Russell's teapot

A thought experiment in which Bertrand Russell imagines an undetectable teapot orbiting the Sun to show why lack of disproof does not justify belief in an extraordinary claim.

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Burden of proof: The obligation to provide evidence for a claim in a debate or inquiry. Russell assigns this obligation to the person asserting the teapot exists.
Bertrand Russell: A British philosopher, logician, and public intellectual who lived from 1872 to 1970. Russell introduced the teapot analogy in a 1952 essay on religion.
Flying Spaghetti Monster: A satirical deity invented by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to criticize the teaching of intelligent design. Like the teapot, it exposes unequal demands for proof when unsupported supernatural claims are proposed.
New Atheism: A twenty-first-century movement associated with prominent public criticism of religion and supernatural belief. Russell's analogy became a recurring argument in its popular critiques of religious claims.
Falsifiability: The property of a claim being testable in a way that could show it false. An orbiting teapot beyond detection illustrates a claim designed to evade decisive testing.
Is There a God?: A 1952 essay by Bertrand Russell discussing whether belief in God is rationally justified. This essay contains Russell's original teapot illustration.
Invisible pink unicorn: A fictional, undetectable unicorn used in atheist satire about unfalsifiable religious claims. It restates the teapot's challenge through a different imagined entity.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: A maxim that unusually implausible claims require correspondingly strong evidence. The teapot illustrates why an unsupported extraordinary claim need not be accepted.
Argument from ignorance: The fallacy of treating a claim as true because it has not been disproved, or false because it has not been proved. The analogy rejects the move from absence of disproof to evidence for existence.
The Illustrated Magazine: A British periodical that published articles and illustrations during the twentieth century. Russell's 1952 essay introducing the analogy appeared in this magazine.