Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: salem@racquel.sri.com (Bruce B. Salem) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Why believe? - Occam's Razor Message-ID: Date: 18 Mar 91 16:13:25 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 40 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu lums@soggy-fibers.ai.mit.edu (Andrew Lumsdaine) writes: >In article mailrus!gatech!eedsp!ldh@uunet.uu.net (Lonnie D Harvel) writes: >>I was unaware that Occam's Razor was used to justify Atheism. >>Occam's Razor is: >> >>"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem." >> >>I do not see how that impacts a faith in God. God is a simple >>explanation for many complex and currently unsolvable problems, >>like "who set off the Bang". Occam's Razor cannot be used >>to justify either Theism or Atheism. >A very good friend of mine who is an agnostic explains that the "God >postulate" is undecidable -- meaning that one can either take it or >not and obtain a formally consistent system. However, since the >system without the "God postulate" is enough to explain "everything", >it should be discarded. I think this is how most atheists / agnostics >invoke Occam's Razor. I don't think Occam's Razor has anything to do with deciding Theism/Atheism since deciding this is beyond interpetations of evidence. Specfically it applies to the case where there is agreement on the facts but there are one or more alternative models to explain the facts. Occam's Razor is a mandate to choose the least complicated and extraordinary of the models until new facts render one model more suitable than the alternatives, when used with the idea of parsimony. It also says that there must be some way to decide amomg the alternatives. What you find with Theism/Atheism as Creationism/Evolution is that there is no general agreements in the debate on the facts, or there is a shifting of the terms in the debate. The former does not submit to evidence, the latter is decidable but the evidence that decides it is ignored by the Creationists and the methods used to get and use this evidence, from Biology, does not deal with the ad hoc reasoning within Creationism. Neither of these cases can be resolved with Occam's Razor. Bruce Salem