the delusion of a tea pot

Here I discuss a point raised on Page 74 of the book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. He says, “

The fact that I cannot know whether your red is the same as my green doesn’t make the probability 50 percent.  The proposition on offer is too meaningless to be dignified with a probability.”

Dawkins makes two points:

1)      It is not for atheists to establish that there is no God, but for theists that there is

2)      There may not be enough evidence to establish the non-existence of God, yet since He most likely doesn’t exist, we can confidently feel that He doesn’t.

I’ll take up point 2) first.

Dawkins quotes Betrand Russell where Russell narrates, how ought we react, if he claimed that there is a tea pot orbiting around the Sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars. The tea pot, is too small to be detected by a telescope. Russell goes so far as to say that we ought to be able to doubt the existence of such a phenomena. However Dawkins says “… if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting tea pot. Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics:  we cannot prove for sure, that there is no celestial teapot.”  The point Dawkins is trying to make is as follows:

It is very unlikely that there is an orbiting tea pot, although it cannot be proven to be definitely so.  Thus although we cannot really establish that there is no orbiting tea pot, the probability of such an event taking place is so low, that we can more or less claim the orbiting tea pot to be another delusion.  This is similar to the theist’s claim that there is a God.  Although it cannot be definitely proven that there is no God, the existence of God (like the orbiting tea pot) is very unlikely.

So what? So, a lesson in epistemology; how could the teapot have gotten where it had? How indeed.

I would like to ask Mr Dawkins that do we all have to believe that reality can only consist of what  we can easily perceive it to consist of? Can reality not consist of events beyond our experience? Hasn’t science again and again established that reality can be very different than what we originally thought it to be?  For example Newton said space and time were two different entities and so it was thus proven to be again and again by empirical evidence for about two hundred years. However Einstein proposed that space and time are just different threads of the same fabric, known as space-time, which moved and morphed unlike the space of Newton, which was static and absolute. Sometimes reality could consist of experiences which need us to stretch our imagination, possibly because He who begot reality is far more imaginative than us. Why is Dawkins upset about the orbiting tea pot; because it becomes difficult to account for how the tea pot got there in the first place. Or is it so; lets just stretch our imagination a little bit; what if there is a civilization more ancient than ours, who sent a rocket into space. What if the rocket met with an accident and the wreckage started orbiting the sun. What if the wreckage included a tea pot? Is this scenario that difficult to conceive.  Just because everything that God does isn’t understood by us need He cease to exist?

Now I’ll consider case 1)

On who’s shoulder is the responsibility of establishing the truth? This is just a commonsense question. If a theist was trying to convince an atheist that there is God the onus might be on the former to establish his claim. If the situation was the other way round, then maybe it would be the responsibility of the atheist to establish, that there is no God. Since Dawkins is the author, it seems to be that it is his responsibility to establish his case. But then he prefers to be humorous and shirks his responsibility.

The very fact that he does so indicates that he does not have much genuine evidence about the non – existence of a Creator.

When Stephen Hawking asked Mr. Dawkins why he is so concerned about God, he answered it was because it is the responsibility of science to provide answers to various questions. Men of science should not say “because God so desired” in reply to every question. This seems an attractive reply but if you investigate further, you will realize how shallow this approach is. It is a bit like, just because the obedient sons depend on the father much to the dissatisfaction of the disobedient ones, the latter simply claim that the father is dead and can never intervene in the fortunes of anyone.  Many men of science (like Newton, Maxwell, Pasteur) pursued scientific careers with great zeal just to understand the glories of their Maker.  Thus this claim is unscientific that a theist doesn’t make a good scientist.