The fact that you are having meaningful cognitive and emotional responses to what you’re reading right now is evidence, to you, that at least one mind exists. There is a severe lack of reasonable theories, let alone evidence supporting them, for how mind can be merely an emergent epiphenomenon of matter. In that case I would say yes, that lack of evidence does point to (but not prove) the existence of a non-physical realm of reality, in which minds exist. Once you accept that, then there really is no barrier to believing in things that physicalism expressly denies the existence of, including a supreme Mind who creates and sustains everything, including physical Universe.
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I think all the time in these kinds of conversations people confuse logical inferences and entailments. Proofs are about entailments. If your premises are true, and your entailments are done correctly, your logical conclusions are proven. But there are warranted conclusions (that can’t be “proven”) because they are about justifiable inferences. You can’t have mutually exclusive entailments from the same set of premises, but you can have mutually exclusive justifiable inferences about something based on different evidence sets or even different interpretations of the same evidence set. In light of my lack of experience with unicorns in our world, and the fact that I can’t name a single trustworthy source asserting evidence of unicorns, a justifiable inference would be they don’t exist and my disbelief in the existence of unicorns is warranted. But when people are arguing over things like whether or not miracles happen or whether or not people can hear from God or whether prayer brings healing, usually the evidence people marshal one way or the other is to some degree subjective and shaped by experience (or lack of experience) as the basis for knowledge. So for some people, it’s justifiable to infer those things have happened and their belief in them is warranted, and for others with different experiences it’s not.
When there is a complete lack of evidence for something, it is justifiable to infer that the evidence doesn’t exist. But it’s not true that a lack of evidence entails non-existence.
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Sometimes it’s completely objective, though, facts as reported, not feelings or opinions.
No, still no proof. We have proved that there is at least one even number less than 246 that occurs as a prime gap an infinite number of times, though. We have also proved that using current techniques it is likely feasible to prove that some subset of 2, 4, and 6 occurs infinitely many times as a gap.
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Sure, but not all facts entail specific conclusions. Most of the time the conclusions we draw are meanings we infer from the facts, not logical necessities.
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Agreed. Some are more than obvious, though, and while not logical necessities are even silly apart from the obvious implication. (I might have one in mind. 
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Lack of evidence of an unnecessary explanation, i.e. when all the necessary evidence to fully explain existence is already fully testified, is evidence.
I’m curious but am not sure exactly what you are saying. Can you give an example?
When the thing in question is an object such as a unicorn what could count as evidence is a good deal clearer than when the ‘thing’ in question is an experience such as noticing a difference in how the way we hold our attention results in experiencing more or less meaning or insight. Subjective experience is more participatory than objective classification. So it is harder to rule in or rule out the sort of discernments someone like Bach could make in music based on those of which we ourselves are capable. The same is perhaps true regarding empathy and love, our access and conclusions can vary based as you say on experience.
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We already have all the evidence we will ever need to sufficiently explain nature, existence, being, life, mind without anything supernatural. Nothing is missing but details which we will asymptotically fill in. Again and again and again, there is no requirement for a-theism as there is none for theism.
I find the criteria for what counts as supernatural to be too ill defined to be of any use. So for explanation, I agree, appealing to any such thing is useless. But I don’t agree that everything natural is entirely understood already since we and our experience are entirely natural and yet harder to explain than the motion of dominoes. The assumptions you make at the beginning will determine how obvious you experience it all to be. I don’t begin by assuming our behavior or experience are mechanistic by nature.
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Neither do I. Emergent complexity is not clockwork. Nature, whatever destabilizes nothingness, can never be fully understood, hence my use of asymptotically. My criterion of supernatural is real transcendence at best. An unnecessary complication for explaining any aspect of reality whatsoever.
Sometimes there is evidence that begs another explanation.
Not for those who need evidence.
Rich Stearns had evidence.
In New Testaments studies sometimes arguments from silence are probative and sometimes they are not. Raymond Brown writes: “The NT writers certainly knew more of the Christian tradition than they were able or chose to convey in their writings; John 21:25 is specific about that. Therefore we should maintain a certain distrust of negative arguments from silence, as if the failure to write meant the failure to know. . . On the level of the literal sense, exegesis that embraces what the evangelists did not actually convey in writing becomes very speculative.” (Intro NT pg 38-39 )
Brown also cites the eucharist in Paul as a classic example. Had conflict not arisen over the meal in Corinth (1Cor 11:23-26), Paul would not have needed to address the issue and this might lead some modern day exegetes to think that, given how extensive his corpus is, without mentioning the Eucharist, his churches didn’t practice it!
With that being said, if you can show it likely that something would be mentioned and is not we can form the judgment it didn’t happen. For example, if a terrorist set off a bomb killing 1,000 people in New York city yesterday, it would be worldwide news almost everywhere. So if someone claimed this happened and I search all over the internet and official news outlets and they are completely silent on this event, I do believe I am completely justified in unequivocally rejecting the claim being made. I would go so far as to say the silence is actually insurmountable evidence this did not happen.
