The "Flying Spaghetti Monster" [FSM] was invented to protest the Kansas State Board of Education decision to permit teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in state school science classes ion 2005. Pastafarians demanded equal time in science classrooms for "Flying Spaghetti Monsterism", alongside intelligent design and evolution.
Pastafarianism is meant to be a parallel with belief in God. The way the challenge goes is that believing in God is just like believing in a flying spaghetti monster. To wit, its just a figment of one's imagination for which there is absolutely no evidence, but foolish people choose to believe in it anyway. Thus, belief in God is dismissed as nothing more than believing with absolutely no evidence.
An argument by analogy argues that because two things are similar in some respects, they are likely to be similar in other respects, or that a certain characteristic present in one thing is likely to be present in the other.
Here's a breakdown of arguments by analogy:
Premise: Two things (A and B) share some known similarities (F).
Premise: A has a characteristic (G).
Conclusion: Therefore, B likely also has characteristic G.
The strength of an argument by analogy depends on the relevance and significance of the shared similarities to the characteristic being inferred.
First, Pastafarians argue that “faith” is essentially blind: therefore, you might as well have faith in an invisible, intangible being made of pasta as have faith in God.
The second problem is that Pastafarians are painfully ignorant of the latest scientific research into the transmission of religious beliefs. Cognitive scientists have argued that “minimum counter-intuitiveness” is essential for the transmission of religious ideas. Ideas that are slightly outside the norm – that are slightly counter-intuitive – tend to be transmitted by humans because they seem interesting. But there is a substantial body of research that shows that bizarre and trivial ideas are rapidly dismissed, and therefore cannot ground religious belief. The idea needs to be eye-catching enough to warrant attention, but not so far-fetched that it can be immediately discounted. We don’t like films that simply recount a day in the life of an average person; but we don’t often watch films that are just a chaos of randomly connected scenes.
So a new religious movement based on a transcendent creator will be more successful than a religion which teaches that humans are the reincarnations of the alien beings who died in a trans-galactic rebellion aeons ago. The latter is just too strange an idea to merit consideration. However, the idea that an agent is behind the order and seeming purposefulness of the world does seem plausible. We regularly observe and have direct experience of the power of agency. Indeed, the fact that theism has survived and thrived in multiple cultures over two millennia suggests that it is very plausible.
Third, the parody presupposes that theism is meaningless, or that theism lacks explanatory power. Is the concept of God meaningless word play? Hardly. It is a coherent concept with explanatory power. God can be described as limitless, loving, personal power (what the Bible calls “holiness”). “Personal power” is simply the power to choose; something that we readily experience. God is such “personal power” without limits. Our choices are limited by our bodies and the nature of the universe that we dwell in.
If God exists he would have limitless power because he would not be confined by a body, or by time or space. The power to choose depends on knowing our options; so limitless power needs perfect knowledge. God would know everything that he was capable of doing; and he would know everything that he has created and is currently sustaining. So this accounts for God’s omniscience. God is loving, personal power” because love requires freedom, and because God is the source of all value and goodness in our universe. Now that’s a simple, rich description of God.
So theism isn’t complicated, and is also quite meaningful. Better yet, theism is able to explain a great deal about our universe and our lives. It accounts for the order which we see in our universe. It explains why the universe has conscious, living, knowing beings. Theism explains why good and evil are as real and as important as electromagnetism or gravity. Theism explains why human lives crave purpose and meaning. FSMs don’t really compare.
It is also crucial to realise that evidence can count against theism. If there is a God worthy of worship, why does he allow suffering? Why is the living world so wasteful – what was the point of making those marvellous dinosaurs, just to wipe them out? Why is it not clear which religion provides the best way of approaching God? Now theists have different responses to this counter-evidence. But what is important to note is that it is counter-evidence. Whereas meaningless and trivial stories (say, invisible, intangible beings made of pasta haunt the cosmos) are so disconnected from the real world that it isn’t only impossible to provide evidence for them. It is impossible to provide evidence against them.
