Interfaith Group

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

is misleading, not because of lack of absolutes, but because it fails to take into account prior knowledge about the absence of evidence. The lack of absolutes is an interesting one, but can be separated out.

In some cases, the lack of evidence is very significant, i.e. we highly expect evidence. In other cases, there are reasons we don't expect evidence (or don't know whether to expect evidence). So the lack of evidence is not so powerful.

This "prior information" (highly coveted by people working in probability theory ) is key to how valid is the statement "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"