Materialist Carl Sagan is credited with the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The dictum is known as the “Sagan Standard,” but it should be known as the “Extraordinary Claims Fallacy,” as explained very well in this article.
Materialists often use the Sagan Standard as a cudgel against theistic claims. For example, as pointed out in the article, they may assert that people do not ordinarily rise from the dead, and therefore the claim that Jesus rose from the dead must be supported by something more than ordinary evidence; it must be supported by some vaguely defined standard of evidence they call “extraordinary evidence.”
My purpose here is not to debunk the Sagan Standard. That has been done many times. See the article linked above and here and here. No, my purpose here is to note the hypocritical double standard in the way materialists employ the Sagan Standard.
Let’s take the example above. People do not ordinarily rise from the dead. True enough, but the claim that nonliving matter spontaneously organized itself into living matter is even more extraordinary. There is no evidence (much less “extraordinary evidence”) to support the claim that it did. As Franklin Harold has admitted, “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
Yet every materialist believes the claim as a matter of course.
Matter does not ordinarily spontaneously organize itself into a sophisticated self-replicating code, and there is good reason to believe it is impossible to do so.
Yet every materialist believes the claim as a matter of course.
Staggeringly sophisticated systems such as the blood clotting cascade are not ordinarily assembled through the accretion of random errors.
Yet every materialist believes the claim as a matter of course.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. For the materialist the rule of the day is “extraordinary evidence is required for thee, but not for me.”
Update: The wishful speculation quotation was erroneously attributed to James Shapiro.