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God the Teapot
19 March 2014
Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot is an object orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars. It is too small to be detectable so any insistence that the teapot exists cannot be refuted. Russell made the point to show that such unfalsifiable claims demand proof from the believer rather than disproof from the sceptic. In other words, the belief is itself carries no special authority.
The teapot – rather than, say, an oddly shaped asteroid – is chosen to make the assertion seem as absurd as possible. Russell concludes by implying it is no more absurd than the dogma preached in churches every Sunday, a dogma which has, down the centuries, carried special authority.
The teapot argument was tweeted in my direction by Adrian Perry (@Tregeare) who is amazed that I could believe in God (I am an agnostic but I won’t, for the moment, quibble). That, in turn, arose from my tweet expressing my dislike of the Richard Dawkins-Lawrence Krauss anti-religion ‘tour’, specifically my horror that an artist as great as Werner Herzog should support such nonsense. These neo-atheist preaching to the converted love-ins must be dismal, smug affairs. They also shock me in the same way Dawkins shocked me when he told me, years ago, he was writing a book on God. Why? Arguments against the existence of God are obvious, numerous and, in their own terms, irrefutable; they hardly need repetition.
Of course, 9/11 and American fundamentalism were the real targets – in other words, certain forms of very extreme behaviour and belief. Fair enough, I suppose, but the argument did not stop there, it expanded to become an assault on religion in general, the abolition of which, it was claimed, would make a better world. This is nonsense, of course – as, to my astonishment, Christopher Hitchens admitted on a US radio show. Religion is just an occasion for human evil, as were communism and fascism. The argument then further expanded to assert science as the one true way.
This last assertion is based on the belief – and it is a belief, a total teapot in fact – that science is capable of a final and full account of the the world. This leads to scientism in which every problem is approached with the presupposition that there is a scientific solution – read Roger Scruton on this particular abuse of reason.
All of which has tended to polarise people’s responses to religion. Neo-atheism has made non-believers and believers more strident. On one side, some people now seem scared of even referring to religion; a recent interviewee stammered an apology to me when he happened to use a religious reference. On the other side, faith in its most destructive forms is ever more entrenched.
But about that teapot. The first point to make is that Russell’s thought experiment is rigged. Nobody, as far as I know, believes in that teapot, billions believe in God. In other words, God is not a teapot because there is, indeed, evidence for his existence – primarily his persistence in the human mind. Here’s a teapot-centric account of this type of argument. That God is in the human mind and imagination is irrefutable on the grounds of history and, in my case at least, introspection. This may be a mass delusion or an expression of some psychological disorder in me, but I don’t think so, not least because, by other names and with other attributes, something like God appears in so much human discourse – the omni-competence of science being one obvious example.
The real issue in all this is the intensity of belief. Wisdom should teach us that we are wrong about almost everything almost all the time and that we pass through the world in a cloud of unsubstantiated beliefs. We can’t abandon them – we would cease to function – but we should all cling to them weakly. (This is, in fact, what scientists used to claim to do.) We shouldn’t go on ‘tour’ to prove ourselves right and we shouldn’t kill unbelievers. I don’t expect anybody to be impressed by or even to react to my own teapottish tendencies, but I will say that, in return, you shouldn’t deny the existence of yours.
11 Responses to “God the Teapot”
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19 March 2014 at 6:00 pm
“God gave us intelligence so that we can understand His creation via scientific enquiry.”
If “God” is truth, then it should be verifiable via reason and experience.
Experience can be gained via meditative technologies. A shortcut is easily available these days in the form of 5-MeO-DMT. Discussion of this substance is presented in “Tryptamine Palace”, the account of an atheist who discovers “G/d” via toad venom vapours. The same book has an excellent few chapters covering the zero-point field and modern quantum hypotheses for the source of mind.
Reductionists blindly believe in the teapot which is that consciousness arises as an epiphenomenon of matter. However, since all matter arises from the zero-point field, it stands to reason that mind also arises therefrom. Since mind is subtler than matter, it stands to reason that the former cannot be produced by the latter, and that consciousness is a nonlocal quantum phenomenon that is channelled via functional neurosystems.