However, Richard Dawkins disagrees with my reviewer, arguing that the FSM stands for “an infinite number of things whose existence is conceivable and cannot be disproved” (The God Delusion, p.76, 2006). The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s on-line home cheerfully endorses and approves of Dawkins interpretation. And they’re hardly alone: American Humanists ask “what is the evidence for the existence of invisible beings controlling our world and judging our behavior? None for FSM—and none for Yahweh either.” Indeed, the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s homepage argues that religion has nothing to do with truth and evidence:
By any rational metric, Pastafarians are as legitimate a religious group as any. Arguably more so, since we’re honest and rational….Nonbelievers get hung up asking for evidence when really we should be looking at why does religion thrive despite evidence?So the Flying Spaghetti Monster is meant to parody religious truth claims. It is only recently that sceptics have started to use the FSM to satirise religious “privilege”. But Pastafarianism is a poor argument against religious toleration. There is a weight to religion that Pastafarians do not seem to comprehend. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz described religion as
Or consider Ninian Smart’s scheme for studying religion, which draws attention to its seven dimensions- the experiential, the narrative, the doctrinal, the material, and the practical, the social and the ethical. Metaphor, symbolism and analogy play an important part in religious doctrines and narratives: but some truths must be taken literally if a religion is to have any effect on behaviour. And it should be obvious that religion profoundly affects a person’s moral convictions and social identity. Religion creates martyrs; Pastafarianism creates puns.
Religion has such a command over a person’s behaviour and inner life that we should provide everyone with the freedom to manifest a distinct identity. In the interests of liberty, we allow believers to convey their convictions to the wider world. Religions do not merely use words, but also traditions, symbols and signs to communicate. These distinctive practices are rich with narrative, doctrinal and historical significance.We impoverish our culture and reduce our freedom to be different when we naively mock “religious privileges”.
The real problem is that many “Pastafarians” left the Christian faith in their late teens or early twenties, so they tend to have a teenager’s understanding of the Christian faith. Like New Atheism, it is an anti-intellectual movement with no deep interest in philosophy, theology or religious studies in general. Sometimes I think I’m meant to be offended by their Spaghetti Monster, but I can’t quite work up the energy. I really don’t mind how many posters they display in public places because they don’t fully comprehend the beliefs that they are rejecting. Their satire, like most of popular secularism, is brainless and heartless; it does not cut me emotionally or intellectually.
One interesting feature of recent debates about God’s existence is the use of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to deride the rationality of theistic belief (a colorful spin on Russell’s teapot case). What I’m interested in is why anyone was ever impressed with it.
Lately I’ve been studying the history of the Byzantine Empire: its military history, its religion and theology, its philosophy, art, and architecture. It’s amazing to me that there’s an entire empire, lasting one thousand years, that is wholly absent from popular Western culture. When was the last time you saw the Byzantine Empire mentioned in a movie, a television show, or a recent novel? And so what happened? Why did one thousand years of Greek Christian history go down the memory hole?
Anyway, I don’t know. But I am impressed by one thing that survives – neoplatonist influences. I’m impressed by neoplatonists’ ability to continually reinvigorate themselves over the centuries, especially by introducing and refining theological ideas that continue to have broad influence in Christianity. Neoplatonism played an essential role in the development of the doctrine of the trinity, the two natures of Christ (the hypostatic union), the doctrine of the immortal soul, and the Eastern Christian ideas of theosis, and the essence-energies distinction.
Neoplatonism was extremely influential in the Western Empire as well, among Augustine, who more or less introduced Platonism into Christian theology in the West, Anselm, Aquinas, and many others. Platonism was probably most influential in Christian Egypt, through Alexandrian theology.
So all around the Mediterranean, and deep into Europe, neoplatonism was the state of the philosophical and theological art for centuries and centuries.
For many neoplatonic thinkers (Christian or no), the existence of some sort of deity is philosophically obvious. God/master deity often served as the explanatory ground of almost everything: concepts, knowledge, morality, human purpose, the soul, freedom, and the basis of political order. This isn’t a coincidence. They believed they had arguments beginning from their philosophical commitments and extending to the existence of some kind of chief deity. Some kind of God served a central explanatory role in these philosophical and theological systems.
