• Corvid@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    There’s a teacup orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. There’s no evidence to the contrary, so it can’t reasonably be called false.

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Teacups are man-made objects, rocket launches are closely monitored, and no rocket is known to have launched a teapot into that orbit. It isn’t absolutely impossible that something very much like a teapot formed there spontaneously, that a teapot was secretly launched there for no apparent reason, or that extraterrestrials placed a teapot there, but again there is evidence that these events are very unlikely to have happened. Russell’s goal was to illustrate that the burden of proof should be on the one making unfalsifiable claims, but he didn’t pick a good example - the lack of a plausible mechanism for the teapot to arrive in that orbit was even stronger evidence before spaceflight.

      • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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        4 months ago

        There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Teacups are man-made objects, rocket launches are closely monitored, and no rocket is known to have launched a teapot into that orbit.

        None of that is evidence that the teapot doesn’t exist.

      • HauntedBucket@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        There’s a manhole cover out there that isn’t on a single NASA manifest either.

      • Corvid@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        China launched the teapot on a rideshare rocket that delivered 60 other payloads. It’s top secret, and the US Gov doesn’t want to publicize that the Chinese have developed a space tug capable of inserting a 200g teacup into a mars transfer orbit.

            • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              From your Wikipedia article itself:

              Another philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, states that a falsehood lies at the heart of Russell’s argument. Russell’s argument assumes that there is no evidence against the teapot, but Plantinga disagrees:

              Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      That’s not comparable here. Chromosomes and hormone levels are easily testable. (I don’t know what the IOC’s actual policy is, but I’m sure it’s something measurable.)