Is absence of evidence evidence of absence in the case of god or not?

Question

I know that this is a common question but the question is usually posed in a generic context. I’m interested in whether this principle applies specifically to god. I’ve seen philosophers talk about how this is context dependent. A lot of this depends on what kind of evidence we would expect for an entity and whether that evidence is accessible.

For example, one may not have evidence that there is a storm happening on a planet that we can’t fully check for. This doesn’t mean there’s evidence of a storm’s absence. Rather, we just have no means to check.

Similarly, some theists argue that since god is immaterial or “outside” of space and time, not finding direct evidence of His existence is expected.

However, I see two problems with this. First, unlike the planet case, we don’t know if it means anything to say that something exists “outside of space and time”. We atleast know the planet exists even if we can’t check for everything that is going on in the planet right now.

Secondly, the hypothesis seems post hoc in the sense that part of the reason god is posited to be purely immaterial is because there has been no evidence of a powerful material designer’s existence. How should one thus assign the plausibility of a hypothesis based on the potential motivations of the designer of that hypothesis?

Answer 1

Is absence of evidence evidence of absence in the case of god or not?

Yes.

If it is a fact of reality that there is an absence of evidence as to God's existence, then that absence of evidence would act as evidence of absence of God's existence. The catch to this matter is that no one could know it as evidence of absence. In this situation, God would be symbolic of the evidence of its own existence. Any attempt to interpret something as evidence of God's existence would be invalid because the interpretation could not be definitively qualified as evidence of God's existence. For instance, I speculate that omnipotence would be required to definitively qualify anything as evidence of God's existence.

Answer 2

There are all sorts of objects in physics — dark matter and energy, neutrinos, exotic particles, etc. — that we theorize exist mainly because they solve a confusion or fill a gap in our understanding of the world. The fact that our direct evidence for them is slim to nil doesn't lead every physicist to reject them outright. Absence of evidence is not taken as evidence of absence in this case (at least not by most physicists, though there are a few), but instead is a spur to physicists to go look for evidence.

So why should we take absence of evidence in the case of god(s) as evidence of absence, not as a spur to go look? That's philosophically inconsistent.

The problem here isn't scientific; it's political. Over the last few centuries there has been a vast struggle in the West between religious and secular movements over who gets to exert hegemonic power. It's a question of whether human social behavior should be governed by doctrinal ethics or economic interactions; science is merely a tool used or abused by both sides to make their points.

Answer 3

... we don’t know if it means anything to say that something exists “outside of space and time”.

We don't? Now, we might not know how to check if something is nonspatiotemporal,^D but this is not to say that we don't have a clear enough general sense of the description. There are at least four families of theories about category mistakes, including three subtheories that turn on the difference between meaninglessness, lack of content, and lack of truth-value, and allowing for nonconceptual mental content on the one hand, and denying truth-conditional semantics on the other (not a stretch, since questions and imperatives have semantics but aren't (usually/directly) truth-apt), we find that we should be cautious in saying that "not spatiotemporal" is entirely void of possible significance.

Per the overall issue, here, though, the SEP article on divine hiddenness and a counterpart IEP article address reasons why a deity might "have reason" to hide itself, as well as objections to these supposed reasons. Immanuel Kant ominously claimed that knowledge of God would undermine the integrity of our will before the tribunal of the moral law, though his claim's viability perhaps then depends much on his (unnecessarily) rigoristic sense of that law (he argued, roughly, that if we knew of God, we would always do what is right, but out of fear of punishment, an impure motive in his eyes).

Upshot: if a realistic (but what would that even mean?) definition of God deductively led to this God having a reason to not hide Itself, then the absence of God's not hiding Itself would be evidence of absence of God in the first place. Kant's concern seems moot, actually, though, insofar as he also claimed that it was impossible for God to prove Its existence to us anyway, so the scenario he fretted about is either irrelevant because (not-ought)-not-implies-can,^C or because if we knew God to exist, the metaphysical conditions giving rise to the moral law (the ought-would distinction in practical reason^W) would not obtain and there wouldn't even be a moral law to undermine in the first place, either, then.

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^DTo be very precise, we must first ask whether it is possible to differentiate zero-dimensional spacetime from not spatiotemporal at all. If not, then saying that God is not subject to spacetime mereology at all is just to say as much as that God is a zero-dimensional "dot" embedded in no other coordinate system. (C.f. Nicholas of Cusa's "sphere with its center everywhere and circumference nowhere.") And yet another option would be to not deny that God's intrinsic presence is in some kind of spacetime, but to say that this presence is in a maximum possible number of dimensions of this (c.f. Kant's God as the "engineer of dimensions"). With Augustine and Anselm we might go ahead and say that the number is infinite, with Cantor even absolutely so. This picture is radically underdeterminate, granted, but this is not the same as for it to be meaningless, lacking in content, or without truth-value.

^CSo if God can't make us know Its existence by intuition, then there is no moral fact of the matter, for us, about what it would be like if God could do that (again, per impossible).

^WKant says that, "I ought..." means, "I would, if reason was the only determining ground of my will." Kant is happy, as many theists are, to claim that God can be the greatest being, morally-speaking, without having to "build Its soul up" like in aretaic theodicies, which Kant himself half-replicates with his immortality postulate and his imagery of "crucifying oneself" (in the Religion). This, then, because God is such that Its "oughts" are actually already Its "woulds." The reality is, then, though, that if we knew God to exist, we wouldn't fear punishment from this being, since we would know that this being wouldn't absolutely punish us. Besides, the transformation of the physical world accompanying the intuition of the divine nature being imparted upon the creation would change the playing-field, so to speak, so that motives for certain kinds of offenses would presumably often be altered, too (why kill when you know God will resurrect all living things or maintain them in noumenal immortality regardless?).

Answer 4

Similarly, some theists argue that since god is immaterial or “outside” of space and time, not finding direct evidence of His existence is expected.

By itself the absence of evidence for god is not the evidence of absence. However, if the god has no influence on human affairs and does not manifest themselves in any way, it should be excluded from the consideration due to the Occam's razor. This doesn't mean that the god does not exist - merely that it is irrelevant for all the practical purposes.

Note that this is different from the concept of god/religion, which is a real thing (existing in human minds), with real influence on the human affairs.