A reference to Russell’s teapot came across my feed, and I’ve been ruminating on it for a few days now. I confess at the outset that I used Claude to give me the outlines of a Thomistic response to it, and I think I have my head around it now. It was an interesting exercise, and it’s prompted me to revisit metaphysics a bit. To that end, I have Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God on the way, and it should be here before we leave for some long-awaited vacation time.

In brief:

The teapot is used to argue that the burden of proof for God’s existence lies with the theist who makes the assertion, and not on the atheist to disprove. For finite, contingent beings, this is a reasonable stance to take within the framework of empiricism. If someone says “I saw Bigfoot,” but provides no evidence, you’re not under any obligation to believe the person or act as if Bigfoot existed.

God, however, is neither finite nor contingent, but a metaphysical necessity for everything else that is. The only answer to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing,’ the only answer which obtains is ‘because of something which is ipsum esse subsistens.’ Trying to use the teapot to somehow disprove God (or the reasonableness of God’s existence) is something of a category error, and so on. God isn’t a thing among other things in the universe, or the question of a reason for existence would still remain - the essence of the third proof in the Summa.

We covered some of this in Fundamental Theology, but that was a while back, and I enjoyed wading back into it a bit, with the added bonus of looking up some of the required vocabulary in Spanish, just in case.

Thus, the reading landscape for my immediate future is as follows:

• Graham Greene’s Complete Short Stories for the nightstand
• de Sales' Treatise on the Love of God for spiritual reading
• Feser’s Five Proofs for ongoing study

This feels like a pretty good set-up, and I’m going to try to maintain a three-pronged approach going forward.