Tercel

Note: The following is written by me and is not a copy + paste job. Enjoy.
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<strong>Introduction</strong>

Science is the great success story of our era. Over the past few centuries, modern science has blossomed exponentially and continues to do so, providing us with everything from medicine to nuclear weapons to the computer I type this on. The success of our modern science has led many people to believe (with good reason in my opinion) that science can provide us with an understanding of the world that is significantly more reliable and well supported than anything provided by a non-scientific source.

It seems the atheists would have us believe that science is the ultimate bane of religion. They portray its inexorable advancement in terms of its continued destruction of God. Once the masses believed gravity to be a continued act of God, Newton explained it as a natural law. Once people believed supernovas to be supernatural signs from God, now we know them to be natural events in the life cycles of some types of star. "Look," say the naturalists, "everywhere science is filling in the gaps. When all the gaps are filled, where will God be?" Or they say "Supernatural explanations failed, but naturalistic ones succeeded - what does that tell you?"

The theists meanwhile see the success of science as evidence for their beliefs. "Look at the founders of modern science!" they say, "Those people believed that because an intelligent being was responsible for the creation of the universe that the universe would work by orderly and consistent natural laws that are intelligible to us. Hence the success of science is evidence for their beliefs."

If science is indeed so superior to anything else it would seem to be sensible and rational to hold beliefs only in that which fits most comfortably with the main parts of the scientific worldview. This is certainly not to say that we should only believe things that have been proven by Science. (Such a view would be self-defeating as there is no scientific evidence for such a belief) Rather, to the extent that the axioms, principles and worldview of Science fits or conflicts with another worldview is strong evidence as to whether that worldview is acceptable.

But does the scientific worldview sit most comfortably with atheism or theism?
I will argue here that the idea of an intelligent creator is so heavily enmeshed in some of the basic principles of science that to reject it is tantamount to the rejection of at least one of the basic axioms or methodological principles of modern science.

<strong>Chance and the Principle of Parsimony</strong>

One of the more important principles for evaluating scientific theories, especially in Physics, is known as Parsimony. Also sometimes called simplicity, Occam's Razor, elegance or beauty, this idea states that if two rival theories are in competition then the theory that is simplest and most elegant is to be preferred.

Philosophy lecturer Robert Koons points out that "Philosophers and historians of science have long recognized that quasi-aesthetic considerations, such as simplicity, symmetry, and elegance, have played a pervasive and indispensable role in theory choice. For instance, Copernicus's heliocentric model replaced the Ptolemaic system long before it had achieved a better fit with the data because of its far greater simplicity. Similarly, Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravitation won early acceptance due to their extraordinary degree of symmetry and elegance." [1]

Al Seckel, one of the leading scientists in the field of visual illusions, relates a conversation he had with the famous physicist Richard Feynman:
"Why is our sense of beauty and elegance such a useful tool for discriminating between a good theory and a bad theory?" [Al Seckel asked]
"It's goddam useless to discuss these things. It's a waste of time," was Dick's initial response. Dick always had an immediate gut-wrenching approach to philosophical questions. Nevertheless, I persisted, because it certainly was to be admitted that he had a strong intuitive sense of the elegance of fundamental theories, and might be able to provide some insight rather than just philosophizing. It was also true that this notion was a successful guiding principle for many great physicists of the twentieth century including Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Gell-Mann, etc. Why this was so, was interesting to me..."[2]

The physicist Steven Weinberg in his book Dreams of a Final Theory includes a chapter named "Beautiful Theories" in which he details the use of parsimony in the recent history of physics and shows the indispensable role it has played.
Weinberg explains:
"The physicist's sense of beauty is ... supposed to serve a purpose -- it is supposed to help the physicist select ideas that help us explain nature." [3]

Weinberg notes that the sort of simplicity that plays such a central role in theoretical physics is "not the mechanical sort that can be measured by counting equations or symbols" [4]. Rather is it the subjective human idea of beauty and elegance.

The naturalist David Papineau, in his book Philosophical Naturalism, writes:
"the inductive strategy used by physicists is to ignore any theories that lack a certain kind of physical simplicity."[5]

This principle of parsimony is not something that scientists have simply assumed but is unevidenced. On the contrary, parsimony has shown itself to be a guide to accurate theories time and time again. As Weinberg puts it:
"Through countless false starts, we have gotten it beaten into us that nature is a certain way" [6]
Koons writes:
[i]"Through scientific experience, we are "trained" to recognize the simplicity shared by the fundamental laws, and we use this knowledge to anticipate the form of unknown laws."[7]
So the principle of parsimony is recognised by scientists as one of the basis for the prediction of further scientific truths.

