BERTRAND RUSSELL:
interplanetary teapot.

June 2006's thought from my agnostic calendar is:-

"I think that in philosophical strictness at the level
where one doubts the existence of material objects
and holds that the world may have existed for only
five minutes, 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 Earth and Mars
a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but
nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken
into account in practice. I think the Christian God
just as unlikely." [Bertrand Russell].

I think Bertrand is trying to say it is impossible to prove
a negative - one cannot prove God does not exist any more
than one can disprove the interplanetary teapot theory.
Which is all very drole of course - and would be a perfectly
fair point...if he had left it at that. But he stretches the point
way too far, to breaking point in fact, and makes at least
one assertion which is patently false....all because he does
not understand agnosticism. [He makes a few other silly
points which for the sake of brevity I will let pass]. I have
to say in all candour that the notional challenge to "prove
God's non-existence" isn't one I've ever made [or heard
made] to a non-believer, probably because the subject is
far too important to leave the initiative with the sceptic.

Agnosticism is a perfectly sound position from an intellectual
point of view - but what Bertrand fails to grasp, as many do,
is that agnosticism does not work in practice. His apparently
casual move toward atheism is actually an imperative driven by
"the impossibility of agnosticism" [to quote Joseph Ratzinger].

In the real world one has to come down one side or the other;
to act as if God exists or to act as if God does not exist -
precisely because of the values involved one cannot be neutral.
And it is here that Bertie has got it so wrong - it does matter
in practice. How one views the world and ones fellow creatures
turns on the issue of God.

If it didn't matter I wouldn't be writing this - and presumably
you wouldn't be reading it!

tagline; Calendar of Doom.