A Manual for Creating Atheists
by
Peter Boghossian
Published 1 Nov 2013
This is a version of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s (1872–1970) teapot. Russell claims that there’s a small teapot, undetectable by telescopes, in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars. If you can’t disprove that such a teapot exists, do you believe it does exist? Personally, I’ve not had as much success with Russell’s teapot as I have with the example here. Perhaps it’s because people can’t wrap their mind around an object that we cannot detect floating in space, or because it’s easier to elicit a contradiction with an increasing number of substances found within a contained space. If you find Russell’s teapot to be more effective than my example, then use what’s most effective.
The God Delusion
by
Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006
Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise that the question of God’s existence is in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are equiprobable. Another way to express that error is in terms of the burden of proof, and in this form it is pleasingly demonstrated by Bertrand Russell’s parable of the celestial teapot.31 Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.
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A friend, who was brought up a Jew and still observes the sabbath and other Jewish customs out of loyalty to his heritage, describes himself as a ‘tooth fairy agnostic’. He regards God as no more probable than the tooth fairy. You can’t disprove either hypothesis, and both are equally improbable. He is an a-theist to exactly the same large extent that he is an a-fairyist. And agnostic about both, to the same small extent. Russell’s teapot, of course, stands for an infinite number of things whose existence is conceivable and cannot be disproved. That great American lawyer Clarence Darrow said, ‘I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose.’ The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion ‘is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith’.32 A philosophical favourite is the invisible, intangible, inaudible unicorn, disproof of which is attempted yearly by the children at Camp Quest.* A popular deity on the Internet at present – and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other – is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage.33 I am delighted to see that the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has now been published as a book,34 to great acclaim.
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All of us feel entitled to express extreme scepticism to the point of outright disbelief – except that in the case of unicorns, tooth fairies and the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Vikings, there is (nowadays) no need to bother. In the case of the Abrahamic God, however, there is a need to bother, because a substantial proportion of the people with whom we share the planet do believe strongly in his existence. Russell’s teapot demonstrates that the ubiquity of belief in God, as compared with belief in celestial teapots, does not shift the burden of proof in logic, although it may seem to shift it as a matter of practical politics. That you cannot prove God’s non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything.
A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings
by
Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004
As a lover of truth, I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence: fairies, unicorns, werewolves, any of the infinite set of conceivable and unfalsifiable beliefs epitomized by Bertrand Russell’s hypothetical china teapot orbiting the Sun (see ‘The Great Convergence’, pp. 177–78). The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell’s teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves.1 Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots.
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Now, if it be retorted that there actually are reasons X, Y and Z for finding a supreme being more plausible than a celestial teapot, then X, Y and Z should be spelled out because, if legitimate, they are proper scientific arguments which should be evaluated on their merits. Don’t protect them from scrutiny behind a screen of agnostic tolerance. If religious arguments are actually better than Russell’s teapot, let us hear the case. Otherwise, let those who call themselves agnostic with respect to religion add that they are equally agnostic about orbiting teapots. At the same time, modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists.
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Blueprint, (i), (ii) Red Queen Effect, (i) Red Strangers, (i), (ii) Reductionism, (i) Redundancy (cf. information), (i), (ii) Relativity, Theory of, (i), (ii), (iii) Religion As cultural barrier to gene flow, (i) As handed-down traditions, (i), (ii) As label, (i) As memeplex, (i), (ii) As virus of the mind, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Epidemiology of, (i) Generating sensations akin to sexual love, (i) Making scientific claims, (i) Not converging with science, (i) Organized, (i) Religious Atrocity, see September (i)th 2001 Customs, Quasi-genetic inheritance of, (i) Lobbies, (i), (ii) Privilege given to opinions of the, (i), (ii) Propaganda, (i) Replicator, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), 260 (see also Gene, Meme, Virus) Reproductive success, Variance in, (i) Revelation, (i), (ii) Ridley, Mark, (i) Ridley, Matt, (i) Ring species, (i) River Out of Eden, (i) Robinson, Heath, (i) Ross, Andrew, (i) Rubber Band Analogy, (i) Ruse, Michael, (i) Rushdie, Salman, (i), (ii)f Russell, Bertrand, (i), (ii) His teapot, (i), (ii) Ryder, Richard, (i)f Sagan, Carl, (i), (ii), (iii) Sahelanthropus, (i) Saltation, (i), 103 (see also Mutation: macromutation) Sanderson, F. W., (i), (ii), (iii) Schliemann, Heinrich, (i) Science As frequently counter-intuitive, (i) As proceeding by conjecture and refutation, (i) Cannot define ethics, (i) Its claim to truth, (i) Not a virus, (i) Not converging with religion, (i) Spiritual nature of, (i) Wonder of, (i) Scientific method, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Segmentation As single macromutation, (i) Millipede cf. lobster, (i), (ii) Selection, see Natural Selection, Sexual selection, Higher-level selection Selection, Unit of, 148 (see also Gene, Meme) Selfish Gene, The, (i), (ii)f Selfishness, (i) Self-replicating Computer program, (i) Element of culture, (i) Information, (i), (ii) Virus, (i), (ii) September (i)th 2001, (ii), (iii) Sex Economic view of, (i) Parasite theory of, (i) Sex ratio, (i), (ii) Sexual inequality, (i) Sexual recombination, (i), (ii) Sexual selection Darwin’s theory of, (i), (ii) Handicap theory of, (i) Positive feedback in evolution, (i) Wallacean view of, (i), (ii) Shakespeare, William, (i), (ii), (iii) Shannon, Claude, (i) Shapiro, L.