Now all this is well and good, and science has speeded along using this and other principles for its guides. But what does this have to do with religion? Well the pertinent question would seem to be: "What is this simplicity, beauty and elegance doing there?" Why should we expect to find it?

If the universe was the creation of an intelligence at least somewhat similar to ourselves (as the theists hold), it is quite easy to see why the simplest, most elegant, and beautiful formulas would be selected.
One of arguments for evolution I have often seen uses this idea. The eye, it is argued, is unnecessarily complicated. An intelligent being would not create something unnecessarily complicated, and hence we were not created.[8] Whether the argument proves evolution is irrelevant for our purposes (I accept evolution at any rate), but rather it is the logic of the argument that is interesting as it recognizes the inclination of intelligent beings to achieve maximum results with a minimum of complexity and a maximum of elegance. ie The principle of parsimony.

With regard to the physical laws governing the universe, consider if they were not designed by an intelligent creator and were the product of pure chance. Now we can note that for any given mathematical formula expressing a physical law, there are an infinite number of more complex mathematical formula which are extremely close in value to it.
For example, say a formula contained a B to the power of 2. A similar formula containing a B to the power of 1.99999999 will be very close in value to the first formula over a wide range of values of B. Or we could construct another formula simply by adding 0.0000000001 to the end of the first formula.
Indeed for any given formula there are an infinite number of possible constructions that yield formulas arbitrarily close in their values to our first one.

Hence, if the physical laws were selected by pure chance, the probability that the most parsimonious law would be selected tends to zero. For any simplest and most elegant formula we could choose, we can construct a potentially infinite number of other, more complex, formulas arbitrarily close to it. If we were to believe (as we are so often told by the atheists) that the universe was forged by blind chaotic chance, have we any reason to believe that the single simplest and most elegant of these infinite possibilities was selected in the case of every one of the basic physical laws?

There has been a variety of attempts at explaining why the principle of parsimony is valid within an atheist worldview because of pragmatic reasons. Peter Turney has recently argued that simpler hypotheses are more likely to be repeatedly confirmed because of the existence of random observational error.[9] Hans Reichenbach has argued that it is right for us to prefer simpler theories because they are easier to write, to use in calculations, and to make predictions from.[10]

While these points may indeed be true, they would seem to be irrelevant for our analysis. Science is about more than obtaining theories for use in calculations: Science is first and foremost about finding out the truth about the facts of the world. We are not interested either in getting theories that we can repeatedly confirm, rather Science is about getting theories that are true. None of these pragmatic considerations gives any answer to the question of why the principle of parsimony can give such reliable predictions about the truth of theories.

Thus the basic principle of parsimony, so important to the evaluation of our modern scientific theories, seems diametrically opposed to the view that the natural laws are a result of blind chance, but extremely consistent with the view that the natural laws are a creation of an intelligent being.

What possible responses does the naturalist have to this? It seems to me that the only possible response is to accept the idea that the natural laws are some sort of logical necessity - that is to say that they absolutely had to be the way they are and could never ever have been another way. Indeed, the three possibilities of Intelligent Design, Blind Chance and Necessity, can be shown to be the only possibilities:
Either the universe was the product of intelligent design or it was not. If it was not, either there were alternative ways the natural laws could have been or there was not.

Therefore, the atheist (who rejects intelligent design by definition), must accept either Chance or Necessity as being the defining causes of the natural laws. If -as I have attempted to demonstrate- the principle of parsimony indeed conflicts with the chance hypothesis, then in order to maintain a worldview consistent with modern science, the atheist’s only recourse seems to be to accept Necessity. Now it is not immediately apparent that this is a bad thing. Indeed many atheists I have talked to tell me they believe the universe is “a brute necessity”, and as they will probably be unimpressed by my argument up to here as they already agree that the natural laws are not the result of Chance. Necessity would seem to provide also a simple explanation for parsimony: Any logical necessity cannot be arbitrarily complex but rather must be the ultimate in simplicity. Hence, if the natural laws are logical necessities, they in turn must be very basic and simple principles.

