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.
- 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.
- Densely hot singularity
- Uncaused Cause
- Big Bang
- Order and Structure from chaos
- Sun perfect temperature and distance from Earth to support life
- Moon perfect distance from Earth to support life
- Atmosphere on Earth perfect to support life
- Non-living matter somehow evolved in to living matter
- 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:
