William Lane Craig on Bertrand Russell's teapot analogy: Another bad atheist objection which is based upon the confusion of absence of evidence with the existence of contrary evidence

 

Many atheists, wholly incapable of formulating solid arguments against the existence of God, are forced to argue for a wholly implausible position, namely that the absence of evidence for God suffices to think that God doesn't exist. They illustrate this point with examples, like "we believe that Flying Pink Elephants don't exist because there is not evidence for these things".

But obviously we don't deny the existence of these things because we lack evidence for them. On the contrary, we deny the existence of such things because our CURRENT knowledge (e.g. about zoology and the biology  and genetics of elephants) implies that it is likely that such animals (e.g. flying  pink elephants) don't exist.

The atheist analogy has this form: "We lack evidence for X, therefore we must believe that X doesn't exist", when actually the examples mentioned by the atheist have this form "Our current knowledge implies that X is unlikely, and given that we don't have positive evidence for X which could counterbalance that, we have to conclude that X's existence is unlikely".

The atheist conflates the cases in which, given our knowledge, it is unlikely that certain entities do exist; with the (wholly different) cases in which there is absolutely not evidence whatsoever for the existence or non-existence of some entity. In the latter case (in contrast with the former), the proper position is agnosticism, because we have no reason at all to believe or disbelieve the thing in question.

Just an example: In this blog, I've never written a post about how to repair PCs or to buy in Amazon. Readers of this blog have absolutely no evidence for the claim that Jime Sayaka knows how to repair PC or buy things in Amazon. Now, are you readers justified in concluding that I don't know how to do these things? Obviously not, your proper position about this question is agnosticism: You don't know if I have such knowledge or not.

Now, suppose that you claim that on your bed  is Pamela Anderson right now. You go to your bed and you don't see her. In this case, the fact that you don't see her is CONTRARY evidence for the claim that she's there. Why? Because if she were there, on your bed, you WOULD see her. And You don't. 

In logic, this is known as modus tollendo tollens (If A, then B, Not-B, then Not-A).

Note that the example of Pamela is, from a logical point of view, wholly different from the example of Jime not posting anything about repairing PCs (my knowledge about how to repair PCs doesn't imply that I'm going to post about it... specially since it is not a blog about PCs).

Summarizing: The atheist objection conflates cases of absolute absence of evidence for X, with cases in which we have, based upon our current knowledge (and the expectations based on this knowledge), CONTRARY evidence for the existence of X.

Atheist "geniuses" and "brights" cannot understand this, and it is a waste of time to try to explain this to them.

That atheists like Richard Dawkins and Lewis Wolpert have used such objection is understable, since they're not sophisticated philosophers nor thinkers. We cannot ask them (nor we can reasonably expect) that they can understand hard philosophical issues or fine and subtle logical matters. But when  trained philosophers like Bertrand Russell or John Shook engage themselves in such sophomoric modes of argumentation, we can only feel a deep dissapoiment and lack of intellectual respect for them, and tell to ourselves: SHAME on them.

Sheer atheistic pseudo-intelectualism, bad philosophy, stupidity and mediocrity on behalf of atheistic wishful thinking.