<strong>Necessity and Empirical Science</strong>

After all, the scientific axiom of parsimony might destroy Chance, but it agrees perfectly with Necessity. So is the atheist home and host simply by accepting necessity? Far from it. For in accepting necessity they violate a different axiom of science. Indeed, they violate the very principle that forms the whole reason for empirical science itself: The principle of empiricism. Necessity is a dodgy position on other grounds:

• Cosmologists often examine the consequences of models of the universe in which the different natural laws hold and in no way do these models seem impossible or contradictory;
• There seems to be no way to derive any of the natural laws from logic: no way to declare one formula a necessary while another an impossibility.

However, first and foremost Necessity contradicts the basic idea behind empirical science.

The ancient Greek scientists were in many ways what we might call "Armchair Scientists". They thought they could discover the ultimate truths of science merely by thinking. In believing the universe to be a logical necessity, they believed that they could discover these ultimate truths merely by thinking about what was possible and what wasn't. Since the universe was a necessity, what was possible existed (of necessity) and what was impossible didn't exist. For them this meant they merely had to think about their theories and decide them to be either impossible or possible. Although this led them to raise a few interesting philosophical questions (such as things like Xeno's paradox), it didn't actually get them very far.
By contrast with the Greeks, the Christian founders of modern science believed the universe to be a free creation of God. If as they believed, God had had a choice about both whether to create the universe at all as well as the basic characteristics of the universe, then it seemed to follow that the universe was certainly not a Necessity. There were many possible ways that God could have created the world, so they needed to investigate to see which particular way He had done it. Empirical Science was born, the rest is history.

The very foundation of our science is that we need to observe the world to see which way it really is and not merely to use our minds to decide the way we think it must be. This very basis of our empirical science seems to be diametrically opposed to the idea of any sort of Necessity.

<strong>Conclusion</strong>

So is there any recourse left to the atheist? It seems any atheist position would seem to stand in contradiction to either the principle of parsimony or the basis of empirical science. Can the methodology of modern science be reconciled with atheism? The answer it appears is "no".
The Theists started our modern science, and on their side it seems it will remain. The success of Science it seems can only be interpreted as a great success story for Christianity. It seems a pity that the bad PR of "Christianity vs Science" generated by the evolution/creation debate and the unfortunate Galileo has left the world blind to the truth.

[1] Robert C. Koons, The Incompatibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism
[2] Al Seckel, "Why is our sense of beauty and elegance such a useful tool for discriminating between a good theory and a bad theory?", &lt;http://www.edge.org/documents/questions/q2001.4.html&gt;
[3] Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature, p 133
[4] Ibid, p 134
[5] David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, p 166
[6] Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature, p 158
[7] Robert C. Koons, The Incompatibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism
[8] Does an objective look at the human eye show evidence of creation?, &lt;http://www.2think.org/eye.shtml&gt;
[9] Peter Turney, The Curve Fitting Problem -- A Solution: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41 (1990):509-30
[10] Hans Reichenbach, "The pragmatic justification of induction", in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, p 305-327

Ron Singh

Very interesting, can I get a link from where you got this from? Thanks.

Joe Nobody

Tercel stated:

Joe Nobody

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: Joe Nobody ]</p>

Ron Singh

OoooOOoh. I mixed up the two. Well in that case, It's a very insightful read Tercel. Kudos.

braces_for_impact

Indeed, an interesting read. I have a few problems with it, however. The base argument of the article seems to insists that the atheist must accept the universe on the grounds of parsimony or necessity. This is a logical flaw. It suggests that only two viable aternatives exist, when in fact there may be more. I point out that a current theory in abiogenesis consists of the universe starting and collapsing, over and again, because conditions didn't come out correctly for the formation of matter we see today. The mathmatical formulae seem to me to be a strawman. Despite the universe being in chaos around us, patters do form. Chemical reactions for example, behave in very predictable ways, time and again under the same conditions. The very chaotic conditions of fast moving air molecules combined with a high humidity and low temperature can cause crystals to form in highly complex shapes. Is this leading to a rehashing of the second law of thermodynamics?
I can see why many theists see science as attacking their religion. Many theists I know have an automatic, knee jerk reaction to distrust science. Others simply try to convince themselves that science supports their theistic conclusions, often with little or no understanding of the actual scientific process themselves. This article seems to suggest that science has to 'pick a side'. Many theists feel threatened by science, and well they should; it's hard to argue with facts. But the point is, science doesn't say anything about god. It doesn't seek to prove or disprove his existence, or say anything about his nature, etc. Science has unfortuantely, taken standard theistic beliefs, and turned them upside down by demonstrating a widely held belief to be a falsehood, or by explaining the unexplainable. Science is merely a method used to gain information in as unbiased a manner as possible. As the facts are discovered, the chips will fall as they may. It is up to those who make claims that are turned on their head to pick up the pieces. More often than not, a new scientific discovery will change the beliefs of a field of study that has nothing to do with religion. Science doesn't threaten god. Science threatens the men that use mystery as their proof that gods exists.

