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As Dawkins puts it, if there were a teapot orbiting the sun, we'd have no way of detecting it. It is too small for our telescopes, so we have absolutely no evi
by biohacker42 18y ago
As Dawkins puts it, if there were a teapot orbiting the sun, we'd have no way of detecting it.
It is too small for our telescopes, so we have absolutely no evidence for a teapot orbiting the sun.
You don't believe in that teapot, do you? That's silly.
But Dawkins is a biologist, and I'm a computer scientist, I don't believe in the teapot, but I also don't KNOW it's not there.
And that has nothing to do with shyness.
- dfranke 18y agoThat argument originally came from Bertrand Russell, not Dawkins.
- gravitycop 18y agoWikipedia says "Yes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
- TrevorJ 18y agoI'm a 3D animator for my day job, I definitely believe in the teapot, I saw it in the Cornell box so I know it exists. (apologies if this is way too much of an inside joke)
- olavk 18y agoThe shyness part is probably when people treat the question of belief in certain supernatural beeings as "special". Nobody is "agnostic" about their belief in the Tooth Fairy. They just plain don't believe in him (her?). Beeings from still living religions are treated differently since the issue is more sensitive.
- Herring 18y agoWhat would a proof of "not there" consist of? What I mean is, how can you claim to know anything if you allow the possibility of supernatural things interfering with your experiments?