First Space Flight and Russell's Teapot

This is the transcipt of my 2 minute Pause for Thought broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on 12th March 2010:

It was on this day in history that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the Earth and enter space. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of this momentous event. Urban legend has Gagarin saying “I don’t see any God up here”, though these words do not appear in the transcripts of his communications with ground control. What he actually said was “the Earth is blue... How wonderful. It’s amazing”. Many of our ancestors certainly believed in a heaven that was literally in the sky but I doubt many religious people nowadays would have expected Gagarin to see God in space. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell asked us to imagine someone believing that there was a china teapot in orbit around the sun which was too small to be seen even by our most powerful telescopes. Could anyone say with certainty that there isn’t such a teapot? If someone continually insisted that there was such a china teapot somewhere in space without providing any evidence or adequate reason to think so, would it seem odd? Since we cannot prove that there is no teapot, should we be agnostic about its existence? Of course, Russell was making an analogy between the china teapot and God. Unless someone has some evidence that there is a God, why should anyone believe in one anymore than a china teapot floating through space? There are an infinite number of things that could conceivably exist, invisible pink unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster or a dragon in my garage. Just because you can’t prove that something does not exist, doesn’t make it reasonable to believe in it.