It is a standard atheist trope to claim that the existence of God can no more be disproved than the existence of a teapot orbiting Mars. So why worry that he might exist?
Well, the obvious difference is that no one thinks it a matter of overwhelming moral importance that there should not be a teapot orbiting Mars, or is shocked by the absence of a teapot orbiting Mars, or regards it as normal in other people to be shocked by the Martian teapot question, or devotes 400 page books to the Martian teapot question. To claim, therefore, that the existence of God is exactly analogous to that of the orbiting Martian teapot is to miss everything that makes the status of God interesting or important.
Note: saying “they started it” does not make the question go away.
Does anyone, in fact, claim that the Martian teapot is “exactly analogous” (whatever that might mean) to the existence of God? It seems to me that the analogy serves a particular purpose, to illustrate the arbitrariness of any particular conception of God. Besides the teapot, we have Brahman and the FSM in the mix, to name a couple examples somewhat closer to Yahweh than our teapot.
The teapot has the distinction of being verifiable in principle by ordinary scientific methods, which is another place the exact analogy (again, if anyone is claiming one) breaks down.
the teapot serves as a way of illustrating the point that you CAN’T disprove God, just as you can’t disprove that there is a teapot orbiting Mars. You also can’t disprove the Invisible Pink Unicorn, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (I’m just paraphrasing Richard Dawkins there)
“Well, the obvious difference is that no one thinks it a matter of overwhelming moral importance that there should not be a teapot orbiting Mars, or is shocked by the absence of a teapot orbiting Mars, or regards it as normal in other people to be shocked by the Martian teapot question, or devotes 400 page books to the Martian teapot question. To claim, therefore, that the existence of God is exactly analogous to that of the orbiting Martian teapot is to miss everything that makes the status of God interesting or important.”
Bandwagon fallacy. The popularity of a claim does not verify it.
I’m not trying to claim that God exists merely because billions of people would say he does. I am saying that belief in God is an entirely different phenomenon to belief in teapots orbiting Mars precisely because billions of people suppose that it is.