Is there any more evidence for God than Russell’s teapot? As a reminder, Russell’s teapot is related to the notion of a teapot orbiting around the earth [the sun].
If there is more evidence, then I suppose it would explain why so many philosophers have seriously believed in God. If there isn’t, is the regular talk of God in philosophy unjustified?
The purpose of Russell's teapot analogy is, as Russell himself wrote, to address:
Many orthodox people speak[ing] as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them.
The purpose of the analogy is to clarify where the burden of proof rests (i.e. with people claiming God exists), not to directly claim that the teapot and God has the same amount of evidence.
Some skeptics say there is "no" evidence for God, while others say there's no "good" evidence for God, or that the evidence is insufficient. This disparity is not generally because people disagree about what the available facts are, but rather because they disagree about how to define "evidence" or they disagree about the methods for evaluating or determining belief.
If one says there's no evidence for God, and there's no evidence for the teapot, then they have the same amount of evidence: none. If one says there's no "good" evidence for God, then God might have more (bad) evidence than the teapot, but it's still not enough to warrant belief.
One could also talk about forms of "negative" evidence that might arguably shift this in one direction or the other.
For example, one might say someone human from Earth would've needed to put the teapot there, and given the amount of time and money it requires to get into space, the lack of evidence of people having done that is evidence against it. Although one might respond that aliens could've put it there, or maybe it formed naturally, maybe it's a rock teapot.
One could also talk about negative evidence for god. These would be evidence against specific god claims (the category of "god" is too broad for something to be evidence against all possible gods). As examples, consider: the problem of evil/suffering, divine hiddenness, the problem of inconsistent relevation, the problem of hell, the problem of poor design and the omnipotence paradox (which I'd probably say is the weakest of these).
It's probably not too useful to compare God to the teapot for all of this - this goes way beyond what the analogy was intended to demonstrate.
If there is more evidence, then I suppose it would explain why so many philosophers have seriously believed in god.
Russell's teapot was never seriously presented as a thing that actually exists, and it's a negligible claim with no emotional appeal (perhaps intentionally so). So it doesn't make for a great comparison to explain anything about why people believe in god.
If you want to compare god beliefs to something, you could compare it to other god beliefs (people don't all believe in the same god, and what they believe can't all be true... but it can all be false). Or compare it to aliens, ghosts, chakras, magical crystals, auras, astrology, etc.
If there isn’t, are most of them living in delusion?
You could similarly flip this around: if there is more evidence, are most people who don't believe living in delusion?
It always annoys me when people accuse others of being "delusional" (although it's often religious people feigning offense, e.g. "are you accusing us of being delusional", in response to skeptics challenging the claims they make). Either the thing you believe is true, or the thing you believe is not true. Either you're justified in believing that thing, or you're not justified in believing that thing. Terms like "delusional" are little more than personal attacks (or attempts to accuse your opponent of throwing personal attacks) which distract from whether or not some claim is true or whether believing it is justified.
Across time, many people believed in a variety of gods, and many people didn't. That, by itself, doesn't really tell you anything.
One might generally try to understand why people believe false or unjustified things. Much of that comes down to cognitive biases. People fear death and struggle with losing loved ones, so they may have a bias towards a belief that offers an escape: eternal life. They fear being tortured for all of eternity (hell), so they may refrain from questioning their religion (and thereby concluding that hell isn't real), because they believe that would or might land them in hell. They may a bias against saying "I don't know", they may want justice, they may fear randomly dying due to illness or injury, they may want a protector, they may want a grounding for their morality, they may want some greater purpose, we have a tendency to stick to their beliefs, there is social pressure (ranging between not wanting people to roll their eyes at you, not wanting to be completely ostracised by everyone you know, or not wanting to literally be murdered), etc. All of that potentially feeds into someone's belief in a god (but that's distinct from whether any given god claim is true or whether believing it is justified).
One might get a bit more insights by comparing rates of theism between certain groups - that's somewhat tangential to whether what they believe is true, but it might give some insight about biases and fallacies and such (in our own thinking as well).
Since you specifically mentioned philosophers, I'll note that a solid 67% of philosophers in 2020 accept or lean towards atheism (with an additional 7-8% being agnostic).
There is no evidence for Russell’s teapot. Because that’s an ironical comment of Russell to show that the burden of proof lies on the person who makes an unusual claim.
There is also no evidence for the existence of god.
But there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of the belief in god - the belief is even a fact. And it is the task of sociology and psychology of religion to explain the wide spread and the strenght of this belief.
There is some evidence (although arguably weak) for the existence of a God, and therefore this is more evidence for the existence of a God than for the Teapot, at least using a broad definition of evidence.
