In an article titled Is There a God? commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote: 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. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism: I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely. Perhaps Russell developed the analogy from his friend Frank P. Ramseys Theories (1929): Take, for instance, the problem Is there a planet of the size and shape of a tea-pot? This question has meaning so long as we do not know that an experiment could not decide the matter. Once we know this it loses meaning, unless we restore it by new axioms, e.g. an axiom as to the orbits possible to planets. Some people speak as if we were not justified in rejecting a theological doctrine unless we can prove it false. But the burden of proof does not lie upon the rejecter. ... If you were told that in a certain planet revolving around Sirius there is a race of donkeys who speak the English language and spend their time in discussing eugenics, you could not disprove the statement, but would it, on that account, have any claim to be believed? Some minds would be prepared to accept it, if it were reiterated often enough, through the potent force of suggestion. Analysis Chemist Peter Atkins said that the point of Russells teapot is that there is no burden on anyone to disprove assertions. Occams razor suggests that the simpler theory with fewer assertions (e.g. a universe with no supernatural beings) should be the starting point in the discussion rather than the more complex theory.[5] Atkins notes that this argument does not appeal to the religious because, unlike scientific evidence, religious evidence is said to be experienced through personal revelation that cannot be conveyed or objectively verified. In his books A Devils Chaplain (2003) and The God Delusion (2006), ethologist Richard Dawkins used the teapot as an analogy of an argument against what he termed agnostic conciliation, a policy of intellectual appeasement that allows for philosophical domains that concern exclusively religious matters.[6] Science has no way of establishing the existence or non-existence of a god. Therefore, according to the agnostic conciliator, because it is a matter of individual taste, belief and disbelief in a supreme being are deserving of equal respect and attention. Dawkins presents the teapot as a reductio ad absurdum of this position: if agnosticism demands giving equal respect to the belief and disbelief in a supreme being, then it must also give equal respect to belief in an orbiting teapot, since the existence of an orbiting teapot is just as plausible scientifically as the existence of a supreme being. Astronomer Carl Sagan used Russells teapot in the chapter The Dragon In My Garage in his book The Demon-Haunted World, and stated Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 14:01:10 +0000
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