Re: [asa] The Parsimony Principle (aka Occam's Razor) and atheism

I agree with you that it is a category mistake to apply Occam's Razor to
God, for the reasons you discuss relating to probability theory and the
notion of God as transcending the system being described. In addition, it
seems to me that the argument also fails on its own merits. The state of
our current scientific knowledge does not provide an explanation of the
origin of the universe that is more parsimonious than "in the beginning,
God...." In fact, the state of our current scientific knowledge provides no
meaningful explanation of the origin of the universe at all. Thus, it seems
to me that Occams' Razor can't elide God as the "prime mover."

A fair rejoinder here is that this is a god-of-the-gaps argument. Perhaps,
although the singularity before the big bang continues to show every sign of
being a genuine singularity. But in any event, the god-of-the-gaps problem
is a different goalpost. Occam's Razor only elides a given explanation when
there is a more parsimonious alternative, and no such alternative exists for
anything prior to the big bang.

On 7/10/07, Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've noted that an appeal to "the most parsimonious explanation", or
> Occam's Razor is a frequently used argument by atheists to justify not
> believing in God.
>
> The argument goes something like this. Because the laws of physics and
> the theory of evolution can explain, in principle, everything there is,
> including all the complexity of life, etc, there is no need to invoke a
> Creator to explain it all. A universe without a Creator is a simpler, and
> therefore more parsimonious, explanation than a universe with a Creator.
> Hence the god-less universe is to be preferred.
>
> However, I think this argument is flawed, for the following reason.
> Occam's Razor, or the principle of parsimony is certainly to be used and
> encouraged in trying to decide between different scientific models. For
> example, I have a bunch of data and I have to fit a polynomial curve
> through it. What order polynomial should I choose? ( e.g. linear,
> quadratic, cubic, quartic etc). In general the higher the order the better
> the fit, but the more complex the model (requiring more coefficients). One
> good way of deciding this is to look at the data-fitting errors. One can
> describe the dataset as a set of polynomial coefficients plus the residual
> errors. The better the fit, the lower the residuals. For each model, one
> has a "data description length", consisting of the length of the model
> coefficients and the length of the residual errors. Smaller errors require
> less bits to transmit, so have a shorter description length, but at the cost
> of a more complex model. The optimal trade off is to get the shortest
> description length, and this will be the most "parsimonious" description of
> the data. Such methods have a sound basis in probability theory, and can be
> shown to be equivalent to Bayesian inference, which is one of the key ways
> probabilistic models are derived nowadays. The simplest way to put this is
> that given a number of models each of which fits the data equally well, the
> most "parsimonious" model is the most probable. If anyone's interested, I
> can probably point to technical papers that describe this.
>
> But it is this connection with probability theory that, to my mind renders
> the "parsimony" argument against God as invalid. Firstly, it can only
> really be valid if God is "part of the model" - the explanation of why
> things are as they are. This is the fallacy of the Intelligent Design
> position - the claim that evolution can't explain everything, and therefore
> one needs a Designer (aka God) to explain the complexity of life. That
> argument perhaps falls foul of Dawkins's arguments in "The God Delusion" -
> that the Designer is even more complex than we are and hence even less
> probable. I think that by requiring God to "explain" the existence of
> various complex artefacts, one is falling into the Occam's Razor trap.
>
> But it seems to me that the obvious rejoinder is that God isn't "part of
> the model", but is traditionally viewed as transcendent over the model.
> Furthermore, one simply can't make probabilistic estimates about the
> existence of God. (Dawkins wants to, but can only do so by requiring God to
> be part of the model - how could such a complex entity come into being?).
> But the supernatural, by its very nature, can't be subjected to scientific
> measurement and laws (otherwise it would be natural and not supernatural).
>
> About 20 years ago, in my church, I was asked by an old lady with crippled
> arthritic hands to pray for her hands to be healed. I was horrified at the
> prospect of effectively being asked to perform a miracle, but the lady was
> in quite a lot of pain and distress and there seemed no way out but to
> comply (though I wanted to run away like a wuss). So I went through the
> motions of what you're supposed to do - laid my hands on her hands and
> prayed for healing - not with much hope, I'm ashamed to admit! Well, her
> hands, which were crippled and stiff with pain, immediately freed up, to
> everyone's amazement (especially mine!). As I was driving off in the car
> park, I saw her - she lifted her hand and waggled her fingers at me to show
> that they could move where previously they could not.
>
> But the point to make about this experience, which was real enough to me
> and to the lady herself, is that it could never be repeated in a laboratory
> under double-blind conditions, and so one couldn't possibly make any sort of
> probabilistic inference about such an event. No similar event has happened
> to me since then though I've heard of a few other anecdotal accounts of
> healings, just as the above is. But in science, and especially medicine,
> anecdotal accounts simply don't count as evidence - the effects have to be
> repeatable. I guess a more "parsimonious" explanation would be that she
> didn't have arthritis at all and that her paralysis was psychosomatic. But
> there is absolutely no way of checking out the probability of either
> explanation - and in order to invoke the principle of parsimony to
> distinguish between the two one MUST be able to estimate probabilities.
>
> So in the end it would come down to prior beliefs. If one's prior belief
> is that there is no God, then one MUST opt for the psychosomatic explanation
> (or something else like saying she was faking it for some bizarre reason).
> But to someone who believes in a God who can perform miracles of healing,
> then it's not an unreasonable explanation to think that this was what
> happened. But to make an estimate of the probabilities of either event is,
> I believe, impossible & hence the principle of parsimony just doesn't apply.
>
>
> Iain
>

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Received on Tue Jul 10 17:40:57 2007