The Teapot of Faith

Marvellous demolition job on Dawkins by a confirmed agnostic. Here's part of it:

http://www.christianfaithandreason.com/june_evans.html

[Dawkins] enthusiastically endorses one of Bertrand Russell's weaker arguments: the 'celestial teapot'. It goes like this: if I said a celestial teapot was orbiting Mars but you couldn't see it, nobody could disprove me, "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." To Dawkins, belief in god is no more reasonable than in a celestial teapot. "What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't), but whether his existence is probable," he writes. "Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probably than other undisprovable things." But faith in god is nothing like belief in a celestial teapot; to most people the former seems a whole lot more reasonable (which is why I have yet to meet a teapot-worshipper).

I didn't know about Dawkin's own religious experiences either. His fantasies were surely on the bizarre edge of sanity, no wonder he is so fervent about atheism now. Explains a lot!


Dawkins' failure to understand the religious mindset is surprising considering his own spell of religious ecstasy. As he put it in one interview: "At the age of about 13 when I was being confirmed, I did have a fairly active fantasy life about a relationship with God, and I used to pray and I used to have fantasies about creeping down to the chapel in the middle of the night, and having a sort of blinding vision and things." Eventually, aged 16, he discovered Darwin and turned his back on childish things but his current view of the religious impulse coincides with that of the born-again Christians I grew up with. They would talk of a 'God-centred gene' in all of us that we are all born with this longing for communion with our Lord. As a genetic fundamentalist, who reduces the cultural terrain to the odd notion of gene-mimicking 'memes', Dawkins rejects cultural explanations and reaches for the familiar: concluding that religion evolved through natural selection not for its own sake but as a by-product of other needs.