Russell's teapot. Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God. Origins of the analogy[edit] In an article titled "Is There a God? " commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote: In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism: I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist.
The burden of proof argument[edit] A Devil's Chaplain. The book's title is a reference to a quotation of Charles Darwin, made in reference to Darwin's lack of belief in how "a perfect world" was designed by God: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature! "[1][2] Content[edit] The book is divided into seven sections as follows: 1 Science and Sensibility– essays largely concerning science and the scientific method. 1.1 A Devil's Chaplain 1.2 What is True? 1.3 Gaps in the Mind[3] 1.4 Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair 1.5 Trial By Jury[4] 1.6 Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls 1.7 Postmodernism Disrobed[5] 1.8 The Joy of Living Dangerously; Sanderson of Oundle[6] 2 Light Will Be Thrown– essays on Darwinian topics. 2.1 Light Will Be Thrown[7] 2.2 Darwin Triumphant 2.3 The 'Information Challenge'[8] 2.4 Genes Aren't Us 2.5 Son of Moore's Law 3 The Infected Mind– a selection of anti-religious writings. 3.1 Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers 3.2 Viruses of the Mind[9]
God of the gaps. This article is about a type of philosophical argument. For the "gap" interpretation of the biblical creation account, see Gap creationism. "God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The term was invented by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to point out the fallacy of relying on teleological arguments for God's existence.[1] Some use the phrase to refer to a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy.
Origins of the term[edit] During World War II the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terms in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison.[4] Bonhoeffer wrote, for example: how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. In his 1955 book Science and Christian Belief Charles Alfred Coulson (1910−1974) wrote: and Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He's not there at all.[6] R.
Intentional stance. The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution. Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.
Dennett's three levels[edit] Objections and replies[edit] Interesting number paradox. The interesting number paradox is a semi-humorous paradox which arises from the attempt to classify natural numbers as "interesting" or "dull". The paradox states that all natural numbers are interesting. The "proof" is by contradiction: if there exists a non-empty set of uninteresting numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number – but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number, producing a contradiction. Paradoxical nature[edit] Attempting to classify all numbers this way leads to a paradox or an antinomy of definition.
Any hypothetical partition of natural numbers into interesting and dull sets seems to fail. However, as there are many significant results in mathematics that make use of self-reference (such as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem), the paradox illustrates some of the power of self-reference, and thus touches on serious issues in many fields of study. See also[edit] Notes[edit] Jump up ^ Johnston, N.