Quote:
Originally Posted by lumi
Is it short enough for you to write it up here? I'd be interested in hearing it.
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"Shit. I knew I should've taken a right turn back in Yonkers."
Okay, lumi, I found it:
Fundamentalist Religion and Science | NPR
Basically, Dr. Dawkins states that philosopher Bertrand Russell came up with the teapot story as a powerful counter to the point that "...many people make when they say, 'Well, you can't disprove God.' ...and so some people take that to mean that therefore the likelihood of God's existing is about equal to the likelihood that He doesn't exist, a kind of 50/50. You can't prove it either way that He doesn't exist, you can't prove that He does....so it's like tossing a coin. I don't think it's like tossing a coin and Bertrand Russell's teapot story illustrates that.
"He said, 'Suppose I was to tell you that there is a large china teapot in orbit around the sun, which you can't see with telescopes because it's too small. You cannot disprove the teapot, but that doesn't mean that you should regard the likelihood of the teapot existing as equal to the likelihood that it doesn't exist. Nobody in their right mind would believe that there is a large china teapot orbiting the sun. There's no positive reason why they should believe it, and exactly the same is true of God. That seems to me to be an absolute, knockdown reply to the statement of 'well, you can't disprove God, therefore you might as well believe him as likely as not'."
Oh, and btw, the flying spaghetti monster is the contemporary equivalent to the teapot story.