Most of the time it is not this clear. Josephus not mentioning the slaughter of the infants by Herod during Jesus’s birth does lean against historicity but it is possible Josephus simply overlooked it. When you couple that with the event clearly as part of a literary parallels between Jesus and Israel/Moses in the Hebrew scriptures, the claim against historicity becomes even stronger still. Then when you add in Luke’s contradictory infancy narrative we are starting to find a coffin for our nail. But the silence is not definitive in itself. It would just lead some historians to a probability judgment that leans against historicity.
Vinnie
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I appreciate the discussion about theology, philosophy and such, but find I am a more concrete thinker when looking at the title question, and in the concrete world, I think the answer is, it depends. If something would be certain to leave evidence, then lack of evidence. Indeed is evidence that that something does not exist. A global flood in the recent past would leave a tremendous amount of evidence. That there is none, is an excellent argument that it did not occur. On the other hand, if something is unlikely to leave evidence, then lack of evidence means little or nothing. Intelligent alien life could well exist, even though we have no evidence, and given the size of the universe and the constraints of physics, we are unlikely to ever have anything evidence of such. I suppose we could look at other less concrete things the same way as well. If my wife loves me, it is likely I will see evidence of that love in her actions towards me, and if I did not, perhaps I would be justified in concluding that she did not.
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Is lack of evidence, evidence within itself?
It can be. Mostly not. But it can be. For it to be so you MUST establish that evidence is to be expected. But evidence can be rather rare and it is demonstrable that people can know things even when they haven’t any evidence at all. Doesn’t mean what they know isn’t true. At most, it only means that they do not have any basis for a reasonable expectation that others should agree that it is the case.
Simple example? Someone says something to you with nobody else to hear and no recording device there. You know they said it. But you can’t prove it and you have no evidence to show they said any such thing. And this is the case with most of the things people say.
LOL…
Obviously not.
Does absence of evidence for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe be evidence that it does not exist? Not even close. Why? Because you cannot establish that such evidence is to be expected.
Does the absence of evidence such as no fossils for a transition stage between two species mean that no such transition existed? No. Fossils are rare events and the fastest evolutionary developments can logically be expected in small populations on the brink of extinction where single mutations will have the maximum effect on the gene pool.
Is it reasonable to believe according to what you have seen for yourself? Obviously. But how do see that something does not exist? There are over 350,000 species of beetles. How many of these have you actually seen? 100? What you haven’t seen is the vast majority of of what is real. Therefore making the limits of your own experience the limit of reality itself is an extremely unreasonable thing to do, don’t you think?
What you can do, is accept limits upon what is reasonable to believe according to what you have seen. With the beetles, for example, you can be pretty sure that all 350,000 species are not in your house at this moment. (A new study shows that the average home has about 100 types of insect in it.)
So even if it isn’t reasonable to make your own lack of experience with UFOs, psychics, fairies, ghosts, and such to mean they do not exist, you can make similar sorts of conclusions based on what you haven’t seen.
So what about God? For one thing, I think we can conclude that if He does exist then making people believe He exists isn’t one of His highest priorities.
Happy New Year All 
Regarding the lack of evidence as being evidence within itself, I like Christie’s comment, “If your premises are true, and your entailments are done correctly, your logical conclusions are proven. But there are warranted conclusions (that can’t be “proven”) because they are about justifiable inferences.” The “warranted conclusions that can’t be proven” stick in my mind as a form of evidence.
I have been mulling over a statement for several weeks concerning some issues of faith like:
- God’s self-control when dealing with us in our sinful frailty.
- His restraint to allow our “free will” without intimidation. (ie. Isaiah being “undone”)
- His continuing involvement with us (Holy Spirit) and His creation (evolution, development.)
- His being in ultimate “control.”
The statement is, “God acts anonymously with us so we can live autonomously before Him.”
In the context of “warranted conclusions that can’t be proven,” I think the statement offers evidence to God’s low profile way of dealing with us lovingly, warts and all. He gave us his Word and Son and told us to follow His example. As a result, we have “free will” without intimidation or compulsion to autonomously be obedient with the help of the Holy Spirit. Evolution operates under His watch care by the guidelines placed in Nature just as the ultimate control of human events works to serve His purposes.
As mitchellmckain said above, “So what about God? For one thing, I think we can conclude that if He does exist, then making people believe He exists isn’t one of His highest priorities.”
The beauty of God’s low-profile way of working at the spiritual and molecular level is that it allows us to be autonomous in the “here and now.” Yet, at the same time, He remains in constant control of all creation as the “Alpha and Omega,” beginning and the end, and by Him, all things consist.
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