Bo Jinn - Illogical Atheism: Russells Teapot

The following book is an excerpt from Book II: Fallacies of the Illogical Atheism series by B Jinn.

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"Fallacy - A failure in reasoning which renders an argument invalid."
- Oxford English Dictionary

Hereunder we shall examine some of the more recurrent arguments from contemporary pop-atheism, championed by the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism and other popular atheist academics. The following arguments are not exhaustive. More detailed formulations of more powerful arguments such as "The Problem of Evil/Suffering" and "The Logical Impossibility of God" shall not be dealt with, reason being simply that these arguments receive surprisingly meager support from the new atheist community. Indeed, atheists like Richard Dawkins and Lewis Wolpert have spoken out against the argument from evil and suffering for reasons not altogether clear. One could only presume they held such "rationalised" arguments to be superfluous to the atheist cause on the supposition that God could be far more convincingly disproved on the basis of science or other comparatively frugal objections for which theism simply cannot account- a dangerous assumption to make in philosophy.

Popular atheism has somewhat drifted away from the more traditional atheistic arguments. Putting it mildly, we might say that it has lost much of its sophistication. In truth some of the arguments discussed below are not even arguments at all. An argument, by definition, must follow a logical pattern leading from true premises to an inescapable conclusion which poses a real problem for a given hypothesis (in this case the God hypothesis). You will notice I presented a few of such arguments against atheism in the previous book; for instance, the "Core Argument" and the "Argument Against the Scientistic View of Human Understanding." The logic in these arguments follows inevitably from their premises to their conclusions. If it any one or more of the premises can be called into doubt, then the argument would be a weak argument. If one or more of the premises can be proven to be false/extremely unlikely, or worse still if the logic simply does not follow from the premises to the desired conclusion, that argument is a fallacy. Since most of the arguments presented below have not been philosophically refined in mainstream atheism, we will try to formulate each argument into a syllogism and proceed to dissect them piece by piece.

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1 Dawkins, God Delusion p.108

"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."
- Bertrand Russell

This argument was alluded to in the Book of Origins. I call this the 'celestial teapot' fallacy in honor of its most celebrated formulation. However, since Bertrand Russell, the 'celestial teapot' concept has been subject to all kinds of re-applications designed primarily to satirise God. Possibly the most famous example of this is Bobby Henderson's infamous 'Flying Spaghetti Monster' which has become somewhat of a status symbol synonymous with modern atheism. The derivatives of Russell's teapot all seek to suggest the same basic proposition which is:

"Because God cannot be seen, heard nor tested for in scientific way, he can neither be proven nor disproven. Therefore if we are to believe in God, we are just as well justified in believing any other ridiculous idea."
... like a teapot orbiting the sun, or a flying spaghetti monster etc.

In order to identify the flaw in this reasoning we shall first reduce the argument to its logical format:

Premise 1: The existence of something requires evidence.
Premise 2: Without evidence for something, we are not justified in believing it exists.
Premise 3: God is something.
Premise 4: There is unsatisfactory evidence for God.
Conclusion: Therefore, we are not justified in believing God exists.

There is a supplement this argument which purports to make it even more generalizing. I am talking about the profoundly inane contention that "You cannot prove the non-existence of anything" I am open to suggestion as to any other way in which the argument might be arranged. All of the premises of the above argument are open to scrutiny. However, the contentions most relevant to the argument's fallaciousness are premises 1, 2 and 4. We shall proceed by discussing Premise 1 and Premise 2 in conjunction, and then Premise 4, which is the most questionable of all the premises.

Let us try and understand the 'God hypothesis in terms of a murder case presented before a court of law:

We have a set of facts, in which the corpse of victim 'A' was found at the scene of the crime. We have a prosecutor and the accused. The prosecutor's job is to bring evidence to support the hypothesis that the accused killed victim 'A'. Ask yourself; is it enough for the defendant to simply to be skeptical of all the evidence presented by the case for the prosecution? Obviously not. The defendant must present an alternative explanation for how the victim was killed. Not only that, but the defendant must provide his own evidence in support of his explanation. If the plaintiff can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the best explanation of the facts is the hypothesis that the defendant murdered the victim, then the guilty verdict is produced.

In the above allegory; the plaintiff is the theist, the defendant is the atheist and the fact that cries out for a hypothesis is the universe and everything within it, to which the theist submits God as an explanation. I would like to reiterate the characteristics of God which bare monotheistic theology recognizes, and which most philosophers would agree upon, namely:
an uncaused, eternal, spaceless, omniscient, infinitely powerful, immaterial and personal/intelligent being.

Is God an extraordinary claim? Yes; an infinitely and eternally extraordinary claim. But then again the universe is also an extraordinary place, so one would expect the explanation for how it got here to be rather extraordinary. If the explanation were not extraordinary at all, one might assume science would have figured it out by now. So, the objection that God is improbable because he is complicated and extraordinary is philosophical garbage which we shall be dealing with when we come to discuss the Dawkinsian fallacy from evolutionism. The only alternative available to the atheist would be to claim that the universe is self-explanatory, and therefore requires no explanation. But that is both scientifically and philosophically invalid because a) the best scientific and philosophical evidence available to us indicates the universe is not and cannot conceivably be eternal or infinite, and therefore cannot be self-explanatory and; b) even if it were a logical or scientific possibility for the universe to be eternal and infinite, then how would this be any more provable or any less ambiguous and confusing than God?