Russell's Teapot: Does it Hold Water?

Here is a famous passage from Bertrand Russell's Is There a God?

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. 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. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

One thing Russell is doing in this passage is making an unexceptionable point about burden of proof and/or the ad ignorantiam fallacy. If the existence of X has not been disproven, it does not follow that X exists, or even that it is reasonable to believe that X exists. So if anyone were to affirm the existence of something like Russell's celestial teapot or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, then the onus probandi would be on him to support his outlandish claims. The burden of proof would not rest on those who deny or dismiss such claims.

So far, so good. Russell is of course doing more than underscoring a couple of obvious points in the theory of argumentation. He is applying his points of logic to the God question. Here too I have no complaint. If the existence of God has not been disproven, it does not follow that God exists or even that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.

But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God. But perhaps we should distinguish between a strong and a weak reading of Russell's suggestion:

S. Just as we cannot have any reason to believe that an empirically undetectable celestial teapot exists, we cannot have any reason to believe that God exists.

W. Just as we do not have any reason to believe that a celestial teapot exists, we do not have any reason to believe that God exists.

Now it seems to me that both (S) and (W) are plainly false: we have all sorts of reasons for believing that God exists. Here Alvin Plantinga sketches about two dozen theistic arguments. Atheists will not find them compelling, of course, but that is irrelevant. The issue is whether a reasoned case can be made for theism, and the answer is in the affirmative. Belief in God and in Russell's teapot are therefore not on a par since there are no empirical or theoretical reasons for believing in his teapot.

Another suggestion embedded in the Russell passage is the notion that if God existed, he would be just another physical thing in the physical universe. But of course this has nothing to do with anything maintained by any sophisticated theist. God is a purely spiritual being.

Another problem with the teapot analogy is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being.

This is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve.

Comments

[Mike]

Here too I have no complaint. If the existence of God has not been disproven, it does not follow that God exists or even that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.

This is not so clear. If the existence of God has not been disproven because nobody has been trying, then perhaps nothing follows. But suppose we have been trying. It seems to me that we do have some confirmation (or maybe what Popper would call 'corroboration') of the claim that God exists. We have not been able to falsify the claim (taking falsification broadly to include showing a priori that God cannot/does not exist---of course, Popper would not take it that way, but nevermind), does seem evidential for the claim that God exists. But this is all intuition and handwaving. I could not give you any details on how one might measure degrees of corroboration, nor do I know anyone who can.

[Bill Vallicella]

Hi Mike,

You're right: it isn't so clear. The fact that there are no arguments proving the nonexistence of God that all competent philosophers accept does seem to provide some evidence of the existence of God. But does this evidence make it more reasonable that not to believe in God?

[jhn]

The reason the teapot argument has so much traction is that it is in fact directly applicable to the God that most people believe in.

The only God that appears defensible according to your reasoning is a kind of philosophical construct. Some sort of first principle or underlying force of reality. (It's not clear to me exactly how you jump from theological ideas of "simplicity," etc, to God being sentient, or having desires, or wanting to do things such as sustain the world, but that is another issue.)

However, the teapot argument deals quite nicely with miracles, the efficacy of prayer, divine revelation, and all of the other embarrassing luggage of religion.

This reminds me of how Swinburne becomes much, much less effective when he moves from defending theism to defending Christianity.

[Mike]

This reminds me of how Swinburne becomes much, much less effective when he moves from defending theism to defending Christianity.

Well, it cuts in two directions, right? Christianity makes short work of the problem(s) of evil, for instance, and lots of other traditional problems. It does so because it has theological resources to manage objections that the rather thin philosopher's God does not. But the additional theology makes Christianity "top heavy" in Steve Wykstra's words (it dramatically lowers its prior probability--its probability coming into these problems). All of those propositions describing your theology are, esp. when conjoined, improbable. On balance, it might be better from a theoretical point of view to make peace with the problem(s) of evil (it's here to stay) and adhere to a somewhat thinner theology. I guess this is hardly a consideration for theists who do not take their theology to be a theory.

Among the reasons philosophers focus on the thinner God is that it stands in the intersection of lots of theological positions.

[jhn]

I don't see how Christianity or a "thick" theology makes dealing with the problem of evil any easier than if you were an atheist or only believed in the philosopher's god.

From a purely human-centered perspective, evil is a practical problem, but not one that poses any profound metaphysical difficulties. (Sociobiology could provide a convincing account of both good and evil, for instance.)

If you believed in only the philosopher's good, who would appear to lack any moral qualities, I don't see how evil is a problem for you. Explaining evil in a naturalistic universe is no more difficult than explaining rainbows or electricity. It is only when good and evil are expanded beyond the human sphere that evil becomes a problem.

I don't want to hijack this thread into a discussion of whether God exists and the nature of evil. I just want to point out that the philosopher's God is, as you say, very thin. I don't see why anyone would care whether such a "god" exists. And any god that does have properties that would make him relevant to human concerns (other than philosophical speculation) would be subject to the teapot argument.

[Mike]

I don't see how Christianity or a "thick" theology makes dealing with the problem of evil any easier than if you were an atheist or only believed in the philosopher's god.

Christianity is actually confirmed by the existence of evil. It predicts that there will be instances of evil. In this way it manages the problem. I'm not suggesting it makes the psychological adjustment to evil easier. That's not the problem of the problem of evil (or not the one I had in mind).

[bobkoepp]

Elliot Sober has mad a good start at sorting out the relations between "absence of evidence" and "evidence of absence":

http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Absence%20of%20Evidence%20and%20Ev%20of%20Abs%20aug%202%202008.pdf

But I'm not sure he would want to extend the argument beyond the "empirical domain".

[Bill Vallicella]

Two quick points.

1. The distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of religion is bogus, as I've argued elsewhere. The God of Aquinas, for example, is not a mere philosophical construct.

2. It is a mistake to confuse the distinction in (1) with the distinction between a 'thin' theology in which the focus is on the nature and existence of God and the theistic proofs and disproofs and a 'thick' theology which adds to this core doctrine such more specific doctrines as (in the Christian tradition) Trinity and Incarnation.

Mike is certainly right to suggest that the philosophical problem of evil (not to be confused with the psychological or as Plantinga calls it 'pastoral' problem of evil) assumes a much different complexion when viewed within the context of a 'thick' theology.