Free The GOD Delusion by Unknown Page A

popular deity on the Internet at present
    - 
and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other - is the Flying Spaghetti
Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage. 33 I am delighted to see that the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti
Monster has now been published as a book, 34 to great acclaim. I haven't read it myself, but who needs to read a
gospel when you just know it's true? By the way,
it had to happen
    - 
a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 35
    The
point of all these way-out examples is that they are undisprovable, yet
nobody thinks the hypothesis of their existence is on an even footing
with the hypothesis of their non-existence. Russell's point is that the
burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine
is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti
monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds
against.
    *
Camp Quest takes the American institution of the summer camp in an
entirely admirable direction. Unlike other summer camps that follow a
religious or scouting ethos, Camp Quest, founded by Edwin and Helen
Kagin in Kentucky, is run by secular humanists, and the children are
encouraged to think sceptically for themselves while having a very good
time with all the usual outdoor activities (www.camp-quest.org). Other
Camp Quests with a similar ethos have now sprung up in Tennessee,
Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Canada.
    The
fact that orbiting teapots and tooth fairies are undisprovable is not
felt, by any reasonable person, to be the kind of fact that settles any
interesting argument. None of us feels an obligation to disprove any of
the millions of far-fetched things that a fertile or facetious
imagination might dream up. I have found it an amusing strategy, when
asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also
an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor,
Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one
god further.
    All
of us feel entitled to express extreme scepticism to the point of
outright disbelief - except that in the case of unicorns, tooth fairies
and the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Vikings, there is
(nowadays) no need to bother. In the case of the Abrahamic God,
however, there is a need to bother, because a substantial proportion of
the people with whom we share the planet do believe strongly in his
existence. Russell's teapot demonstrates that the ubiquity of belief in
God, as compared with belief in celestial teapots, does not shift the
burden of proof in logic, although it may seem to shift it as a matter
of practical politics. That you cannot prove God's non-existence is
accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely
prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is
disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are
sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things.
There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the
spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose
that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his
probability of existence is 50 per cent. On the contrary, as we shall
see.

NOMA
    Just
as Thomas Huxley bent over backwards to pay lip service to completely
impartial agnosticism, right in the middle of my seven-stage spectrum,
theists do the same thing from the other direction, and for an
equivalent reason. The theologian Alister McGrath makes it the central
point of his book Hawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Origin
of Life. Indeed, after his admirably fair summary of my
scientific works, it seems to be the only point in rebuttal that he has
to offer: the undeniable but ignominiously weak point that you cannot
disprove the existence of God. On page after page as I read McGrath,