My only other problem with this article is that I wish it was more specific. I notice often that, when a theist argues that science is "on his side", that they talk about god in very general terms. Which god are you talking about specifically? In most other cases, the theist is very careful to be specific about *which* god he is talking about. Could this be as to avoid specific claims made by science against his god in particular? Claims which are particularly devastating to his argument? To avoid an even lengthier post on my part, I'll simply refer to the reader to the archeology threads in this forum as my examples.

In short, science is often used in debate by atheists against particular theistic views because it's a strong, solid foundation. Logic is used the same way. Are we to say that logic is on someone's side too?

Joe Nobody

I take it you never heard of the transcendental argument for God's existence (TAG)? I think that is exactly whhat some argue. Wilson's openening statement in this debate argues the TAG:

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/douglas_wilson/drange-wilson/wilson1.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/douglas_wilson/drange-wilson/wilson1.html</a>

Here you can access Drange's opening statements and rebuttals along with all of Wilson's:

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/douglas_wilson/drange-wilson/index.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/douglas_wilson/drange-wilson/index.shtml</a>

Are you alluding to the big crunch or newer superstring stuff and its impact on cosmology? Also, I thought abiogenesis dealt with the "spontaneous origination of living organisms directly from lifeless matter" (m-w.com)??? Or are you saying for abiogenesis to work the universe needed to go through a few cycles to get the one with the right conditions?

Joe Nobody

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tercel:
Note: The following is written by me and is not a copy + paste job. Enjoy.

Good work. Was it written for class, or did you want to publish it in our library, or what?

"Look," say the naturalists, "everywhere science is filling in the gaps. When all the gaps are filled, where will God be?" Or they say "Supernatural explanations failed, but naturalistic ones succeeded - what does that tell you?"

It's important to recognize that there are two areas where science conflicts with religion. One is in its success in interpreting and manipulating reality. The other is in its values. Science values freedom of thought and expression, empirical testing, peer review and peer critique, open publication of data and results and other values antithetical to religion. It's war on two fronts.

The theists meanwhile see the success of science as evidence for their beliefs. "Look at the founders of modern science!" they say, "Those people believed that because an intelligent being was responsible for the creation of the universe that the universe would work by orderly and consistent natural laws that are intelligible to us. Hence the success of science is evidence for their beliefs."

Few major scientists are theists nowadays. Why is that not evidence in the same way.

Rather, to the extent that the axioms, principles and worldview of Science fits or conflicts with another worldview is strong evidence as to whether that worldview is acceptable.

Interesting. Can't wait to see how you handle this....extremely well--written, btw, and enjoyable to read so far...

But does the scientific worldview sit most comfortably with atheism or theism?

With neither. With metaphysical naturalism.

I will argue here that the idea of an intelligent creator is so heavily enmeshed in some of the basic principles of science that to reject it is tantamount to the rejection of at least one of the basic axioms or methodological principles of modern science.

Good luck...

So the principle of parsimony is recognised by scientists as one of the basis for the prediction of further scientific truths.

Accepted. Very well-presented, dense enough to make your point without being verbose. Nicely done &lt;sound of hat being tipped&gt;

religion? Well the pertinent question would seem to be: "What is this simplicity, beauty and elegance doing there?" Why should we expect to find it?

Suddenly, the wheel of the car jerked! It was heading into a ditch!

If the universe was the creation of an intelligence at least somewhat similar to ourselves (as the theists hold), it is quite easy to see why the simplest, most elegant, and beautiful formulas would be selected.

Alternatively, the real answer is that creatures evolved to fit a universe where certain physical characteristics we label "symmetry" and "elegance" hold, might indeed have ways to percieve that symmetry. You've got the relationship exactly backwards. You're arguing that New Orleans is lucky the Mississippi River goes right by it.....

...inclination of intelligent beings to achieve maximum results with a minimum of complexity and a maximum of elegance. ie The principle of parsimony.

