[biohacker42]

As Dawkins puts it, if there were a teapot orbiting the sun, we'd have no way of detecting it.

It is too small for our telescopes, so we have absolutely no evidence for a teapot orbiting the sun.

You don't believe in that teapot, do you? That's silly.

But Dawkins is a biologist, and I'm a computer scientist, I don't believe in the teapot, but I also don't KNOW it's not there.

And that has nothing to do with shyness.

[olavk]

The shyness part is probably when people treat the question of belief in certain supernatural beeings as "special". Nobody is "agnostic" about their belief in the Tooth Fairy. They just plain don't believe in him (her?). Beeings from still living religions are treated differently since the issue is more sensitive.

[TrevorJ]

I'm a 3D animator for my day job, I definitely believe in the teapot, I saw it in the Cornell box so I know it exists. (apologies if this is way too much of an inside joke)

[dfranke]

That argument originally came from Bertrand Russell, not Dawkins.

[gravitycop]

Wikipedia says "Yes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

[Herring]

What would a proof of "not there" consist of?

What I mean is, how can you claim to know anything if you allow the possibility of supernatural things interfering with your experiments?