Absence Of Evidence Is Evidence Of Absence

[stromboli]

http://appliedsentience.com/2014/11/27/of-hidden-gods-sometimes-absence-of-evidence-is-evidence-of-absence/

I love this popular little mantra: the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence, also known as the fallacy of the argument from ignorance.  If you’re not already familiar with it, it claims the opposite of my title.  In short, it means that just because you don’t have any evidence for a thing happening doesn’t mean it didn’t actually happen.  It could have happened but the evidence hasn’t survived, or maybe we just haven’t found it yet.  Maybe we wouldn’t know it if we saw it because our understanding of the situation is off.

There are lots of possible explanations for why we 1) don’t have any evidence for X but yet 2) can still hold out that X might have happened or exists.  And if we don’t have any evidence whatsoever, no evidence either for or against, then a thing is only as likely as its prior probability.

Well, except in some cases…

In some cases an absence of evidence can be damning.   If we don’t have any evidence for a thing happening or existing we can sometimes use that very fact, that very absence of evidence, as evidence itself.  Let me give you two examples.

The Master Thief

To introduce the idea, take the case of the master thief.  You’re a detective and were just called to a crime scene.  You arrive and find out that the such-n-such jewels were stolen!  This tells you nothing of who did it, of course, except that it was someone skillful enough to steal them and get away from the scene.  But there are hundreds, even thousands, of people like that.  So you look for further evidence to pin it down on one person over the others.

So you begin the search for evidence.  You look for finger and footprints, DNA, ask the guards if they saw anything, check the cameras, and search for any sign of a tell-tale style or habit which some thieves have.  You interrogate various criminal elements to see if any word has been drifting around.  You even sift through the traffic and security cameras for a 15 block radius.  But you find nothing.  Not a scrap.

You have found no evidence that will allow you to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine which thief it is from the hundreds of possible ones.

But wait!  There are only a small handful of thieves who could possibly have the skills to pull off such a spotless heist!  The very fact that no evidence whatsoever was left behind is itself a clue to who actually did it.  Or, at very least, you can now rule out the lower and middle rungs on the criminal ladder who don’t have anything approaching this kind of skill.

This ‘evidence’ isn’t 100% absolutely, perfectly conclusive.  No evidence ever is.  And “lack of evidence” wouldn’t hold up in court.  But, given what you know about the thieves who could have committed such a crime, 95% of them would have made some small mistake along the way and left some scrap of evidence.  So sometimes lack of evidence can in fact narrow your options.

The most conspicuous example of all of this is the God of Abraham.  The fallacy of the argument from ignorance is often invoked after dismantling some argument, i.e. evidence, for God’s existence.  Basically, just because the argument fails and God doesn’t provide any other evidence does not mean that you can now assert “God doesn’t exist.”  Even if all Christian arguments fail in the end, it is certainly possible, so it is claimed, that God may still be somewhere out there.

If God were like most things, this would be true.  But it turns out that God is more like the master thief.  In the master thief example, an absence of evidence is evidence for presence.  This is because we expect only master thieves to leave no evidence.  For God, it is the reverse.  An absence of evidence is instead evidence for absence.  This is because, contrary to the thief, we expect God to leave evidence.

Why?  Well, it’s important to note that I’m not talking about all Gods. Some possible Gods maybe just want to trick silly humans and so they cover their tracks to make it look like they were never there.  But for the Abrahamic God, or any other omnipotent God who wants us to know Him, they would leave evidence for us.  First, a God who wants us to know Him would try to make it more likely that we would come to know Him.  In other words, He’d give us evidence.  Second, being omnipotent, He can guarantee such evidence exists and will cross our paths.

In addition, St Paul spells it all out for us in Romans 1:18-20.

"18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualitiesâ€"his eternal power and divine natureâ€"have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."

A ‘Hidden’ God?

However, maybe we should expect Abraham’s God to ‘hide’ himself, as some like William Lane Craig argue?  I’m sure a few Christians at this point are exclaiming to themselves the importance of faith.  Unfortunately, this patchwork doesn’t work out for a few reasons â€" in addition to the fact it contradicts passages like the one above.  I’ll be brief.

First, if there are multiple Hidden Gods, and why not, then how do you decide which one to follow?  It’s an extremely pragmatic question.  Who do I put my faith in?  You have the hidden Allah in one corner and the hidden Yahweh in another (and the hidden Brahma in another and…).  Unless you just pick at random or stay with what you inherited, you need some impartial evidence.  But by ‘hidden’ people Craig have already defined such deities as not having any evidence for them.  There is, by definition, no way to decide between such hidden gods.

Second, Craig and others may simply reply ‘you must have faith!’  God will somehow guide your evidence-less decision if you’re pure of heart, genuinely searching, or whatever else.  Matthew 7:7, “seek and ye shall find” is pretty clear.  However, this implies that those that follow other religions do not have a pure heart and aren’t genuinely searching.  If they really sought, then would have found Jesus.  So since they didn’t find Jesus, as Matt 7:7 implies, they didn’t really seek.

