It can be difficult to understand what a God is, since people understand the idea differently. In general, there is a spectrum of kinds of Gods that range from being really powerful, but basically like us (eg Thor), to the God of negative theology who is so different from us that we can’t say anything about IT, only what IT is not.
Should we believe in these gods? One problem is that there is no evidence any gods exist. You can’t pray to get God to show up and say hello in the middle of a football game. Similarly, there’s no evidence such gods interact with the world in any way, like making an amputee regrow a limb. The philosopher Bertrand Russell addressed the idea of believing in a God that we have no evidence for. We know this thought experiment as Russell’s Teapot (from Wiki):
Russell’s teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.
Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion. He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
In 1958, Russell elaborated on the thought experiment:
“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely (Bertrand Russell).“
SO REMEMBER, THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE ASKS YOU WHY YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, IT’S OKAY TO ASK THEM WHY THEY DO BELIEVE!
