Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Occam's Razor and My Faith

So, there was a guy named William of Ockham that was a philosopher about 800 years ago. He posited that the easiest explanation was the correct one. This became known as Occam's Razor. That is the term that now describes Occam's philosphy.  So, what does Occam's Razor have to do with my faith? Everything!

First, let us look at creation of human life. I believe that there is an eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful God who created the entire universe and saw it fit to take the time to create humans. That only requires one leap of faith, one supposition and humans are explained.
  1. GOD
If I believe in evolution, I probably also believe in the Big Bang. So, I first have to believe that an uncaused cause was behind the big bang (I think that some of us know who banged it, we know the cause). Then I have to believe that all I see, the billions upon billions of planets and stars all came from an immensely dense and hot singularity that just happened to exist for the Big Bang (or expansion) to occur from. Next I have to believe that the sun was just perfect: the right temperature and distance from Earth. Then the moon was put perfectly in orbit around the Earth and the Earth had just the right atmosphere to support the transformation of non-living matter into living matter, which has never been observed. Then another never observed process called macro-evolution occurred. Not just once, but millions of times in order to create humans.
  1. Densely hot singularity
  2. Uncaused Cause
  3. Big Bang
  4. Order and Structure from chaos
  5. Sun perfect temperature and distance from Earth to support life
  6. Moon perfect distance from Earth to support life
  7. Atmosphere on Earth perfect to support life
  8. Non-living matter somehow evolved in to living matter
  9. Millions of instances of macro-evolution
That list above is a really short list, too. There are actually so many more things we could talk about, such as the complexity of the human genome with it's 3-6 billion pairs of DNA and how they all have to be perfectly placed in sequence. Then there are 35 parameters that make life possible as well as the 66 parameters that influence the sun-planet-moon system that cannot fluctuate an nth of a degree without causing the entire system to collapse. We have barely dipped into those above. But, we will not go any more indepth. Instead I will tell you that Occam's Razor has been able to help strengthen my faith, because in the end God is the easiest explanation there is and therefore the correct one. Now here's some Dilbert:

3 comments:

  1. Glad to see someone else came to the same conclusion as I have! : )

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  2. The cartoon made me laugh - thanks for the article

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  3. Well, Ockham would not put much stock in the anthropological argument. In a post-Aquinas era with multiple "strong" arguments for the existence of God, Ockham thought them all bunk except the first mover argument from conservation which he didn't think ended up proving what Christians wanted it to prove. In Ockham's formulation, all it proves is that there is at least one God and, for all we know, there are multiple worlds created by multiple Gods. For Ockham, we take the existence of God as an article of faith, not of reason.

    Anyway, if we're going to use Ockham's razor to theorize about the origin of the universe, the simplest explanation belongs to the monists and pantheists who hold that the universe is all there is and that all the attributes that we usually assign to God (omnipotence, necessary existence, self-subsistence, etc.) are really attributes of the universe. So it would seem that a God distinct from the universe has to fall to Ockham's razor.

    Fortunately for theists, Ockham's razor is not really all that impressive on the philosophical level. There are several arguments against it, Hanlon's anti-razor, Plato's lifeboat, and the principle of plentitude to name a few.

    The razor, however, is a useful tool in the sciences and in analysis which is how Ockham tended to use it. Contrary to the way this blog states it, Ockham didn't hold that parsimony was truth preserving (like logic is) but rather a variant of the principle of sufficient reason. This can be seen from one of the classical formulations of the razor ``entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.'' In other words, for every object added to a system, there must be a warranted reason for doing so. If there is no reason to being an additional entity into the picture, then one should not do so.

    IMO, the best philosophical argument for the existence of God is Aquinas' variation of Ibn Sina's argument from the distinction between essence and existence.

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