For neoplatonists, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) would have seemed a ridiculous analogy with the divine. The power of the FSM is to generate the intuition that God’s existence is random, unnecessary, and absurd. And just as no one should believe in FSM, no one should believe in God. But, again, the finest minds for over a thousand years, and really fifteen hundred years, would have been utterly unmoved because God’s existence was in no way random. In fact, God’s existence was the least random thing imaginable.
The truth is that a single, original deity isn’t going to seem random on any view that prioritizes the conceptual and the mental as ontologically fundamental. Deity just doesn’t look weird on such views. And, importantly, these views aren’t insane, since it is hard to see how the conceptual and the mental as we know them could even in principle originate in the material world. So there must be some mental point of origin or explanation, and that suggests at least one deity, and perhaps only one master deity. I take no stand here on whether those systems must lead to some kind of theism, just that it is entirely reasonable for these philosophical systems to yield arguments for some kind of theism.
So when did FSM start seeming like an interesting analogy? Not the 19th century, since idealism was dominant in many places, and idealists frequently affirmed the existence of either an immanent deity or a transcendent one.
No, it is the dominance of physicalism that gives the FSM its rhetorical power. But this suggests that all the FSM can do is convince people with tacit physicalist commitments that God’s existence is as random and unexplained as the FSM. For again, for centuries upon centuries, almost no reflective person with philosophical training would have been impressed. Instead, the only people who are impressed are those who have absorbed physicalist assumptions. And, while physicalism is influential, it is not only reasonably contestable, but it is probably in some trouble in the philosophy of mind and metaethics. It’s just hard to jam mental and moral properties into the physical world.
Now, of course, many people will say that the only reason various forms of monotheism were dominant for so long is that people were pressured into believing it and absorbed it from their culture. But, first, that wasn’t always true (it wasn’t true in the polytheistic ancient world in many areas). Second, the lines of argument they pursued weren’t at all absurd, or at least no more absurd than modern philosophical arguments for all kinds of things. And third, similar debunking explanations can explain away rational atheism too. One could argue that the reason atheism is common in the academy is that high status academics are often atheist physicalists, and atheism has filtered out of the academy in part because many academics are high-status atheists in the popular culture, like the late Stephen Hawking.
So that’s why I think the FSM impresses some people. It impresses express or tacit physicalists, but other reasonable philosophical systems won’t see a single God as an arbitrary and laughably random postulate. And the philosophical systems that do see God in this way are subject to various difficulties. Now, the Christian God may indeed seem random as a specification of the master deity, but even Christians admit that we only know about God’s Trinitarian structure through revelation. So if you want to impugn the Christian God with the FSM, you have to already think you have a good argument against the idea that the master deity can and has revealed itself as having a Trinitarian form. And that requires a bit more than ridicule, if the existence of a master deity is already on the table.
Number and Variety of Instances:
A greater number and variety of instances supporting the analogy generally lead to a stronger argument.
Differences:
It's also important to consider any relevant differences between the two items being compared, as these can weaken the argument.
Plausibility:
Analogical arguments aim to establish plausibility, not certainty, for their conclusions.
Modal vs. Probabilistic:
Analogical arguments can be used to support either modal conclusions (showing a conjecture is worth taking seriously) or probabilistic conclusions (showing a hypothesis has a certain probability).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
https://www.spaghettimonster.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fsm/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
atheists who invoke items like goblins and the Tooth Fairy in teapot-type arguments are “presenting ridiculous examples and ignoring non-ridiculous ones” [6]. Even über-atheist Richard Dawkins, who uses teapot-type arguments, seems to recognize the intrinsic implausibility of the objects invoked in the arguments [7]. (However, Dawkins does not seem to realize that this implausibility undermines the arguments.) In this paper I will elaborate on the differences between the plausible and the implausible objects – or what Antony calls “ridiculous” and “non-ridiculous” examples. Much of what I will say might seem trivial in hindsight, because the items under discussion seem so very implausible once we have thought about them for a moment. First consider the teapot. To understand why the teapot is implausible, consider what would have happened if Russell had used an oblong rock having two craters instead of a teapot. Then Russell's argument would have been conspicuously wrong. Even if we had never observed an oblong space rock with two craters, our general knowledge about outer space would give us good reason to believe that there probably is such a rock. We know that there are lots of rocks in space, including meteoroids and asteroids. These rocks come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Many of these rocks are oblong, cratered, or both. Therefore, even if we had not observed an oblong two-cratered rock in space, we should be quite surprised if there were no such rocks. There could well be such a rock in an orbit of the general kind that Russell mentioned in his argument. We would know that the existence of such a rock is not implausible, and presumably has a non-negligible probability, even if we had no direct evidence for such a rock. Our general knowledge of the materials found in space is enough to make the point.
