Preliminary Reading: We Are The Evidence
Carl Sagan equated the existence of God to the existence of a dragon living in someone’s garage.
Instead of having Carl Sagan or someone else try to scientifically validate the existence of this dragon, what if we just asked those people who knew a dragon was in their garage to leave their lights on? That way, if the dragon was not something that could be scientifically tested, we could still have data to look at.
The number of houses with lights on continues to grow as we zoom out from the neighborhood, to the town, state, country, and world. One thing we can know for certain is that people think that there are dragons in their garages.
So each house [with the lights on] amounts to a single claim that a dragon exists. So if a type of dragon does exist that science cannot validate, we appear to have good evidence backing that claim.
Of course, if the only type of dragons that can exist are those that science tells us that it can test, we simply miss out on any dragons of the sort that science cannot test. Obviously, there are two types of possible dragons: those that science can test, and those that science cannot test.
And if we are looking for dragons that science cannot tell us whether they are in a garage or not, I think one of the best ways of testing is to ask the resident if there is a dragon in their garage.
This, though, is not really convincing as evidence.
If all these dragons are different, they could all be made up or mistaken. What becomes good evidence is when we see that there are many dragons of the same type. Or that many homes are occupied by the exact same dragon. Alongside a book that predicts the existence of this dragon.
So yes, a dragon does live in my garage. But don’t take my word for it.
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