Someone should shoot Dawkins with a dart-gun loaded with 5-MeO-DMT and see what he says afterward. (kidding, that is unethical except for war criminals, but someone should challenge him to try it. But people like Dawkins are very similar to fundamentalists who refuse to accept any evidence that might contradict the assumptions upon which their entire ego-structure is based.
One might ask Dawkins if he believes in the existence of an ego.
Dawkins’ work is rubbish.. taking easy potshots with little understanding. He claims that 911 was the work of religious fundamentalists even though the official story itself claims that their motivations were political, not religious. Reports of the alleged terrorists drinking with whores supports this. So Dawkins is just hatemongering against religions, using such events to support his bigotry.
“Look how many wars were caused by religion,” people say.
Look around you today. See how many wars are being waged in the name of “human rights” and “R2P”. Such ideals were never the motive for violence, but very often the justification. Wars are fought for resources, geopolitics, and the big egos of kings and bankers. They justify their evil by covering dogshit in holy brocades.
It is easy to criticise idiots who take the Bible literally. What they do not realise, is that they are just as illiterate and ignorant by taking the Bible literally when they refute it.
Those educated in esoteric texts understand that such texts are full of metaphors. In Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, one “year” can mean 1 century, 1 millenium, or one aeon, depending on the context.
Also, the Bible was very poorly translated into english. “God” makes us think of a Zeus-like creator, but the original term was the tetra-grammaton. [Only the Gnostics understand the metaphors, and the true intention of Christ’s teachings, which are very similar to buddhist teachings, both in theory and in practice. That is why the Vatican Church of Satan calls them heretics.]
Esoteric buddhist texts sometimes call consciousness the “All-Creating Monarch” (kun.byed.rgyal.po) because all phenomena arise from the zero-point field which is the home of pure consciousness, a dimension of infinite light beyond space and time. This is “God”. But beyond God (“Brahma”) there is the Void, Shunya, so even God does not exist. (Neither does this world, since all atoms are illusory manifestations of the Void.)
Infinite Light gets limited by our perception-habits, so we do not recognise reality but just a very small band of it. Thus it is said that all dimensions are concurrent – those in human bodies will see a glass of water, those in hell will see lava, those in bliss-realms will see nectar.
(Smoked some 5-MeO-DMT once. As i came back, the brown leaves were all beautiful flowers like in the god realms. Then I understood what the texts meant.)
Similarly, the same trigger can be positive or negative to the same person depending on the mood he is in on that day.
Heaven/hell are in the mind. As long as we are grounded in a human body, our experiences are limited to a narrow band. If we take 1g of LSD, we will experience extreme versions of heaven/hell right there and then. If one considers the possibility that consciousness has continuity, and is not an epiphenomenon of matter, it stands to reason that consciousness continues after death. After leaving the body, that consciousness is as volatile as someone who just took 1g of LSD. If s/he spent the day in love, s/he will be in heaven. If s/he spent the day in hatred, the experience will be terrible.
The idea of a permanent heaven/hell is bullshit created by the Church long after Christ’s death as a means to control the people. Reincarnation was largely censored from the bible by corrupt priests, but it is still there: purgatory. Believers seem to imagine it is some imaginary holding cell created by Zeus, or perhaps a situation like the series Lost.
In short, theists and atheists who take esoteric metaphors literally are equally illiterate and ignorant.
Truth is very scientific. It is not something mystical that somehow evades the laws of reason, nor is it something that cannot be experienced (and peer-reviewed) by those willing to adopt appropriate methodologies. Understandably, many years of meditation is difficult and even that is unreliable; but anyone speculating the existence of God should definitely take 5-MeO-DMT and ayahuasca, otherwise he is little more than a blind man feeling a big ego when he preaches that Picasso’s art does not exist.
And that is the essence of Dawkin’s work: preaching with the motive of boosting his own ego. Very very similar to very many priests.
19 March 2014 at 6:02 pm
Correction:
“the teapot which is that consciousness arises as an epiphenomenon of matter”
This is not a teapot. This has already been disproven.
8 April 2014 at 7:02 am
On the scientism debate see the wonderful interchange in the New Republic on this subject between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier’s ripostes are wonderful.
6 May 2014 at 2:38 pm
Excellent and nicely done, Bryan.
