Posted 09 October 2006 - 08:41 PM
Imagine I began telling people that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun. Such a thing would be ridiculous to most people today, but imagine it's a primitive culture four thousand years ago. There is a teapot, hurtling around the sun at 4,000 km/s, and thus we could never observe such a tiny object moving so quickly. I tell thirty villages, in one village the myth catches on, and books are written about the teapot, temples are built to the teapot, people dedicate themselves to studying the scriptures about the teapot. Now we know the teapot is not there, but if you attempt to tell one of the believers this, they will be absolutely revolted by your words. Since we cannot disprove the existence of the teapot, for our data collection cannot map everything around the sun simultaneously, we cannot strictly rule out the existence of the teapot. We should really all be teapot agnosticists, but we are really practicing teapot atheists, since, afterall, the chances of such a thing existing are absolutely next to nothing.