Whoa! What inclination of what intelligent beings? There are way too many assumptions here. For example, do you have a statistically valid sample of different species of intelligent being? Do even all human cultures see parsimony and beauty the same way? If not, why do scientists? Do you think the scientific view of parsimony is something that scientists are born with, or is it something that is ingrained in them as they are acculturated to science? How do you know that physics isn't "selecting" people with a preference for certain types of parsimony and symmetry? You've really assumed a lot here.

Basically, you're universalizing a culturally bound version of preference to not only the species as a whole, but to all intelligent species, and then to God. Can you really make that move with so little argumentation?

Hence, if the physical laws were selected by pure chance, the probability that the most parsimonious law would be selected tends to zero.

However, if the physical laws were the result of selection processes, the probability that they would be parsimonious is much higher. Further, you have absolutely no idea how the physical laws got here, or what the probability is, really. This part, while well-written, is extremely weak.

(as we are so often told by the atheists) that the universe was forged by blind chaotic chance, have we any reason to believe that the single simplest and most elegant of these infinite possibilities was selected in the case of every one of the basic physical laws?

How do you know that it is the simplest and most elegant? Do you know of other universes? There is no evidence for your assertion that our physical laws are the "simplest" and "most elegant."

It seems like you are committing a logical fallacy. Just because physicists use an intuitive model that relies on elegance, it doesn't follow that the universe itself is elegant. It simply means that our descriptions of it are elegant. You're confusing our descriptions with the things they represent.

There has been a variety of attempts at explaining why the principle of parsimony is valid within an atheist worldview because of pragmatic reasons.

Hello, evolution. Perhaps evolutionary psychology can add a thing or two to these ideas.

...use in calculations: Science is first and foremost about finding out the truth about the facts of the world.

That's one view. Science is about obtaining reliable and useful knowledge about reality. Science is what scientists do. Science is about generating proposals for grants. Science is about gaining credit. There are lots of theories about what science is about.

We are not interested either in getting theories that we can repeatedly confirm, rather Science is about getting theories that are true.

They are considered provisionally true if repeatedly confirmed. I don't understand this distinction you're making.

None of these pragmatic considerations gives any answer to the question of why the principle of parsimony can give such reliable predictions about the truth of theories.

Yes, but if humans are evolved to fit in this universe, perhaps a sense of elegance and symmetry is useful. Perhaps physics merely bootstraps problem-solving strategies used in other primate social activities, like mate-finding, and uses them to solving physics problems. Perhaps physicists should leave the psychology and philosophy to those with some background in it, eh? Feynman was right....

Thus the basic principle of parsimony, so important to the evaluation of our modern scientific theories, seems diametrically opposed to the view that the natural laws are a result of blind chance, but extremely consistent with the view that the natural laws are a creation of an intelligent being.

Or, alternatively, the humans are evolved to solve problems in a universe where elegance and parsimony are useful problem-solving strategies.

What possible responses does the naturalist have to this? It seems to me that the only possible response is to accept the idea that the natural laws are some sort of logical necessity - that is to say that they absolutely had to be the way they are and could never ever have been another way.

Or, more simply, to say that natural laws are the way they are, and anything else is speculation. When we accumulate information about how laws are created, then we can formulate ideas.

Indeed, the three possibilities of Intelligent Design, Blind Chance and Necessity, can be shown to be the only possibilities:

Tercel, this won't work. There are many forms of designers. ID assumes that god is just like a human, only on a galactic scale. Why would any intelligent being create a universe for life, and make 99% of it useless for it?

Either the universe was the product of intelligent design or it was not. If it was not, either there were alternative ways the natural laws could have been or there was not.

Yes....the answer is B, and then A.

Therefore, the atheist (who rejects intelligent design by definition),

Really? What about Design by aliens? You seem, like so many others, to have forgotten that naturalistic ID paradigms are possible. Further, there are ID theories that do not depend on a Designer at all. The Confucians argued that things in the universe have a spontaneous natural order, and emerge "designed" from the formless chi that all things arise from and go back to. Design, but no intelligent designer. You don't have a case, Tercel. Too bad, was a nicely-written piece.

must accept either Chance or Necessity as being the defining causes of the natural laws.

We metaphysical naturalists don't have to accept anything. I prefer to keep an open mind, since other options are possible and we have no information about the period prior to the creation of the current universe.

If -as I have attempted to demonstrate- the principle of parsimony indeed conflicts with the chance hypothesis,

It conflicts with the god hypothesis too...

decide the way we think it must be. This very basis of our empirical science seems to be diametrically opposed to the idea of any sort of Necessity.

Umm, no. Empiricism simply says we should find out what's out there by interacting with it.

