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

Which is the reason why ID can never become scientifically relevant.
And I agree, we should not have to explain Him.

On 7/10/07, Robert Schneider <schneider98@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why should we need to EXPLAIN how God works in creation? As someone might
> say, "I reject the premiss of your question."
>
> Bob Schneider
>
>
> 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 Wed Jul 11 00:32:06 2007