Carl Sagan on Divine hiddenness
Sagan argued that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that God's failure to provide it is telling.
Sagan's famous dictum — 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' — is directly applicable to the problem of divine hiddenness. If an omnipotent God exists and wants to be known, the evidence should be overwhelming and unambiguous. Instead, the evidence is the subject of millennia of inconclusive debate, which is precisely what we would expect if no such God exists.
Sagan frequently noted that the universe offers no sign of being arranged for human benefit. It is overwhelmingly vast, ancient, cold, and empty. If a personal God created this cosmos with humanity in mind, the design is spectacularly inefficient — billions of years and billions of light-years of lifeless void, with one unremarkable species on one unremarkable planet wondering whether anyone is out there.
He was careful to maintain an agnostic rather than dogmatically atheist position, insisting that the absence of evidence is not proof of absence. But he argued that the burden of proof lies with the claimant, and that the persistent absence of clear divine communication — despite millennia of seeking — makes the hypothesis of God's existence less probable, not more.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course, ask next where God comes from.”