Agreed, the New Atheists often embody a similar mindset to American fundamentalist Christians. Once again we’re on the same page about these issues, per my email and comments elsewhere. Your point about intensity of belief gets right to the nexus of the issue.
The way I approach this, any entity having the capabilities that define a deity, could confound any experiment performed to ascertain its existence, therefore no such experiment can be valid.
Thus there is no viable empirical test for the existence or nonexistence of deities, and the issue (along with the issues of moral choices and aesthetic choices) is outside the scope of science.
(This is not to deprecate science in any way, any more than it is an insult to carpenters to say that hammers aren’t the best tools for smoothing concrete. One needs a multiplicity of tools to build a house that’s fit to live in, and the same case obtains with respect to the roles of the sciences and the humanities in seeking wisdom.)
Further, the propensity to believe or disbelieve in deities appears to have neurological correlates that vary in the population at-large. Some people are ‘naturally wired’ to believe, some are ‘naturally wired’ to disbelieve. Within each of these areas, there is a separate continuum from ‘abstract’ to ‘concrete’ thinking, that individuals apply to the domain of their belief/disbelief. As with sexual orientation, these subjective feelings are inherent in each person.
Personally, I’m naturally wired to feel a deeply meaningful sense of connexion with the universe at-large and to infer an implicate intelligence, but also to apply empirical and rational tools to understand nature, and to apply self-scepticism to my own subjectivity.
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Re. the preceding comments about psychedelic drugs, I would caution readers against making self-experiments with illicitly obtained compounds. The correct dosage ranges for these compounds are so small that laypeople are not capable of weighing them accurately, and unregulated compounds are often contaminated with dangerous impurities. For personal practice, meditation is the surest route to enlightenment and compassion.
The greatest benefit most of us will gain from psychedelics is the same as that which we gain from space exploration and cutting-edge physics: being able to read the outcomes of legitimate research in the peer-reviewed journals, or in articles in the intelligent lay press, and appreciate the ways in which the new knowledge contributes to our understanding of various facets of nature including the nature of mind.
9 November 2014 at 6:38 pm
Shut your fucking mouth bryan appleyard. You’re just mad at krauss and Dawkins and herzog because they aren’t neville chamberlains like you? Religion is explicitly evil like nazism! and they unlike you refuse to pretend otherwise. They refuse to be appease accomadate or apologies for religion because people who belong to it have done good and have cherry picked verses to justify their actions. You don’t have to be an expert in religious history, theology, or sociology to realize that it is slave thinking. You shut up padma drago, appleyard work is rubbish, he himself admitted that he is a terrible writer. it astonishes me that in this day in age, we have to defend freedom not only from religionists who want to take it away but from atheists like you who want to help them do it.
16 January 2015 at 10:22 pm
I visited this site for the first time today and found both the blogs and the discussions very interesting and well stated. My statement on this topic is simply (in my opinion):
In our human form, we are simply incapable of understanding the very nature of God. God does not run anything or determine anything. God simply is, and we cannot possibly understand it. All discussions for or against are like some of your readers statements about theoretical physic and models – the value is in whether those beliefs guide us towards greater truths and better outcomes.
23 February 2015 at 8:44 am
Strawman argument regarding science being a belief system that will answer everything…. it’s the scientific method that is our best chance of understanding everything. Posit a theory, test a theory, find a proof, challenge the proof, publish for scrutiny, use a basis for new theories, but ALWAYS leave that initial theory open to scrutiny, and finally, and most importantly, celebrate when it is unproven, as that will have furthered our learning.
Additionally, it’s disingenuous to suggest that just because the teapot doesn’t have a follower, (actually it probably does, if Jedi found its way on to the census) compared to all of the believers in god. We’ve had thousands of years of ignorance and indoctrination, that continues to this day via parent’s imprinting their superstitions onto their children.
It’s this indoctrination that pushes for a more strident atheism and anti-theism, as it undermines the chances for rationality. It’s a short cut to morality for toddlers, and the assertion of an invisible parent/babysitter, who is ALWAYS watching and judging you.
Ultimately Religion, at it’s most basic, requires an absolutist position, and absolutism, is, almost ironically, the opposite of the scientific method.
