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OtherWhy exactly is Russell's Teapot badreligion? (self.bad_religion)

ithisa が 投稿

I'm not trying to defend Russell's Teapot; I'm not even an atheist myself. It's just that a lot of atheists seem to like the argument, and most people simply respond with some variation of "but that's ridiculous", or some weak argument on how the existence of God is obvious, and atheism is in fact the teapot.

What exactly makes Russell's Teapot a poor argument for the non-existence of God?

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[–]Unicorn1234Learnt everything I know about Christianity from watching Agora 16ポイント17ポイント  (1子コメント)

God is Necessary, while a Teapot orbiting Jupiter (or whatever it is) would be Contingent.

Don't get me wrong, Bertrand Russell was a brilliant philosopher, but he evidently didn't fully understand Modal logic or the difference between Contingency and Necessity, hence why he thought that 'Who created God?' was a good rebuttal to Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument, when a careful reading of the argument already dispels many such misconceptions.

[–]SnugglerificCrypto-metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigologist 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

Don't get me wrong, Bertrand Russell was a brilliant philosopher, but he evidently didn't fully understand Modal logic or the difference between Contingency and Necessity, hence why he thought that 'Who created God?' was a good rebuttal to Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument, when a careful reading of the argument already dispels many such misconceptions.

Russell's knowledge of theology and rigor of argumentation in this arena was sub-par compared to other atheist philosophers like J.L. Mackie.

[–]TheZizekiest 20ポイント21ポイント  (3子コメント)

The teapot can be proven by observation. If we take God to be outside of time and space, as many people do, then God is not observable, as such, the teapot is a bad analogy.

[–]ithisa[S] 4ポイント5ポイント  (2子コメント)

This seems to be irrelevant, though. You could replace teapot, with, unobservable ghost orbiting the sun, or something.

[–]TheZizekiest 23ポイント24ポイント  (0子コメント)

But if it is orbiting the sun then it has a position in space and time, given the definition of orbit. How can you claim it orbits the sun if you can't observe it orbiting the sun? An 'unobservable object' with position in space and time is non-sensical

[–]CountGrasshopperDon't bore us, get to the Horus! 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

A ghost is still a thing, like a teapot or a person or a god. But God is not. Univocity of being is a crock of shit, but the analogy hinges on it.

[–]WorldOfthisLord 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Let's turn to Peter Van Inwagen and Alvin Plantinga to see why this line of thought is mistaken.

In short, it's because we have a very low prior probability that there's a teapot orbiting Mars, because as far as we know, teapots aren't found in space naturally and couldn't get there without being launched into orbit, which would have definitely created news.

This is not the case with theism, because we have no way of estimating the prior probability of God's existence (Plantinga uses the example of whether the number of stars are even or odd).

[–]WanderingPenitent 9ポイント10ポイント  (0子コメント)

The first presumption of the Teapot is that it is something that has no effect on our lives. For someone that miracles and sacraments affect their lives, the teapot argument does not really work unless you can disprove those miracles beforehand, rather than after. To do this consistently without presuming that there is no God to perform such miracles is actually a rather difficult task.

[–]shannondoahHuehuebophile master race realist. 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

To askphilosophy we go to ask...

[–]TaylorS1986Catholicism is sun worship 6ポイント7ポイント  (11子コメント)

It's based in the childish conception of God as a Magic Sky Daddy that exists in the world in a particular location common among Ratheists.

[–]inyouraeroplane 14ポイント15ポイント  (24子コメント)

Because there isn't such a thing as the burden of proof outside of law or debate clubs. Every claim needs sufficient evidence for it to be accepted and nothing is simply "right by default".

Even if we take Russell's standard as valid, it's clearly not the case that it's always on the person asserting existence to make their case and never on the person denying existence. If someone said Saturn wasn't real because they'd never seen it or that Abraham Lincoln was a mythical figure made up to inspire America around the Civil War and dared everyone else to prove them wrong, we'd rightly think they were talking nonsense and ask them to show why all the other evidence presented is wrong. The same thing applies for scientific concepts like evolution or climate change. If someone denies that either one exists, we expect them to disprove something so universally agreed upon.

Theism, for better or worse, has that same kind of consensus among the world's population and human history, so when someone comes along suggesting every culture in history has been largely wrong and deluded, people are well within their right to ask why.

[–]TaylorS1986Catholicism is sun worship 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Because there isn't such a thing as the burden of proof outside of law or debate clubs.

I wonder how much the "burden of proof" thing has it's roots in American litigiousness. Shoe Atheism applies to this, too.

EDIT: /u/katapliktikos's comment chain illustrates my point.

[–]ArvinaDystopia -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

If someone said Saturn wasn't real because they'd never seen it or that Abraham Lincoln was a mythical figure made up to inspire America around the Civil War and dared everyone else to prove them wrong, we'd rightly think they were talking nonsense and ask them to show why all the other evidence presented is wrong.

No, we'd show them evidence of Saturn or Lincoln's existence.
It's because we have evidence of those things that the non-existence claim is ridiculous.
You could say the burden of proof shifted because, for all intents and purposes, we have actual proof of existence.

The only way your analogy isn't terrible would be if we had evidence of at least one god's existence.
We don't.

[–]HyenaDandyMagnet for Stupid People 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Imagine a shipping crate, that clearly was opened, and now seems empty. One person says "I bet that this box used to have a statue in it." Another person says "That's ridiculous, what's the difference between that and thinking there's an invisible undetectable statue still in it?"

The position of "There's something that's not here" and "There's something that is here you don't see" are very different. Now, if you figure "Well, honestly, I don't know why I'd assume this was a statue," then that's fine. I'm not telling you what to think. But the point is that "God = Undetectable Teapot" is bad because there's a difference between the two.