The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell offered an admirable example in a 1952 article, rejected at the time, entitled Is there a God?.
"If I suggested that between Earth and Mars there is a china teapot in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, no one would be able to prove otherwise, provided I had taken care to specify that the teapot was too small to be detected by our most powerful telescopes. But if I claimed that, since my proposition cannot be disproved, human reason cannot be permitted to doubt it, I would immediately be regarded as a crank.
Yet if the existence of this teapot were described in ancient books, taught as sacred truth every Sunday and instilled in children at school, then any hesitation to believe in its existence would become a sign of eccentricity and earn the sceptic the attentions of a psychiatrist in an enlightened age, or of the Inquisitor in earlier times."