However, Russell did not use a plain old space rock in his argument. Instead, he used (of all things) a teapot. A teapot is an object that is inherently unlikely to occur in space. The china teapot that Russell had in mind could not occur in space unless either (1) humans put one there intentionally or unintentionally, or (2) some freakish natural event threw one into space from Earth. Alternative (1) has not happened as far as we know. Alternative (2) also has not happened as far as we know, and is extremely improbable given the way Earth and its atmosphere work. Of course, someone might want to expand the definition of “teapot” to include objects that could be used as teapots but that are not of intelligent origin. (For example, natural forces might shape a piece of rock accidentally into a form that would make the rock utterly indistinguishable from a teapot, and fully usable as a teapot if we had the rock in our hands.) But even if you count such a naturally occurring “teapot” as a teapot, the existence of Russell’s teapot remains unlikely – because it is unlikely that such an object would happen to form naturally. In any case, the object would not be the china teapot that Russell specified.
Now we can see why Russell's teapot argument fails to disprove anything. The argument is circular. Its conclusion is built into its premises. It begins with an object whose existence in outer space is intrinsically unbelievable – and it ends in the conclusion that belief in the object's probable existence is irrational. Belief in the teapot seems silly only because the teapot is an object that is unlikely to exist in outer space. We already know 4 that the teapot is unlikely even before we read the argument. We might not have direct sensory evidence against Russell’s teapot, but we have indirect evidence against it. Russell’s teapot example does not succeed in showing that unproven objects are unbelievable. At most, it succeeds in showing that objects known to be improbable are unbelievable
Viewed this way, the teapot argument doesn't really prove much at all. It only shows that we shouldn’t believe an object is probable if we already know the object is improbable. We already knew that. The teapot argument is not as strong as the New Atheists would like to think it is! Indeed, the teapot argument is shockingly weak. It might be able to tell us that God is improbable, but only if we have independent reasons for thinking that God is improbable – and in that case, it tells us nothing new.
Now what about the other teapot-like arguments – the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument, or the unobservable pink unicorn argument, or all the trite comparisons of God with tooth fairies, leprechauns, and Santa Claus?
All these arguments have the same flaw as the teapot argument. They ask us to imagine an intrinsically improbable object – one that we know, through indirect evidence, to be improbable. It's true that we should disbelieve in such objects if we lack evidence for them, because we already know that the objects are improbable. However, the usual atheist line of argument suggests that we should disbelieve in these objects because we have no evidence for them. That is a different claim – and it is wrong. The reason it is rational to disbelieve in these objects (instead of simply reserving judgment about them) is not that the objects are unproven. The reason is that the objects are improbable in view of the indirect evidence against them.
Now I will discuss a few of these improbable objects and suggest a few reasons why they are improbable. It goes without saying that we already disbelieve in these objects. I am only trying to point out some simple reasons why our disbelief is justified. (Any militant atheist who reads this paper, logs on to an internet forum, and writes “This author is trying to disprove leprechauns – he must think they might exist ha ha ha ha ha” will be guilty of the basest intellectual dishonesty.)
