peregrinning - Teach one controversy, teach them all........

Teach one controversy, teach them all........

Nov. 2nd, 2009 at 7:22 AM

Oh, dear... Teach the Controversy shirts. Cute concept. I recognize most of them, but I can't figure out the square with the arrows around it. Posting because they include Discworld.

Comments

( 6 comments — Leave a comment )

cvirtue wrote:

Nov. 2nd, 2009 12:45 pm (UTC)

The square thing is almost certainly the Time Cube. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

And the other thing is sort of like Discworld, but isn't. Cool, though.

Link | Reply | Thread

naturespirit wrote:

Nov. 2nd, 2009 01:56 pm (UTC)

If it helps, it looks like a pyramid viewed from above to me.

Link | Reply | Thread

new_man wrote:

Nov. 2nd, 2009 02:14 pm (UTC)

If you click on the images you get an explanation -- well, a tag line.

What the hell is Russell's Teapot?

Link | Reply | Thread

etherial wrote:

Nov. 2nd, 2009 02:22 pm (UTC)

In brief:

Theist: "You can't prove God doesn't exist."

Russel: "You can't prove there's not a teapot in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. That doesn't mean there is one."

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

goldsquare wrote:

Nov. 2nd, 2009 02:53 pm (UTC)

Bertrand Russell was kinda strange. :-)

Some "debates" argue that "if I make an assertion that cannot be disproved with the information you have, it must be true". So, if I say God exists, and ask you to prove he doesn't, since you can't: I am right.

Russell made a similar assertion - a china teapot, floating an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars, too small to see.

Logically he then related this to the assertion that God exists, but you can't see or detect him, as an argument in favor of atheism. Because you can't prove God doesn't exist, and you can't prove that teapot doesn't exist.

He then goes on to demonstrate that popularity of an idea has no relationship between truth or falsehood, so that there are believers and adherents doesn't make religion true.

It's a small but good demonstration that proof-by-random-assertion isn't really proof at all.

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread