Celestial Teapots and Garden Fairies

[cdave]

andrewducker's hosting another conversation on the nature of changing belief. Well trying to. I hijaked one thread to argue for Agnosticism again. I wasn't joking when I set my religion to "Evangelical Strong Agnostic" of facebook. (I am somewhat tongue in cheek now having set it to match an equivalent from one of paulcornell2's stories)

There's a couple of famous arguements for Atheism: {ETA not Agnostism}

Bertrand Russell uses the example of the celestial teapot. He argues that although it is impossible to know that the teapot does not exist, most people would not believe in it.

I often argue against strong atheism. For instance the argument that you can assert anything, even the existance a teapot orbiting the Sun too far away to see with a telescope. Or: "I am an agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." Richard Dawkins

Both of those things, are things I'm happy to assign negligible probabilities of existence.

Gardens are seen all the time, and there is not the slightest evidence of fairies. While it may be argued that it's impossible to prove a negative (as I have done previously), I'm happy enough to say that the overwhelming lack of evidence is enough that on the balance of probability I don't beleive in fairies. cdave claps his hands.

The contents of solar space on the other hand is not so thoroughly known. However there's no reasonable way an implicitly human made teapot could placed into a solar orbit without more finance that I be prepared to believe would be spent in secret on such a daft project. {ETA} Therefore I believe that such a teapot does not exist, although I cannot prove it.

However as most gods are defined, there's not a similar argument that can be made. Their existence is beyond the realms human experience, so cannot logically be dismissed {ETA} as their existence would be beyond our experience.

Comments

[tregenza.livejournal.com]

I find your argument a little flawed.

There is exactly the same amount of evidence for fairies as there is for a celestial teapot. Therefore the your conclusion should be the same both. i.e. there are zero independently accredited, gold standard evidence for either of them thus neither of them exist.

The amount of unknown information is irrelevant to the logic of your conclusion because there will always be an infinite amount you don't know about a subject.

[cdave]

Um. It should be the same. I beleive they don not exist. I'm afairy. I'm alittleteapot.

I'll add a sentence to the end of the penultimate paragraph to clarify.

And you can say "there's no proof that anything exists". But I bet you still believe you and the world you see exist in some form.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

> I'm alittleteapot.

Short and stout?

[cdave]

Yay! Someone got it :)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Religion only remains beyond the realm of human experience by constant retreat as human experience expands.

The problem with claiming inability to logically dismiss religion based on the ever-retreating goalposts is twofold:

1) you're then unable to logically dismiss *an infinite number of other things* for which there is no evidence
2) you're incorrectly conceding that there is a need for a positive assertion of falsehood.

You don't have to explain why they're wrong, whether they're talking about God or about the invisible stair-dwelling people who love you very much but watch you when you poop. They have to explain why they're *right*, and, when the explanation fails to provide even the slightest evidence, you have a rationa *obligation* to disregard their hypothesis.