Consider the Invisible Pink Unicorn. The case against the existence of this creature is open and shut – and for a reason almost too obvious to mention. How could an object that is completely invisible also be pink? If the unicorn reflects the right kind of light to give it a pink color, how can it be invisible too? A permanently invisible pink unicorn would seem to be a logical impossibility – not just a physical or biological impossibility. Also, a unicorn, in the standard sense of that word, would have to be roughly horseshaped – and one can doubt that a completely undetectable object would have a shape, at least according to the standard meaning of the word "shape." How could we ever tell which points of space the "unicorn" occupies if the animal is completely unobservable? If it's impossible to specify whether this creature occupies a given region of space, then in what sense does it have any shape at all – even the shape of a horselike creature with a horn? There are even more reasons to deem the pink unicorn improbable, but these two reasons seem good enough. The Invisible Pink Unicorn is not believable – not because its existence is unproven, but because there are good reasons to think it cannot exist.
Next consider the Tooth Fairy. In this case, we have very good indirect evidence that the alleged entity does not exist: we know the real cause of the phenomenon that the Tooth Fairy supposedly causes. According to the Tooth Fairy folklore, the Tooth Fairy leaves money for children who have lost a tooth. In reality, we know that this money is brought by the child’s parents or other responsible humans. This fact excludes the Tooth Fairy as 6 the literal, causal bringer of the money. Hence the Tooth Fairy, defined in the standard way, is implausible. We don’t just lack proof that it exists; we have very good evidence that it does not exist. This is similar to the reason we don’t believe in Santa Claus. We know that an actual man named Santa Claus, who has the properties attributed to him in the Christmas legends, doesn’t exist – because we know where Christmas presents really come from
Next consider leprechauns. We should disbelieve in leprechauns, but if we want to justify our disbelief we need a reason different from the reason for which we disbelieve in the Tooth Fairy. Imagine that leprechauns existed and had the features that the leprechaun folklore says they have. Imagine that leprechauns really interacted with humans as often as the folklore suggests they do – and with just as much gusto. Then they likely would have left behind some decent evidence for their existence. However, we don't have this evidence. This tips the balance in favor of the improbability of leprechauns. The improbability gets worse when we consider the rather long time that people have been believing in and talking about leprechauns. All that time to leave some physical traces – and no verifiable physical traces found? On the other hand, if the leprechauns were beings of a kind that would not leave significant physical evidence, then they would be quite different from the way the leprechaun folklore says they are, and we would have good reason to doubt that they were the same beings that storytellers traditionally called “leprechauns.” Leprechauns, as described in the folklore, are improbable. We cannot prove with absolute certainty that there are no such beings (there isn't much we can prove with absolute certainty), but we have good reason to believe there are no such beings.
Note that I am not jumping from the premise that we haven't found leprechauns to the conclusion that there aren't any leprechauns. I am only claiming that if leprechauns existed, and if they fit the relevant descriptions in the folklore, then probably they would have left some decent evidence by now. No matter what one thinks of the maxim “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” one still must contend with the fact that 7 some hypothetical entities are likely to reveal their existence if given enough time
The same argument that I used against leprechauns can be used against other mythical creatures that are alleged in folklore to be fairly common and to have plainly observable effects on humans or the environment. These creatures include fairies, goblins, and all the rest. This argument also can be used against implausible beings of modern invention, such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course, someone might want to interpret all these imagined entities as purely spiritual beings that don't leave physical traces. However, according to this alternative set of definitions, the entities would lack many of the characteristics with which their legends endow them – so they wouldn't literally be the same beings that the legends describe. In a lesser version of this strategy, one could reinterpret leprechauns or fairies in a diluted way, so that they have very little interaction with humans or with anything else in the physical world. Again, these creatures wouldn’t be the ones described in the actual myths about leprechauns and fairies – so the resulting teapot-type arguments would lose force, besides losing almost all of their rhetorical punch.
Atheists have deployed all these implausible beings (in their undiluted forms) in teapottype arguments. The intent of these arguments – or at least the most important part of the intent – is to show that if you feel you lack evidence for a God, then you should come over to atheism. In other words, you should believe there probably is no God instead of just reserving judgment. The moment we replace the implausible beings in these arguments with plausible beings, the arguments become ineffective – and we can see where the arguments go wrong. I showed how this works with the original teapot argument. Once we replace the intrinsically improbable object with a less improbable object, the argument loses force. It's reasonable to believe that there might be an oblong two-cratered rock in space, and to leave the possibility of such a rock open, even if we have no direct evidence for such a rock.
