His main example was the unicorn. If you tell me there were in fact unicorns I would certainly say there is no evidence that is true, but I sure cannot prove there were/are no such thing.
That article would seem to buttress the atheist position more than take away from it.
Hasting, it's an issues of definitions. The religion are careful to insure the gods are unfalsifiable. In other words, constructed in such a way they cannot be disproven. It's a dishonest trick, and I suspect most Christians here know it's dishonest, but they persist anyway.
Bertrand Russell used the example of a China tea pot between Earth and Mars in 1953:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
And his further comments from 1958:
I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely
Last edited by antelope_sniper; 01/07/22.
You didn't use logic or reason to get into this opinion, I cannot use logic or reason to get you out of it.
You cannot over estimate the unimportance of nearly everything. John Maxwell
