Russells Teekanne

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate the idea that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claimed that a teapot were orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it would be nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they could not prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God, and is in essence an example illustrating the uselessness of advocating a position based on the logical fallacy known as argument from ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam).

Russell's argument

Vorlage:See also In an article titled "Is There a God?" commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote:

In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism: Vorlage:Quote

Analysis

Peter Atkins said that the point of Russell's teapot is that no one can prove a negative, and therefore Occam's razor suggests that the more simple theory (in which there is no supreme being) should trump the more complex theory (with a supreme being). He notes that this argument is not sufficient to convince the religious, because religious evidence is experienced through personal revelation or received wisdom which cannot be objectively verified and are not accepted forms of scientific evidence.

In his books A Devil's Chaplain (2003) and The God Delusion (2006), 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. 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.

Carl Sagan uses Russell's teapot in the chapter "The Dragon In My Garage" in his book The Demon-Haunted World, and says "Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true."

Counterarguments

One counter-argument, advanced by philosopher Eric Reitan, is that belief in God is different from belief in a teapot because teapots are physical and therefore in principle verifiable, and that given what we know about the physical world we have no good reason to think that belief in Russell's teapot is justified and at least some reason to think it not. The teapot, however, serves merely an example of something the existence of which cannot be proven. Whether that something happened to be physical or abstract is immaterial to the point of the analogy.

Theologian Paul Chamberlain says it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not. He says that all truth claims bear a burden of proof, and that like Mother Goose and the tooth fairy, the teapot bears the greater burden not because of its negativity but because of its triviality, arguing that "When we substitute normal, serious characters such as Plato, Nero, Winston Churchill, or George Washington in place of these fictional characters, it becomes clear that anyone denying the existence of these figures has a burden of proof equal to, or in some cases greater than, the person claiming they do exist." This counterargument amounts to denial of the argument from ignorance as a logical fallacy.

Parody

The concept of Russell's teapot has been extrapolated into more explicitly religion-parodying forms such as the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

See also

• Occam's razor - assume simplicity over complexity
• Argument from ignorance
• The Root of All Evil?, a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins
• Parody religion

References

Vorlage:Reflist Vorlage:Irreligion Vorlage:Philosophy of religion de:Russells Teekanne