We can do the same thing with the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. Try replacing the allegedly impressive Flying Spaghetti Monster with a bird of a rare unknown type, about the size of a sparrow. That's the kind of organism that might well go undetected even if it existed, especially if it lived only in the interior of the Amazon jungle. Would you feel comfortable betting your life that such a bird does not exist? Maybe not! You might not have any evidence for this unknown bird – but still, it's a creature that might well exist undiscovered. Belief in this bird might not be supported by reason, but firm disbelief also is not supported by reason. Agnostic nonbelief in regard to the bird is more reasonable than hard-core disbelief in the bird.
We can make the same move all over again with the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument. Try replacing the undetectable pink unicorn with a horse of some rare breed, still uncatalogued but detectable to the senses just like any other ordinary horse. Once again, the improbability lessens and the ridiculousness goes away. We even can use this same strategy with the leprechaun argument. Try replacing the leprechaun with a monkey of a yet-unknown type, dwelling in the Amazon jungle. In all these cases, the replacement gives an argument that does not clearly give grounds for firm disbelief – though we still shouldn’t believe firmly in the object in the absence of evidence. Once we replace the improbable objects with less improbable ones, the most rational position becomes openminded nonbelief instead of positive disbelief. Is there a yet-unknown species of monkey somewhere in the Amazon jungle? Personally, I don't know of one (it’s an unknown species after all), but I wouldn’t bet my boots that there isn't one! We don't have grounds to believe that there is such a species – but we also don't have rational grounds to believe, strongly and positively, that there is not such a species.
Antony, whom I quoted earlier, pointed out that the teapot and other examples like it are “ridiculous examples” instead of “non-ridiculous ones.” Now we can see clearly why these examples are ridiculous: we have some indirect evidence against the objects they 9 invoke. These examples don’t tell us much about God unless we already have indirect evidence against God – and in that case, the arguments don’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
4. An Alternative Reading of the Arguments
There is another reading of the teapot-type arguments that seems, at first, to avoid the above objections. According to this reading, the teapot and its substitutes are good analogs for God precisely because we have some evidence against God. An atheist might claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is analogous to God because the absence of evidence for design in nature is evidence against God, just as the absence of traces of the Monster is evidence against the Monster. Or an atheist might contend that Russell’s teapot is a good analogue for God because the known laws of physics exclude supernatural intervention, just as the known facts of space science practically exclude the teapot. These alternative readings do not overcome my objection to teapot-type arguments. An atheist who uses these readings is claiming that the teapot-type arguments work because there is other, independent evidence against God. In the first example of the preceding paragraph, the atheist holds that the absence of design in nature is evidence against God. In the second example, the atheist holds that the invariability of natural law is evidence against God. In both cases, the atheist is claiming to have independent evidence against God – evidence that does not depend on the teapot-type arguments. This evidence, if it really were evidence, would be enough to count against belief in God, just as if the atheist had never heard of the teapot-type arguments. The teapot-type arguments add absolutely nothing to the case against God. (Of course, this does not mean that the so-called independent evidence against God really is evidence against God. That is a separate topic.)
Just to keep the record straight, I should mention that there are conceptions of God that do not imply that God would leave any kind of distinctive physical traces or would violate natural laws. I am referring to the well-thought-out ideas of God proposed by careful thinkers on the subject. Just to name two examples, there are the ideas of God set forth by Charles Hartshorne [8] and by G.H. Howison [9]. Ideas like these are immune to the teapot-type arguments. (New Atheists often ignore these reason-friendly ideas of God and confuse the general idea of God with the crudest and most outdated versions of the God concept.) However, you don’t even need to adopt these rational ideas about God to avoid the teapot-type arguments. Even conventional theism is immune to these arguments if God’s interventions are sporadic enough. Religious fundamentalism, with its God of massive and often destructive miracles, would still be vulnerable to teapot-type analogies. However, this is not too relevant to our topic, because atheists don’t usually present the teapot-type arguments as arguments against crude forms of theism only. Instead, they present them as arguments against belief in God in general. That is a very different kind of belief, no matter how hard some atheists might try to convince people that these two kinds of belief are the same.
