Stephen T-B

The Muslims, me thinks, have it made.
Their faith doesn’t rest upon a text which may or may not be historically reliable, nor upon the life of a man who may or may not have been God (or may or may not have existed.)
It rests upon the Word of God as dictated to the Prophet by the Angel Gabriel.
Seems reasonable to me.
That’s why they’re going to rule the world, with or without the help of the sword.
(And when they do, I shall keep a VERY low profile.)

Starboy

Ockhamite, naturalistic explanations do not qualify either. Whenever anything is examined in detail it gets complex. Evaluating two arguments based on complexity is nonsense. The scientific revolution has shown us that such sophistry is unnecessary. We now have experiment on nature. The best reason to be an atheist has nothing to do with parsimony. It is because Christians and other supernatural religionists don't have much evidence to back up their claims. That is the point. Parsimony, along with a good bit of philosophy and all supernatural religions, are outdated useless concepts that have no place in the 21st century.

Starboy

Yellum Notnef

Spoken like a true cynic.


It`s the same with Jesus. Nobody knew any better so they swallowed whatever their priest/minister/pastor said about him.
There are still people ignorantly swallowing the Jesus story just as ther are still people swallowing creation. You think you`ve switched menus and are now eating something more filling than the creationists,but you haven`t.
You`re all still eating crap.


Of course it hasen`t. The move away from a literal creation was well in place before you were even born. I`m talking about Christianity as whole.

Our rcecent understanding of the ancient world and their religions will eventually do to Jesus what evolution and science did to creation. It won`t happen overnight,but there will come a time when babies will be born into a world that has already moved away from a literal Jesus.
The only question is will the church be able to move with it.

There are already people calling themselves "Christians" who no longer believe in a literal resurrection.

Jayhawker Soule

Well said.

pz

Errm, what? Do you ever do any science? Parsimony is indispensable, and abandoning it would make it impossible to do science.

As I've already mentioned here, Occam's Razor is a methodological tool, which has nothing to do with truth or falsity. I can't even imagine how someone can call it outdated or useless.

Ockhamite

Starboy....
The complexity of detail matters not a witt. No one is proposing evaluating arguments based on complexity. Occam's razor will never cut so much as a word from your hypothesis. Yet if the underpinning for your theory is multiple, unsupported, non-parsimonious assumptions....consider them sliced and diced. Aliens don't do crop circles because you can't prove there are aliens. Aliens don't do crop circles because you can't support a method of interstellar travel. Aliens don't do crop circles because you can't plausibly explain why they would need to. The hypothesis that aliens do crop circles could be elaborated endlessly with as much detail as you wish....but it still has no legs under it. The importance of parsimony is in the fewer legs, the fewer targets to be sliced up. A hypothesis built on a single verifiable repeatable observation is difficult to refute. Theistic doctrine is like a caterpillar....legs everywhere. If you can show the Earth is over 5,000 years old....they lose a leg. If the bible has errors....they lose a leg. If prayers aren't answered...they lose a leg. Problems with evil....lose a leg, free-will.....lose a leg, logically contradictory...lose a leg. Sooo many legs, sooo little time.

Starboy

Yes I have done science. It's funny, in physics I don't ever recall it being mentioned once. No one ever said, we will accept this theory over that because of Ockham's razor. It is an argument that just never occurs to a physicist. Yes I know that Einstein is attributed to having used it but there were two very important occasions that I am aware of when he did use it and he was wrong! A scientist in the course of concocting a theory or experiment may use what might be call parsimony, but as used it is nothing more than intuition. There is nothing wrong with intuition since it is a huge source for scientific inspiration, but there is no need to dress it up in pseudo respectable clothing by calling it parsimony. Science doesn’t need to play such games since it has something philosophy will never have, experiment on nature.

Starboy

Starboy

Ockhamite, are we discussing Ockham's razor? You seem to be missing the point completely.

Starboy

Starboy

If one applies just a smidge of skeptical thinking to Ockham's razor, then one would realize that when applied to nature it contains an implicit assumption that nature prefers to do things simply. A cursory examination of the history of scientific theories shows that over time explanations get more complex not simpler. This leads me to conjecture that NTCOR (Not The Case Ockham's Razor) is likely to be a more useful dictum when it comes to science. The more complex theory is more likely to be correct. But this is merely a statistical phenomenon and most likely doesn't have any bearing on a specific application of the dictum. The same goes for OR. Therefore when it comes to science I conclude it is a useless idea. As for using it in philosophy, well those poor bastards need all the help (good or bad) they can get.

Starboy

Jayhawker Soule

It's a rule of thumb at best.