Ross Douhat does a post on Russell’s teapot. I think he misses that Russell was working on a fairly narrow point: that inability to disprove something does not make it credible, not that belief in God is in all ways like belief in a celestial teapot. And Russell was pretty clearly right about this.

Similarly, with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if you read Bobby Henderson’s original letter to the Kansas school board, he was restricting himself to a small handful of points: that you shouldn’t necessarily teach something in school just because some people believe it, that religious scriptures are not evidence for their own claims, that making a claim untestable doesn’t make it credible, and that correlation does not prove causation. And Henderson was pretty clearly right about these things.

On the other hand, if you want a tighter general analogy for evaluating the Christian God, the gods of other religions are more useful. This, by the way, is where Douthat’s quick defense of theism fails: that fact that generic religious belief is common certainly doesn’t validate most of the gods people have believed in, so why should it validate the Christian God?

Semi-related comment on the anti-God bus ads: the thing I like about the slogan is that they suggest that the mere fact that there probably is no God is reason enough to get on with your life. Just like there’s a limit to how much we should fret about our ability to disprove the existence of fairies, or 9/11 conspiracy theories, or extraterrestrial visitation of Earth.