Russell's Teapot was meant to be a thought experiment used primarily to illustrate the burden of proof. There is of course no evidence for it and no one is meant to seriously believe that there is a teapot floating by itself in space. Thus, any evidence for the existence of God is more evidence than for the teapot.
This leaves open a question for what constitutes evidence, which is a large topic in epistemology. But let us assume that it is something along the lines of "something which makes the thing in question more or less likely". That is a simplified version of the definition used in some U.S. legal jurisdictions and is a decent intuitive definition. (This would be insufficient under many definitions put forward in formal epistemology, but that is a very complicated topic that I don't even claim to be able to do justice to without some time to research. The actual legal definition for "relevant evidence" in Nevada is in NRS 48.015 but that needs to be read in conjunction with the other laws on evidence and cases interpreting it.).
Under that definition, there is some evidence for the existence of a God. However, while there is some evidence, a skeptic is fully justified in saying it is insufficient.
For evidence, first, we have written accounts of people such as Paul formerly known as Saul who claim to have met a divine entity first hand and under circumstances that left no reasonable doubt as to the entity's divinity. These accounts are evidence under this definition since the existence of historical accounts makes something more likely to be true than without the account. It is also very similar to the evidence we have the existence of certain other historical figures that are generally believed to have existed (even if their exploits and foibles may well have been exaggerated by the chronicler).
However, a skeptic might very reasonably call this evidence weak. After all, unlike most historical figures, there might well be reasons to fabricate stories about a divinity. It is not at all uncommon for earlier chroniclers to paint a historical figure in either very good or very bad light. It is fairly rare (though not completely unheard of) for a chronicler to completely make up a figure out of whole cloth without in some way hinting that the work was not meant to be factual. Also, if we are looking at written accounts, then we quickly run into the question of which divinity since there are many, many historical accounts of such encounters and they are of such a nature that it would be impossible or nearly impossible for them to all be true.
Second, we have what is sometimes called the cosmological argument. At the risk of oversimplifying what is a whole category of arguments, essentially it appears that something exists rather than nothing. It appears that everything has a cause. There must therefore be something which exists outside of this causal system capable of creating everything else, sometimes called a first mover. The argument goes that this first mover must be God.
Now, an analysis of the strength of this argument is far beyond the scope of this response, but there are strong rebuttals to it. Also, it leaves open the same question of which divinity or if the divinity implied by the argument has anything to do at all with anything humans have worshipped. Nonetheless, it could be fairly said that the existence of something makes it more likely that there is a divinity than without the existence of something. Thus it is evidence, although perhaps weak evidence.
There are other things that people will claim to be evidence for the existence of God, but two examples seems abundant for this conversation.
Again, the strength of the evidence is arguably quite weak. A skeptic would be well justified in saying it does not even approach the burden of proof that should be demanded for an extraordinary claim such as the existence of a divinity.
But the question was, is there more evidence for the existence of God than there is for the Russel's Teapot. There is no evidence at all for the existence of Russel's Teapot, there is some evidence (even if a skeptic might call it weak and limited) for the existence of a God. So the answer is yes.
Yes, overwhelmingly so! For instance, here is a sampling of evidence for God that Russell's teapot does not have:
Someone once told me that anything I could say about God, he could say about a magic grasshopper that lives in his house. He was trying to make a point similar to Russell. Well, it's simply not true. Belief in things like this grasshopper or Russell's teapot are at best a joke, with no evidence. But belief in God is faith in "the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1).
The philosophical response to this question is it depends on what you mean by evidence within your theory of evidentialism. An atheist will point to the fact there is no strong empirical evidence for gods and the loud agnosticism or denial of science towards the supernatural. A believer will fall back to fideism or attempt to bend science to their will by taking pseudoscientific positions and placing heavy emphasis on testimony (of a holy book, personal experience, and so on). Both sides will then engage in epistemological and metaepistemological argumentation both convinced of their belief. This debate has been going on at least since the theologi and physiki of the pre-Socratics more than 2,500 years ago, long before the Abrahamic traditions even existed.
Thus, the answers you will see here fall into three categories: yes, maybe, and no which are roughly theism, agnosticism, and atheism. Deciding what your philosophy is has to come first if you don't have a preference, and such a thing is called metaphilosophical discourse. When you get older, and you've seen the thousands of years of arguments spinning in circles, you tend to become a quietist and accept that people who want to believe in the supernatural experience the supernatural and people who do not or cannot don't. In the philosophy of science, such a phenomenon is understood as theory-ladenness.
Yes, there is more evidence
Your question is a loaded one, and I'm taking the strict interpretation of what you've written.
Russell's Teapot is an analogy that's constructed to have zero evidence in favor of it. There must be literally zero evidence for its existence, because if there were even the slightest evidence for it, Russell would modify the analogy such that there's no longer any evidence. Put another way, it means if there were any evidence, that God exists, then the answer to your question is "yes" (and this is independent of how strong the evidence is).
