Russell's teapot

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), intended to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religions. Russell's teapot is still occasionally referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God.
==Russell's original text==
In an article entitled "Is There a God?",Bertrand Russell: Is There a God? commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote:
==Contemporary usage==
In his 2003 book A Devil's Chaplain, Richard Dawkins employed the teapot analogy as an argument against what he termed "agnostic conciliation", a policy of intellectual appeasement that allows for philosophical domains that concern exclusively religious matters.
One cannot prove a negative, and 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.
Peter Atkins said that the core point of Russell's teapot is that a scientist cannot prove a negative, and therefore Occam's razor demands 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 good enough to convince the religious, because religious evidence is experienced through personal revelation and cannot be presented in the same manner as scientific evidence. The scientific view is to treat such claims of personal revelation with suspicion.
Mariano Artigas explicitly challenges Dawkins' axiom that only scientific evidence should be permissible in assessing the existence of God. According to James Wood, belief in God is more reasonable than belief in a teapot because:
Another counter-argument, advanced by 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 concept of Russell's teapot has been extrapolated into more explicitly religion-parodying forms such as the Invisible Pink Unicorn, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and The Dragon in My Garage.
==See also==
*Parody religion
*The Root of All Evil?, a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins
==References==
Category:Bertrand Russell
Category:Atheism
Category:Criticism of religion
Category:Philosophical arguments
Category:Parodies
Category:Skepticism
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