debate-points, logicHow do you concisely point out the logical fallacy of theists applying Occam’s Razor to creation or other events, where they claim that God is the simplest explanation (just one being), so likely to be true?
They don’t have one. The addition of a deity always makes their argument the less simple argument.
Remember, the other argument isn’t “more than one being” it’s “no beings at all”. So far we’ve been able to explain things without needing one, so, for example, Creationism, has to explain away problems like the fossil record, micro evolution, non-functional organs, extinct species, etc, etc, via the addition of an omnipotent being who’s just fucking with us, while Evolution follows from that evidence.
How do you concisely point out the logical fallacy of theists applying Occam’s Razor to creation or other events, where they claim that God is the simplest explanation (just one being), so likely to be true?
Concisely? I don’t know if that’s possible, because Occam’s razor is widely misunderstood and misapplied. The only good refutation is have an adequate understanding of what he meant and how it applies in the eral world.
There are lots of things to consider here:
Reducing Assumptions
Let’s start with the fancy technical definition of occam’s razor, which has two parts:
1) “For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture”. In other words, if you affirm the truth of something, you need to have a good reason for it.
2) “Plurality should not be assumed without necessity” It means that if you can adequately describe something without making an assumption, then you should exclude the assumption from your description since it clearly adds no useful information. Note that including or excluding the assumption does not make it more or less true, just more concise.
Occam probably would not have agreed with the statement atheism is a simpler explanation than theism. He was a product of his times and believed his conception of God is the only logically necessary being in the universe. I think that belief now is a little more controversial than it would have been in the 1300s.
Occam’s razor is essentially a rejection of “blind faith” – you shouldn’t believe in something by conviction alone, you need to have a good reason for your conviction, otherwise you have no claim to knowledge. A good reason starts with logic (ontology) or experience (epistemology).
Parsimony
Parsimony means “be frugal in your explanations”. In relation to religion and science, it seems that the universe we have no is fundamentally indistinguishable and consistent with philosophical materialism. It seems odd to talk about the universe with the inclusion of paranormal entities like gods and avatars, parallel spirit universes comprising an after life, etc. The mechanics of the universe are evidently unchanged by the inclusion of these elements (at least in so far as they remain wholly invisible and seem not to interact with the universe), so why bring them up in theories of the universe at all?
With that said, its important to keep in mind that excluding supernatural beings from descriptions of the universe is not the same thing as stating that do not or cannot exist.
Explanatory power
We can trade away simplicity for a gain in explanatory power and accuracy. For example:
So what does Occam’s razor have to say about this? Well, I’m pretty sure that the move from perfect circles to epicycles to epicycles on epicycles is justified by Occam’s razor, not because the explanation kept getting simpler, but because each refined model because more accurate. Each explanation could do more than the previous one.
Its really an accident that Kepler’s model is “simpler” (however simplicity is measured) than the other models, but had it been incorrect, we’d really have no reason to prefer it over one with infinite epicycles.
Choosing between explanations
Now, continuing the line of thought above, let’s say that we have two mutually exclusive explanations for an observation. It’s not a matter of excluding one explanation because it includes superfluous entities, but really that both explanations account for the same observation in wholly different ways. To use an example, let’s take Uri Gellar as an example: he claimed to have paranormal powers which were given to him by extraterrestrials, which ranged from telepathy, telekinesis, and famously the ability to mentally bend spoons and keys from behind a magic cloth.
There are two competing claims: that Uri Gellar really has paranormal powers, or he’s using a sleight of hand technique no different than magicians use everyday. Needless to say, Mr Gellar has unable to bend keys in scientific environments, or bend keys behind a cloth when those keys were sitting on a glass table being watched by a camera.
Proofs are for math, but [i]accumulation of evidence[/i] is for science. In this case, when testing both theories, evidence in favor of Mr Gellar’s actual paranormal powers dwindled in favor of the sleight of hand explanation.
What to Test First
A handy consequence of Occam’s razor is how, if we have to make a choice between testing two competing hypotheses, it seems “simplest” hypothesis is roughly equivalent to the one we can test most quickly. If I had a theory which could be verified in 5 minutes with a two bars of soap and a matchstick, or verified by 100 years of studying theoretical physics and building a massive hadron collider positioned on the moon, any self-respecting scientist will say “use the soap!”.
For this reason, we’d be more likely to approach a claim of telepathy by putting two people in separate rooms and attempting to have a sender communicate information to a receiver. We’d be unlikely to approach the situation by scanning the atmosphere for minute perturbations in EMF signals marking the telepathic transmission.
Theism and Occam’s Razor
Occam’s razor states that, in order to make a claim of theism, that there should be good reasons to postulate the existence of gods, and that the inclusion of God is a useful contribution to observations we see, and that the inclusion of God provides more accurate explanatory power that non-god explanations.
Ockham’s principle says that non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem [entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity]. By adding God to the picture, we multiply the entities. And then, God is not even an explanation, because an explanation tells why something is one way instead of another way. God could have done anything, so there are no alternatives, and therefore God is an unnecessary entity.
Occam’s Razor has to do with minimizing the number of things for which their existence one has to assume in order to explain some phenomenon. Naturalistic explanations for everything in the universe ideally only use what we already know or have good reason to accept by means of observation and reason, so not much if anything is really invented out of whole cloth.
The problem with claiming that the existence of a deity that created everything is that something extra is introduced without simplifying the explanation at all—there’s still the matter of why any god would do such a thing and as for the mechanisms that were used, and why they were selected, we’re back to square one except with a larger burden of proof.
I think that as long as Occam’s Razor argument is mostly utilitarian, because allows one to chose between proved things (events, phenomena etc.), God, being the only but not proved explanation cannot be used as an argument.
