Teapot Agnosticism (General)

by whitecraw, Friday, February 01, 2008, 21:52 (5928 days ago) @ Mark

A website espousing the virtues of agnosticism seems incomplete without a discussion of Russell's (in)famous 'teapot' analogy -- perhaps the most cogent (and popular) argument against the agnostic postition. I.e. to what extent is it reasonable to adopt a neutral position on beliefs for which there is no evidence? - 'Russell's teapot' calls into question the idea that the burden of proof lies on the sceptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims (e.g. that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot, which is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes, revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit). It can be similarly deployed against the equally unfalsifiable claims that God exists and that God does not exist. The burden of proof lies with those who make such assertions, not with those who doubt them. - I'm also doubtful of the claim that atheistic conclusions are more reasonable than theistic conclusions. Reasoning is the process of making correct inferences from a set of premises to a set of conclusions. Atheistic conclusions may be perfectly reasonable on the assumption of one set of fundamental principles and theistic conclusions may be just as perfectly reasonable on the assumption of a different set, depending on the quality of the inferences that string each argument together. - The most cogent argument I know of against the agnostic position is the pragmatic argument made by William James in The Will to Believe, which was written in reply to W.K. Clifford's The Ethics of Belief. There's a succinct summary of their dispute here