While I am on this topic, I should mention Richard Dawkins’ variation of the teapot argument – what he calls the “argument from improbability.” [10] I have rebutted this argument elsewhere [11], so I won’t repeat my rebuttal here. The important fact to notice is that the argument from improbability is not a teapot-type argument. Despite its obvious connections to the teapot argument, the argument from improbability is an argument of a different kind. The argument from improbability does not merely liken God to some undiscovered being and ask us to conclude rashly that we should disbelieve in God. Instead, it is an attempt to show specifically that a being like God really is improbable. Thus, Dawkins’ improbability argument is not a teapot-type argument. It is a genuine argument for atheism, though not a convincing one.
5. Implausibility and Arbitrariness
Another way to debunk the teapot-type arguments is to notice that the objects they invoke are arbitrary. Russell asked us to think of a china teapot in space – but why couldn’t we use a trellis, a seesaw, or a breadbox instead? There is a very large set of possible objects, all foreign to the space environment, that Russell could have used in his example. We have no good reason to prefer any of these objects over any other – or at least no good reason to strongly prefer any of them (there might be differences in probability, but no differences big enough to sway our judgment about their existence). This highlights the fact that none of these objects can be very probable. If we begin by believing that there is an object of exactly one of these kinds, then we have (almost) equally good grounds for believing that there is an object of one of the other kinds instead. Thus, our initial assumption ends up with a much lower probability than we might have expected. If, on the other hand, we believe that there is an object of more than one of these kinds (at least one object per kind), then we would have equally good reason to believe the existence of an object of each kind – so we would be stuck assuming a situation which would leave space rather cluttered, probably detectably so.
The same problem faces other teapot-type arguments. Suppose someone postulates a Flying Spaghetti Monster with spaghetti-like tentacles. Why not postulate a Picture Wire Monster, a Floppy Flower Stem Monster, or a Fiber Optic Cable Monster instead? One can make up a huge set of “possibilities” like these. All of them are just about as probable or improbable as the Flying Spaghetti Monster – and all are just as ridiculous. If we want to postulate one of them, we have an equally good case for postulating any one of the others instead. From this observation alone, we can conclude that none of them, taken separately, is very probable.
Interestingly, this problem with arbitrariness does not seem to hit the idea of God as hard as it hits the ideas of unicorns and the like. According to most conceptions of God, God 12 has characteristics (great knowledge, great goodness, etc.) that are relevant to the alleged roles of God as source of the universe and/or as perfect or ideal being. If we replace God with some other arbitrarily selected entity, we are not likely to get an entity that is equally able to fill these roles. We cannot conclude that the substitute entity is roughly as probable as God. Of course, this observation is not an argument for or against God. It tells us nothing about whether God exists. It only shows that God, as an alleged entity, does not share the same kind of arbitrariness that afflicts Russell’s teapot and its imitators
6. Concluding Remarks The main take-home lesson from this discussion is that the teapot-type arguments, by themselves, tell us very little about the believability of any existence claim. At most, they tell us that we should disbelieve in an unproven object if we already have evidence against the existence of that object. In other words, the teapot-type arguments can only be used to disprove objects that already are pretty well disproven. These arguments tell us little or nothing about objects that we don't already have evidence against. Applied to God, the teapot-type arguments tell us this: we should believe there is no God if we already have other reasons, besides the teapot-type arguments, for believing there is no God. In the absence of such reasons, those who find the evidence for God unconvincing can reasonably remain agnostics. Their most justifiable option is simply to refuse to believe in God – to embrace nonbelief while also refraining from positive disbelief. If atheists want their position to be convincing, they must still come up with real arguments for their position – that is, positive arguments for the nonexistence of God. It is not enough to affirm that we don’t know there is a God, and then to toss around teapots or leprechauns to argue for positive disbelief in God. [12]
In other words, the teapot-type arguments fail as ways of supplanting agnosticism with atheism. Note that the point I just made is not an argument against atheism. Needless to say, you can reject the teapot-type arguments and still be an atheist. However, arguments using Russell's teapot, pink unicorns, leprechauns, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the like are not rational ways to argue for atheism. You need to look for better arguments.
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