The error is in assuming that Occam’s Razor means a) that the simplest answer is always the right one, as opposed to be the most likely. b) accepting the first simple answer without further investigation.
To wit: I found a lump under my arm two weeks after my flu jab. Simplest explanation - response to the flu jab. If I, and my doctor, had gone with the theist version of Occam’s Razor, I would probably be dead by now.
Basically, Occam’s razor is meant to choose between two explanations that have differing amounts of postulated explicative entities. However, I would say that the problem is not so much wether assuming god adds an extra explicative entity (perhaps others are dropped at the same time) but wether saying “god did it” explains anything at all!
An explanation has to stop somewhere. If you’re explaining why it rains, you can start explaining the cycle of water. But then a new question might come up as to what sustains this cycle, and then you have to explain that basically the sun is powering it by evaporating sea water. And then one might ask how the sun powers it etc… and you get to eventually more and more fundamental questions and answers.
Now, with a scientific explanation, it is obvious that this will lead to a certain set of basic principles or postulates that can not be explained any further. Either because of our limited knowledge, either because that’s all there really is to it. The question is at some point if god or anything similar will show up in the explanation. I think not, since scientific explanations exclude the supernatural.
At this point one might say: hah! god did it, all the postulates are there because of god. But unless this person provides an explicit mechanism as to how god did the laws of nature, this can not be considered by any sane person as a valid explanation, and the god hypothesis is obsolete without even invoking Occam’s razor.
If however, god is not invoked as an explanation of the postulates, but as an additional postulate, then, Occam’s razor applies and the theory with one less postulate or entity is the one to be preferred, since all other things being equal, it provides an explanation for everything we know.
The simplest answer doesn’t have to be the right one.
“Daddy, why is the sky blue?”
“Because God paints it blue with a big paintbrush”
Simple, but incorrect.
This argument by Eliezer Yudkowsky is not particularly concise, but is very good, in my opinion. Here is an excerpt:
Occam's Razor is often phrased as "The simplest explanation that fits the facts." Robert Heinlein replied that the simplest explanation is "The lady down the street is a witch; she did it."
One observes that the length of an English sentence is not a good way to measure "complexity". And "fitting" the facts by merely failing to prohibit them is insufficient.
Why, exactly, is the length of an English sentence a poor measure of complexity? Because when you speak a sentence aloud, you are using labels for concepts that the listener shares - the receiver has already stored the complexity in them. Suppose we abbreviated Heinlein's whole sentence as "Tldtsiawsdi!" so that the entire explanation can be conveyed in one word; better yet, we'll give it a short arbitrary label like "Fnord!" Does this reduce the complexity? No, because you have to tell the listener in advance that "Tldtsiawsdi!" stands for "The lady down the street is a witch; she did it." "Witch", itself, is a label for some extraordinary assertions - just because we all know what it means doesn't mean the concept is simple.
Having a creator around who has always been and is intelligent enough to create everything into existence and then control it all at the same time is definitely not simpler then anything scientists have proven so far.
(1) “God” won’t be a simple answer until it’s established that one exists.
(2) Use an analogous but ridiculous example. For example (from the Simpsons): “A wizard did it.” That’s a simple explanation, but would the theist accept it?
(3) Occam’s Razor doesn’t mean the simple answer is right, it means the simple answer should be refuted before one settles on a more complex answer.
One god is more than none.
Half of the problem with discussions of this point are the definitions of simplicity in use.
As pointed out above number of words in a sentence is not a good indicator of simplicity.
At the same time more computational definitions such as Kolmogorov complexity fail to even get off the ground.
If we instead consider an entity point of view, the most simple explanation is technically that nothing exists, but this probably fails to fit most people’s idea of the evidence.
Going one more level complex (in terms of entities) is that all that exists is God, the Great Simulator if you will. All that occurs occurs because it is so intended by the Great Simulator.
Even modern science is technically more complex than this since it posits the existence of many more types of particles than just one (consider the Higgs boson, quarks, etc.). Technically then, this fails the simplicity by entity comparison. This also is more simple than most justifications of theism via Ockham’s Razor. Then, if they wish to appeal to simplicity and simplicity alone, they must accept this new theism.
I would argue that a proper extension is not just it is the simplest explanation that fits the data, but that its the simplest explanation that predicts the data, and actively does not predict data that does not occur. This seems a more precise and effective definition of Ockham’s razor that would allow us to both rule out the above argument, and to rule out the standard theist’s argument, since rarely do belief systems make positive and negative predictions about the world that end up being upheld.
It is non parsimonious to posit an enitity that has always existed created the universe. The more parsimonious route (If you must follow that rabbit hole) would be to say that the universe has always existed. At least we can detect the existence of the universe, say something of it’s mechanisms e.t.c.
A god in the eyes of a theist is not a simple entity in the eyes of a theist. A god that has wants, wishes, requirements and intentions is as complex as us. Not to mention a god’s definition as omniscient,omnipotent and omnibenevolent.
Goddidit is not a reasonable explanation anyway, it is indescernable from ‘It happened by magic’ That is to say ‘I don’t know’.
“God did it” is not the simples explanation because any entity that is complex enough to create a whole universe has to evolve from simpler entities or be designed by an even more complex entity. This creates an endless recursion, and is magnitudes more complex than natural processes.
I know that theists would say “God has always existed, he wasn’t created”, but this is just a blank assertion of fact that one has no knowledge of or even a possibility to know, and if the theist keep repeating it there is really no point in having an intelligent discussion, IMHO.
If by Occam’s razor it is meant “choosing the simplest explanation”, then I have two better explanations than a creator God:
By the way - these are the two most widely accepted cosmological theories about the universe.
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