I’m sure there are many, many people who consider themselves religious, and more importantly, faithful, who have no idea how often they transgress from their dogma, and how their lack of knowledge of that dogma, would, if they looked into it, reveal their blasphemy, apostasy, hypocrisy and most likely, their apathy. Yet, they’ll still most likely, christen, mitzvah, circumcise etc etc their children into something their children cannot understand, or have an informed opinion on.
The key for me, is that final part of the scientific process – that new learning and new discovery, even when it challenges things we believed were proved, is a cause for celebration. With no dogma, no hierarchy, and no sanctity. In my opinion, it’s this that Dawkins, Kraus, and Harris are pushing for, and what they are so passionate about… and their frustration is escalated by the type of cherry picking god bothering used by people like Blair and Bush, to justify criminal behaviour, and drum up easily manipulated support for political agendas.
Religion is a tool for control at worst, and a panacea for strife at best. Nothing more.
26 March 2015 at 5:35 am
[…] writer Bryan Appleyard critiques thinkers who endow science with the ability to give a “final and full account of the […]
17 December 2015 at 1:07 am
There is a deeper problem. God is inextricably connected to causation, and per Hume, causation cannot be accessed with the external-facing senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing). Teapots, on the other hand, can be accessed in this way. Now, Bertrand Russell thought we would be best off if we did away with the concept of causation; see his “On the Notion of Cause”. There is, however, a slight problem: without causation, our percepts are not necessarily connected to our concepts.
Can we handle a world with absolutely no necessity? Can we handle a world where ‘laws’ are actually just ‘suggestions’? Indeed, even stuff like the Schrödinger equation is probably just an approximation (see Nancy Cartwright’s How the Laws of Physics Lie), and only valid within certain domains, domains which could change on us. Can we say that a scientist performed an experiment because she believed X? We can only be probabilistic about this if [necessitarian] causation gets thrown out of the window.
Now, Russell eschewed causation because he thought change [of anything] could be represented in terms of differential and partial differential equations. This is manifestly false, as mathematical biologist Robert Rosen competently showed in Anticipatory Systems and Life Itself. Diffeqs and PDEs only cover two of Aristotle’s Four Causes: material causation and efficient causation. As it turns out, to distinguish ‘life’ from ‘non-life’, one needs formal and final causation, which Rosen rigorously formalizes using the branch of mathematics known as category theory. We see the need for something other than material and efficient causation in other places to, like Gregory Dawes’ Theism and Explanation and Martin Hollis’ Models of Man.
Russell’s focus on being obscured the fact that there is also becoming. The latter requires change, and Bertrand Russell wanted to enforce a mathematical straightjacket on the kinds of allowable change. (Michael Tooley offers another way to look at the matter in his Time, Tense, and Causation.) We need to be done with such foundationalist nonsense. Reality is more complicated than the conceits of Enlightenment thinking (including Francis Bacon’s eschewing of formal and final causation). We need to get our eyes off of just things, and understand change—including the change that is life.
29 February 2016 at 11:12 am
Can Science replace Religion? Probably not, superstition seems to be baked into the human brain. However the question that is being skirted here is Can Religion replace Science?
My observation is that the over reaction against the branch of superstition we call religion by some agnostics and atheist is triggered by those that want to push the ethereal into the discipline of the cause and effect and PREDICTABLE processes we call science. I am not speaking of some undefinable “truth” but rather the bread and butter of science which is finding patterns of the universe that can be defined in such a way that prediction can be made with consistency. When this happens it is recognized as science. Questions and answers that can not be tested through prediction will not fit the scientific model. It is rare if ever that questions and answers from the religions community result in consistent successful predictions. It’s not right or wrong. good or evil. Without fitting the scientific method, it just is not science.
29 July 2017 at 5:22 pm
The reason the teapot idea is a poor argument against the existence of God is that God is not a teapot. More precisely, God is nothing like a teapot, which is a material object located at a point somewhere within the material universe. God – the necessarily real, transcendent creator of the universe and the ground of all being – is a totally different concept which cannot possibly be put on the same level as the teapot. It is surprising that Bertrand Russell could not appreciate that God, if he exists, is not an object. God is nothing – that is, no-thing. This is also why the atheism of someone like Richard Dawkins is such a shoddy affair. The God he disbelieves in does not indeed exist, for he is a straw man, a caricature of what theists and deists are convinced of, including those many ordinary believers who may not be theologically well versed.