پنجشنبه سی و یکم ژانویه
اینرا در جواب به تقاضای نینا از ویکی پدیا اینجا نقل میکنم. جالب آنست که عنوان را نسبت به آنچه من قبلا دیده بودم و نام بردم تغئیر داده اند!
Analysis
Peter Atkins said that the point of Russell's teapot is that there is no burden on anyone to disprove assertions. Occam's razor
suggests that the simpler theory with fewer assertions (e.g. a universe
with no supernatural beings) should be the starting point in the
discussion rather than the more complex theory.[3] Atkins notes that this argument does not appeal to the religious because, unlike scientific evidence, religious evidence is said to be experienced through personal revelation that cannot be conveyed or objectively verified.
In his books A Devil's Chaplain (2003) and The God Delusion (2006), Richard Dawkins
used the teapot as an analogy of an argument against what he termed
"agnostic conciliation", a policy of intellectual appeasement that
allows for philosophical domains that concern exclusively religious
matters.[4]
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.[5]
Carl Sagan uses Russell's teapot in the chapter "The Dragon In My Garage" in his book The Demon-Haunted World, and says "Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true."[6]
Objections
Philosopher Brian Garvey argues that the analogy fails with regard to
religion because, with the teapot, the believer and non-believer are
simply disagreeing about one item in the universe and may hold in common
all other beliefs about the universe, which is not true of an atheist
and a theist.[7]
Garvey argues that it is not a matter of the theist propounding
existence of a thing and the atheist simply denying it - each is
asserting an alternative explanation of why the cosmos exists and is the
way it is: "the atheist is not just denying an existence that the
theist affirms – the atheist is in addition committed to the view that
the universe is not the way it is because of God. It is either the way
it is because of something other than God, or there is no reason it is
the way it is."[2]
The literary critic James Wood,
without believing in God, says that belief in God "is a good deal more
reasonable than belief in a teapot" because God is a "grand and big
idea" which "is not analogically disproved by reference to celestial
teapots or vacuum cleaners, which lack the necessary bigness and
grandeur" and "because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing".[8]
One counter-argument, advanced by philosopher Eric Reitan,[9]
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.[10]
Philosopher Paul Chamberlain says it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not.[11] He says that all truth claims bear a burden of proof, and that like Mother Goose and the tooth fairy,
the teapot bears the greater burden not because of its negativity, but
because of its triviality, arguing that "When we substitute normal,
serious characters such as Plato, Nero, Winston Churchill, or George
Washington in place of these fictional characters, it becomes clear that
anyone denying the existence of these figures has a burden of proof
equal to, or in some cases greater than, the person claiming they do
exist." [11]
