Morality Footle: The War of the Teapots

Bertrand Russel in 1952 wrote an essay encapsulating a concept which became known as "Russell's Teapot" (sometimes known also as the "Celestial Teapot"). In it, he posited that if one were to state that there was a teapot between Earth and Mars, the statement would be utterly disprovable provided that it came with the disclaimer that the teapot is too small to be detected by our best telescopes. To say that because it is undisputable it is therefore neccessarily true, is an absurd leap to make. He then goes on to say that if the story of the teapot were supported in ancient literature and re-asserted as truth every sunday, it would be on the head of the sceptic to justify his scepticism simply due to the overwhelming consensus of the disprovable idea.

Since then, the idea has been wildly popular, giving rise to all sorts of comical spin-offs such as the invisible pink unicorn at the centre of the universe, and the notorious Flying Spaghetti Monster. The moral has always been the same: "If you want me to prove your God does not exist, you need to demonstrate that you can disprove a negative by tackling these concepts".

In 1995, a new teapot analogy was born, this time on behalf of the deists and theists: While on the stand as a fact witness, Dr. John Haught was asked by the prosecution to explain why science and religion were not in conflict. ^1 His response was the boiling kettle analogy: If you ask "Why is the water boiling?" you can get a number of answers, all of which are true:

1. the water molecules are bouncing around excitedly and the liquid state is turning into gas.

2. it is boiling because my wife turned on the gas.

3. It's boiling because I want tea.

They do not conflict because they all answer the question on different levels - when studying the molecular activity, you would never bring the desire for tea into the equation - doing so would only cloud matters (and possibly make scientists thirsty). So too, he argues, works the relationship between God and science.

This line of reasoning fascinated me and made me wonder about the nature of the mind of Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins. Let me make this clear - I do not intend this as an ad hominem attack of Dr. Hawkins character. In his book, The Ancestor's Tale, he talks at great length about the "affliction of the absolutist mind", meaning a person who pattern matches in the extreme - mentally cataloguing things even when there is a gradation from one group to another in front of him. In his more recent book, The God Delusion, he refers to the Dualist Mind, to mean people who see a separation between their body and themselves and use this to conclude the existence of a soul. But what of Vaught's "Explanatory Pluralism"? Are there types of mind that we can categorize to encompass those in an absolutist manner, separate from those who do not work at that level? I am not meaning to suggest that Dawkins would fail to grasp that water is boiling because someone wanted tea - more that he exhibits a form of compartmentalisation when it comes to the ultimate questions such as "where we all come from". He has an answer, which is correct, or at least a promising route to an answer which seems most parsimonious and is correct, and therefore concludes that the question is answered on all levels. I suspect that his brain is quite capable of handling such things, but perhaps (and I think this is more likely) the far reaching questions of whether a deity may want evolution are of no direct relevence to anything in his life, whether it does want it, or whether it even exists enough to want it.

Can theistic intent really work hand in hand with so-called blind evolution? Yes, in the same way that fate and free will could co-exist provided your free will is not above the laws that fate encompasses: You have every right to choose whatever you want, so long as it's your personality making the choice, and that personality is not affected by the outside world, then yes absolutely whatever choice you end up making will be the choice your personality was always going to make. Put another way - I am bound by the laws of gravity, but I still have the freedom to jump as many times as I want - each freely made jump does not break the gravitational pull any more than a freely made decision breaks the laws of fate.

I feel like we just stepped off the edge of a thought there which deserves much more time than I have now to give it, so reeling us back in quickly - my initial purpose in writing up this little entry was to illustrate the way a piece of the material world, such as the humble teapot, can be used as a tool for ridicule, or a tool for explanatory mind expansion, depending on the motivation of the person wielding it. I believe this world is one filled with irony and self fulfilling prophecies - in 2000 years, scholars will come across ancient documents about teapots, some of them bewailing the lack of ancient teapot documentation. I shall leave you with another quote from Dawkins:

"The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don't exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don't stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don't warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don't kneecap those who put the tea in first." -The Devil's Chaplain, 2003.

The teapot is benign, depending upon the hand that wields it. How will you use yours?


Footnotes

1. The case was Kitzmiller v Dover, Pennsylvania - a landmark trial where a high school had tried to introduce Intelligent Design into the science classroom without first running it past the scientific community. The teachers, parents and some council members successfully sued on the basis that this violated the separation of church and state. The entire court transcript can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/