The best article I have read all year...
...is here, by James Woods, examining the philosophical problems contained within the standard atheistic critiques of organized religion. Here's a sample:
The model is Bertrand Russell's "celestial teapot," gleefully quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. If, says Russell, I told you that a celestial teapot was orbiting the sun but that you could not see it, nobody would be able to disprove me; "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." God is like the teapot, we are supposed to infer. Dawkins uses Russell to argue that we cannot prove God's non-existence, but then we cannot prove anything's non-existence. "What matters," writes Dawkins, "is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't), but whether his existence is probable.... Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things."
I agree with Dawkins's conclusion, and consider God highly improbable, but I dislike the way he gets there. It seems to occur neither to him nor to Russell that belief in God is not like belief in a teapot. The referent--the content of the belief--matters here. God may be just as undisprovable as the teapot, but belief in God is a good deal more reasonable than belief in the teapot, precisely because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing, and thus entices our approximations. There is a reason, after all, that no one has ever worshiped a teapot: it does not allow enough room to pour the fluid of our incomprehension into it.
In high school, I used to love challenging Christians by claiming to worship my cat, and then asking them to disprove that my cat was God. It was fun and provocative, but I never persuaded anyone to actually rethink their beliefs. To truly do so, atheists will have to respond and treat fairly the human quest for answers to "our incomprehension." I believe they can -- but not by appealing to celestial teapots or omnipotent felines.
The model is Bertrand Russell's "celestial teapot," gleefully quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. If, says Russell, I told you that a celestial teapot was orbiting the sun but that you could not see it, nobody would be able to disprove me; "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." God is like the teapot, we are supposed to infer. Dawkins uses Russell to argue that we cannot prove God's non-existence, but then we cannot prove anything's non-existence. "What matters," writes Dawkins, "is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't), but whether his existence is probable.... Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things."
I agree with Dawkins's conclusion, and consider God highly improbable, but I dislike the way he gets there. It seems to occur neither to him nor to Russell that belief in God is not like belief in a teapot. The referent--the content of the belief--matters here. God may be just as undisprovable as the teapot, but belief in God is a good deal more reasonable than belief in the teapot, precisely because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing, and thus entices our approximations. There is a reason, after all, that no one has ever worshiped a teapot: it does not allow enough room to pour the fluid of our incomprehension into it.
In high school, I used to love challenging Christians by claiming to worship my cat, and then asking them to disprove that my cat was God. It was fun and provocative, but I never persuaded anyone to actually rethink their beliefs. To truly do so, atheists will have to respond and treat fairly the human quest for answers to "our incomprehension." I believe they can -- but not by appealing to celestial teapots or omnipotent felines.
posted by Ben at 2:52 PM
14 Comments:
Never having read about Russel's celestial teapot, I jokingly told my Christian schoolmates that believing in God was no different in believing in a giant purple catapillar that orbited the earth behind the moon. Ben, I guess both of us had our nonsense counter-argument.
The conclusion I draw is that athiests, at our most kneejerk, tend to respond to the improbability of blindfaith in a similar fashion. It sounds like some important updating is being done. I'm glad we're moving past Bertram's argument (which both of us also seem to have stumbled upon in our preteen, Christian-baiting years.)
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
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