So is there any recourse left to the atheist?

Yes, to read a few books on philosophy of science, and refute your piece.

It seems any atheist position would seem to stand in contradiction to either the principle of parsimony or the basis of empirical science.

As we have seen, that is not the case.

Can the methodology of modern science be reconciled with atheism? The answer it appears is "no".

Which atheism? Confucian? Buddhist? Metaphysical naturalism? I assume you are arguing against metaphysical naturalism (not atheists are metaphysical naturalists). Your position seems to be that methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism cannot be reconciled. This strikes me as absurd. Most people I know would disagree rather strongly with this. In fact, most metaphysical naturalists I know regard methodological naturalism as the starting point for their beliefs. You remind me of those Protestants who argue that Catholicism cannot be reconciled with Christianity.....

The Theists started our modern science, and on their side it seems it will remain. The success of Science it seems can only be interpreted as a great success story for Christianity.

Yes, if you ignore the last 150 years of it.

It seems a pity that the bad PR of "Christianity vs Science" generated by the evolution/creation debate and the unfortunate Galileo has left the world blind to the truth.

Perhaps the world has a better take on it than you do, eh? Maybe all those people who sense a conflict are on to something...

In all, well-written, but lots of faulty assumptions, poor understanding of definitions, and logical leaps doom it. Tercel, are you arguing against atheism -- pantheism, buddhism, confucianism, skepticism, metaphysical naturalism -- or against metaphyiscal naturalism? You can't seem to make up your mind.

Vorkosigan

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

CanoeMan

I might be naive, but I figure that in the most simple and elegant universe possible, pi would equal three

Kachana

Well written piece that. My comments:

That good theories tend to be ones that make the least assumptions (are parsimonious) does not make the universe itself parsimonious. As Vork says, 'you are confusing our descriptions with the things they represent.'

Let's also think about what parsimony means, it is a criteria used to select between different theories, so how can this be aplied to the universe, the universe is not a theory? What does it mean to say that the universe is parsimonious? It seems you are confusing the principle of rejecting theories with multiplied unknowns with the (unsupported and rather subjective observation) that the universe is itself simple. Even if it was valid to say the universe was parsimonious, what other universes do we have to compare it to to ascertain if it is the most parsimonious?

Simple explanations are preferred in science as each added assumption which is not neccesary lowers the probability that the theory is correct. It's not the case that out of all the theories available the one with the least assumptions should automatically be chosen, as you suggest when you state: this idea states that if two rival theories are in competition then the theory that is simplest and most elegant is to be preferred. But theories are often in competition which each other but make various different predictions, which is how they are usually tested. A better scientific formulation is:

When you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better.

So it's not the case that simple theories are always the best. When you say:

I think you are wrong, there are many theories that rely on many different assumptions and that are really quite complex, the simplicity criteria is valuable for selecting out only theories that make the same predictions. If God would select the most elegant and simple theories per se, why are there theories that have any level of complexity at all?

Further, your reasoning here is rather post hoc. I could just as well reason that 'If the universe was the creation of an intelligence at least somewhat similar to ourselves (as the theists hold), it is quite easy to see why the most complex and incredibly sophisticated formulas would be selected as the creative output of a supreme intelligence.

HRG

Just a few thoughts:

1. What is beautiful, symmetric, parsimonious etc. are our theories - which are models of the universe, not the universe itself.
We chose those theories partly because they are so simple that we can calculate their consequences. Where we are forced to deal with a basically non-linear model (as in hydrodynamics), we have been stuck for 150 years.

Physicists (myself included, when I was still doing active research) often succumb to temptation and confuse their models with the real world out there. At least, during the last 100 years, they have called their equations "models" and not "laws".

BTW, many theoretical physicists *) believe that this "simple" behavior of the universe is but the low-energy limit of a "chaotic" behavior at high energies (where "high" means many Tera-electronvolts).

2. The task of scientists is not to find out Truth with a capital T. It is to find models which best explains and predicts what we observe.

Truth with a capital T is best left to mathematicians. After all, we cannot even say that the negation of Last Thursdayism is True.

3. If God X decided on the "laws of physics", did he so by chance or by necessity ? Saying "The universe is as it is because X wanted it that way" has the same explanatory content as "The universe is as it is".

Regards,
HRG.

*) among them Steven Weinberg, who apparently draws completely different consequences than the author of Tercel's article. Witness the following quote of his:

"One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment. "

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: HRG ]</p>