God, Atheism and Evidence, as Theoretical Bullshit, hosted on YouTube. (11 January 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9stJ8h2ilZU
“Putting all this together, we see that religion is like Sagan’s invisible dragon. The missing evidence for any god is simply too glaring, and the special pleading too unconvincing, to make its existence anything more than a logical possibility. It’s reasonable to conclude, provisionally but confidently, that the absence of evidence for God is indeed evidence for his absence.”
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 204
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Jerry Coyne 154
American biologist 1949Related quotes
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Martin Rees — Sagan refers to this quote in The Demon-Haunted World (1995) (see above)
Misattributed
Source: Cosmos
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
As quoted in Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (1971) http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730010095_1973010095.pdf by Bernard M. Oliver, and John Billingham, Ch. 2 : Life in the Universe, p. 3 ; this has frequently misattributed to Carl Sagan, who quoted it in some of his presentations.
“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense”
"The Scientific Aspect of Monte Carlo Roulette" (1894)
On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (2010), p. 149
“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
Source: State of Fear
“There is no trustworthy evidence as to a god's absolute existence.”
Source: Why I am Not a Believer (1926), p. 139