of proof is simply that, lack of proof.
Beyond proof which is what you can demonstrate with evidence, you have belief, belief is what you think to be true or not true based on your own best judgement. Evidence can help inform your beliefs but it’s almost always incomplete at best.
Imagine my neighbor is a 7 foot tall man. I know my neighbor is tall. I can prove it just by looking at him. If he let me I could even measure him to prove exactly how tall he is. I believe my neighbor is a good person. I base this on my interactions with and observations of him. But what if he’s secretly a serial killer? He could be! It seems unlikely so I believe he’s not, but you never know….
Think of something that is very hard to prove false. My favorite example is that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth.
We currently have no evidence that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth. But the earth is already being orbited by tons and tons and tons of debris, from fragmented satellites, etc. It would be very hard to spot a bowling ball amongst it and we currently have no efficient way.
Science says there’s no way to prove a negative, in that we ought to go only off of affirmative tests — Not that there is no bowling ball in orbit around the planet, only that none of our current technology sees one. You only further and further corner possibilities, but much like dividing a number by half, you never reach zero.
If you extrapolate that to something like an omnipotent power, it is hard to research far and wide and deep and thoroughly enough to be conclusive enough, so you cannot prove that god doesn’t exist. However, you can instead scrutinize all existing reason to believe it to begin with as incredibly fallible, all of it being human-sourced, and thus victim to all the reasons for human error. None of it holds water. Science prefers things we cannot yet explain, of which there are many many things not related to religion at all, to human word, IE., ‘Trust me, it happened’, because one can be narrowed over time with affirmative tests, and the other only gets more doubtful as further evidence never arrives.
Think of something that is very hard to prove false. My favorite example is that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth.
We currently have no evidence that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth. But the earth is already being orbited by tons and tons and tons of debris, from fragmented satellites, etc. It would be very hard to spot a bowling ball amongst it and we currently have no efficient way.
Science says there’s no way to prove a negative, in that we ought to go only off of affirmative tests — Not that there is no bowling ball in orbit around the planet, only that none of our current technology sees one. You only further and further corner possibilities, but much like dividing a number by half, you never reach zero.
If you extrapolate that to something like an omnipotent power, it is hard to research far and wide and deep and thoroughly enough to be conclusive enough, so you cannot prove that god doesn’t exist. However, you can instead scrutinize all existing reason to believe it to begin with as incredibly fallible, all of it being human-sourced, and thus victim to all the reasons for human error. None of it holds water. Science prefers things we cannot yet explain, of which there are many many things not related to religion at all, to human word, IE., ‘Trust me, it happened’, because one can be narrowed over time with affirmative tests, and the other only gets more doubtful as further evidence never arrives.
Think of something that is very hard to prove false. My favorite example is that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth.
We currently have no evidence that there is a bowling ball orbiting the earth. But the earth is already being orbited by tons and tons and tons of debris, from fragmented satellites, etc. It would be very hard to spot a bowling ball amongst it and we currently have no efficient way.
Science says there’s no way to prove a negative, in that we ought to go only off of affirmative tests — Not that there is no bowling ball in orbit around the planet, only that none of our current technology sees one. You only further and further corner possibilities, but much like dividing a number by half, you never reach zero.
If you extrapolate that to something like an omnipotent power, it is hard to research far and wide and deep and thoroughly enough to be conclusive enough, so you cannot prove that god doesn’t exist. However, you can instead scrutinize all existing reason to believe it to begin with as incredibly fallible, all of it being human-sourced, and thus victim to all the reasons for human error. None of it holds water. Science prefers things we cannot yet explain, of which there are many many things not related to religion at all, to human word, IE., ‘Trust me, it happened’, because one can be narrowed over time with affirmative tests, and the other only gets more doubtful as further evidence never arrives.
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