Bertrand Russell’s teapot and the problem with “authority”

"Russell considered it "undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." He supplied a good metaphor for this in 1952, though it was not actually published at the time. In response to a journalistic question, "Is there a God?," he asked the reader to consider an orbiting teapot:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

 Here we have one of Russell's strongest convictions: that accepting assertions on the basis of authority alone is never good enough. We also get a wonderful example of Russell's tone. He had, as Thomas Paine once wrote of Voltaire, a high capacity for spotting folly, combined with an "irresistible propensity to expose it.""

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

On the other hand...