And there clearly is some evidence that God exists. I'll just quote an example that you can surely believe. If I were to pray to God, beseeching Him/Her/It that the next time I flip a coin, it will come up 'Heads', and it indeed comes up 'Heads', then it's evidence that God exists. It's not strong evidence by any means, but it's still something. A more sophisticated example is the Miracle of the Sun.
Now the above of course doesn't prove God exists. You could certainly press a credible argument that God doesn't exist (Wiki for example has a long section with skeptical explanations for the Miracle of the Sun). But you've only asked for evidence, not proof. If you agree that it is something, then the answer to your question is "yes". In the same way questions such as "which God are you referring to?" misses the point; as long as there is some evidence for any God, the answer to your question is "yes".
In that sense, the reason the answer to your question is "yes" is not so much because there is strong evidence that God exists, but rather that blanket claims are generally wrong.
You can't objectively evaluate the strength of the evidence for any proposition unless you can objectively justify how likely the evidence is if the proposition is true, i.e. P(E|G). See my answer to a related question here.
In the case of the existence of God, it is fairly obvious we are not going to be able to objectively justify the nature of God, i.e. P(E|G), so we can only have subjective evaluations of whether the evidence for Russell's teapot (or equivalently Elon's Tesla Roadster ;o) outweighs that for the existence of God.
In practice, people seem to find it very difficult to separate P(E|G) from their prior belief in the existence of God, P(G), so any use of Bayes rule for rational inference will be invalidated by their leakage of their prior into the likelihood. Bayes gives us a means for rational inference, but only if we use it correctly.
Sadly these discussions just tend to end up in reinforcement of personal/group identity rather than truth-seeking. Any attempt to "prove" the existence or non-existence of God seems wrong-headed to me (at best they tend to be superficial and biased). We can have useful discussions about evidence though and why our subjective beliefs are the way they are.
All questions about whether or not God exists, and what evidence there may or may not be for God's existence, hinge on what is meant by the word "God", and what is meant by the word "exists".
If by "existence" in proposition "God exists", one means "physical existence", like a teapot, then it would be appropriate to seek physical evidence for God, just as we would seek physical evidence for a teapot.
But there are things that one may, or may not, take as "existing" that don't have the same physical existence as a teapot. For example a law. In the united states there are laws against stealing. Now, in some sense, there is physical evidence that these laws exist. There are physical books the purport to say what the laws are. But when we see such a book, are we actually seeing "the law"? Some might say yes, but others might say, no. They might say that the law is not a physical thing, which cannot be seen. What you see is only a book. In another society there may be laws which are not recorded in books, yet are widely known in that society.
I could expand upon how things we debate are often fruitless because we use common words in the debate, but give those words different meanings. But as I personally choose to use the word "God", and "exist", the notion that one could find evidence either for the proposition "God exists" or for its negation, doesn't make sense.
Of course, if one uses the terms "God" and "exists" in such a way that the proposition "God exists" is something that may be confirmed or disconfirmed with evidence, then one may find, or fail to find such evidence. Unfortunately, that has no effect on me. There is no point in trying to convince me that a materially existing God does not exist. I already agree. That may be a confession of atheist in the eyes of some. If that seems like a victory in debate to an atheist, then may the atheist enjoy their victory. I will continue to believe that "God exists" is a true proposition, when the words "God" and "exists" are assigned meanings that accord with those used by a variety of philosophers and theologians.
Every person claiming that God exists constitutes evidence for his existence. Since there are more people claiming so than for Russell's teapot, or, say, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by this alone there is "more" evidence, at least quantitatively.
Whether such evidence is qualitatively greater than for other entities, or whether such evidence is actually "good", is another question. There is no objective scale for this, but I suspect most of this evidence would not stand in court as solid direct evidence for anything – not that many people would claim to have seen, heard, or otherwise perceived God in any direct way. However, there are still some who would claim to have met God in person, which is at least plausible, unlike the Russell's teapot, which by definition orbits the Sun and cannot be seen from Earth. There could be no direct evidence for the existence (or non-existence) of Russell's teapot, whereas God at least admits some direct evidence. Note, however, that this is only due to the definition of Russell's teapot and does not hold for other entities – even the Flying Spaghetti Monster for example enjoys more evidence since it is not so restricted by its definition.
The last type of evidence is one that derives the existence logically. So far, I have seen none of this kind for either entity – indeed Russell's teapot was created on the basis of the absence of such evidence, and arguments for God's existence are either logically flawed, or derived from already unproven statements (to illustrate a few: not everything needs a creator, causality does not exist before the beginning of time, our simulations tend to mimic nature without any external interference, and any supernatural phenomena prove magic or aliens equally well as they do God).