Now we’re back to looking for empirical evidence!  Do pure-hearted genuine-searchers, i.e. real seekers, all converge on the same God?  The uncontroversial answer for anyone with a bit of diversity in their pool of friends is a resounding “no”.  There are open and searching Christians, certainly.  But, as I’ve seen time and again, there are also open, honest, and searching Muslims, Hindus, Humanists, and so on.

I use the "absence of evidence " argument for the above reasons. It is simply a case that an all powerful, omnipresent and personal god at some point has to be revealed by his actions. That such a god can exist and leave literally no evidence through any of his actions or aspects- answering prayers, healing, miracles of intervention or prevention, anything. As I've said before, if faith healing worked there would be faith healing clinics next to every doctor's office. Healing by faith would be an absolute sign, as well as any other claimed miracle. If the absolute lack of any evidence of a god presumed to be so powerful and so ever present isn't a telling point, nothing is.

[Sal1981]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It's not up to us to prove absence, it's up to "them" to prove presence.

[SGOS]

I swear.  I think theists study these errors in reasoning, and then apply them post hock.  Even if they actually spot the error, the fallacy can still convince others.  Such is the remarkable power of God's loving grace.

[Atheon]

I think the absence of evidence for A, combined with an absence of reasoning favoring the existence of A, as damn good evidence of the absence of A.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I think the absence of evidence for A, combined with an absence of reasoning favoring the existence of A, as damn good evidence of the absence of A.

Absence is evidence of absence. If they claim "undiscovered presence" then they're admitting they have no evidence for presence.

[SGOS]

God wants you to believe in him on faith alone.  Therefore, he leaves no evidence, which of course is the evidence for him wanting you to believe by faith alone.  You guys are such cynics.

[stromboli]

God wants you to believe in him on faith alone.  Therefore, he leaves no evidence, which of course is the evidence for him wanting you to believe by faith alone.  You guys are such cynics.

But like the article pointed out, with a total lack of evidence, how can you worship one god over another? Using that logic, simply pick out the god of your choice that has ideals you like and worship that one. Like the tooth fairy; if you got money under your pillow as a kid, isn't that all the evidence you need?



ALL HAIL THE TOOTH FAIRY!

[Solitary]

Logic cannot prove what is real, no matter how well done. But if there is no evidence for something to be true, then it is just a hypothesis. But why is there even a hypothesis for gods, or God? Where did this idea come from? Magical thinking and ignorance thinking all things are possible with a God. A compensation for ignorance and hope, from fear of the unknown, and the human condition of knowing we are helpless with forces beyond our control, like death. 

[stromboli]

. A compensation for ignorance and hope, from fear of the unknown, and the human condition of knowing we are helpless with forces beyond our control, like death.

Pretty much this. I can imagine an early man needing heat to keep from freezing seeing lightning strike a tree and setting it ablaze, thereby inadvertently saving his life. That coincidence is enough to cause wonder about the existence of a higher power. Seeing someone scoff at a religion having a tragic accident is another. Any form of reward/punishment can be perceived as supernatural if it coincidentally "proves" the existence of something, with causation outside of our understanding.

[SGOS]

But like the article pointed out, with a total lack of evidence, how can you worship one god over another?

The other gods are silly non-Christian inventions.  How could a person ever believe in something like Hindu Gods?  Such gods are absurd.

[Minimalist]

Kitchen, were he not a senile old fart, would never have said such a thing.  Absence of evidence is not PROOF of absence...it sure as shit is "evidence" of absence.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Pretty much this. I can imagine an early man needing heat to keep from freezing seeing lightning strike a tree and setting it ablaze, thereby inadvertently saving his life. That coincidence is enough to cause wonder about the existence of a higher power. Seeing someone scoff at a religion having a tragic accident is another. Any form of reward/punishment can be perceived as supernatural if it coincidentally "proves" the existence of something, with causation outside of our understanding.

But isn't there evidence of early human campfires in Africa?

[SNP1]

I prefer this way of showing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

P1) if P then Q
P2) not P
C) Not Q

P=evidence
Q=god

[Hakurei Reimu]

I prefer this way of showing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

P1) if P then Q
P2) not P
C) Not Q

P=evidence
Q=god

Unfortunately, this is an improper conclusion as stated. If not P, then the value of Q cannot be deduced from P1.

Fortunately, when you talk about evidences rather than proofs, you have exited the realm of pure logic and have entered the realm of Bayesian analysis. In this case, the lack of evidence for God is exactly what you would expect from a state of affairs where there is no God. This supplies the necessary support for the claim that there is no God.

The problem is that as evidences go, absence of evidence is not in itself a very strong piece of evidence â€" for instance, you may lack evidence because you never bothered to gather it, and as such the lack of evidence would also easily be explained by your lack of effort rather than there being genuinely no evidence to find. Fortunately, this is not the case with God: we have looked very hard and have found all the proposed "evidences" wanting, but it is useful to keep in mind why the absence of evidence for God is quite compelling.