CJD

fishbulb, our understanding of the razor is not different, our problem is couched in your phrase "(the Universe can be explained without god just as adequately as it can with it, making it "futile" to do with the unneeded element)." I am not sure what the unneeded element is, especially considering that (forgive my assumption) you might simply substitute random chance for a personal being. It's not as if a CreatorGod goes one step beyond the scientific "facts" any more than Chance does. Besides, I am not even sure I actually agree with the Invincible Doctor on this point. Sometimes the most simplest explanation is also the most ridiculous (consider the day Aristotle looked at a mud puddle, saw tadpoles squirming inside, and concluded that spontaneous generation was a viable alternative).

You are right, we no longer carry the assumptions—scientifically—that Occam did in his own day. But this goes for theology only up to a point (that is, if the razor was as absolute as, for example, the law of non-contradiction, then you might have a shot at being correct in saying that Occam's razor disproves theism). The one thing that has remained largely stable throughout the centuries, however, has been creedal orthodoxy, and I am willing to bet that in another 1700 years from now, when many of our current scientific postulates are jettisoned, creedal orthodoxy will still be standing.

Finally, "hijacked by atheists" as I have used the phrase is equivalent with "adopted by atheistic scientists." I am no fundamentalist fearful of science, nor am I so naive as to think that our beliefs (or absence of belief) have no bearing on our scientific understandings of the universe.

CJD

fando

CJD, do you realize that Occam's Razor implies an ability to drop one explanation in favor of a different one? Above all things, the Razor requires the ability to change opinions, to change belief, to change theory. An inflexible system such as your creedal orthodoxy cannot benefit from Occam's Razor because it is impervious to change. Science, on the other hand, draws its power and relevance from the ability to adapt new ideas, to change, to discard the old in favor of the new.

ComestibleVenom

I posit that occam'z razor is uneliminatable as non-contradiction. In fact, systems with inherent contradictions can be very useful. Systems of arbitrary complexity are inevitably less useful than parsimonious counterparts.

echoes

The definition I got in a philosophy class was as follows:

If there are two theories with equal explanatory power, the one which postulates the fewest entities is the better one.

NonHomogenized

I like Shadowy Man's formulation a lot, so I'll go with that one, but I'm mainly posting to share this comic about Occam's Razor:

http://flem.keenspace.com/d/19990509.html

nermal

I doubt William called it "Occam's Razor," that came later. I think it is called a razor because it is used to cut away unnecessary elements from a theoretical system.

Ed

Secular Pinoy

Shadowy Man's and echoes' formulation are adequate, IMO. BTW, here's a nice animated gif of Occam's Razor that I found in the internet:

JaeIsGod

Wa , I love that pic!

fishbulb

Niether a creator god not random chance are explanations of anything at all. This is precisely why scientist are not interested in either one. To say "it happened because of random chance" or that "god did it for some unknowable purpose" has the same explanitory power as "I have no clue why it happened."

There is, though, a difference between random chance and aggregate statistical probabilies. If you don't know why certain things happen, but you can establish that it will happen in n% of all trials, then you can make some predictions about what will happen on a long-term scale, even if you can't predict the outcome of individual events. So you can develop an accurate rule for predicting the aggregate outcome of several events without developing any particular theory or explanation of why individual trials go the way they do. You just say "we don't (yet) know; it appears to be random."

It may be the case that certain phenomena in the universe are truly random, or happen at the whim of an inscrutable god. If that is the case, then those phenomena are beyond the scope of science. You cannot predict what is by nature unpredictable, or find the laws governing phenomena that are not governed by laws.

God has not been replaced in science by random phenomena. It has been replaced by physics and biology. God was thought to have created the Earth by fiat at a time when no one knew what we know today about the cosmos. Today, we know that that planets are quite capable of forming as a result of the inherent properties of the Universe and the laws of physics. Whether these properties were defined or are guided by a god or not is irrelevant; leave god in or take it out, the Earth could have formed the way it did. So scientist leave god out because god adds nothing to the explanation. Even though we may not know exactly how everything came to be, we now see that there is no reason to suppose that only a god could create planets, stars, life, intelligence, consciousness, and so forth. Since there is no real evidence that a god actually did such a thing, and nothing to suggest that a god is necessary, we don't worry about god when we do science.

ComestibleVenom

My problem with that statement is that random chance plays an important, perhaps ultimately uneliminatable role in scientific explanation. There may well be no discernable reason why particulars are the way they are, we can only, and may always in some cases, offer a stochastic account of why things are as they are.