(November 13, 2017 at 6:11 am)Mathilda Wrote:(November 12, 2017 at 9:10 pm)alpha male Wrote: Do you even know what Occam's razor says? It says that you shouldn't multiply entities needlessly. In the case of a universe with a beginning, as science says ours has, it's not needless to infer an additional entity, i.e. a creator.
That is entirely the opposite of Occam's razor.
Writing as someone who has actually read Occam, his position was that people should prefer the explanation that requires the least number of causal factors needed to sufficiently account for all the relevant phenomena. At least for now, abiogenesis cannot be sufficiently explained by any known combination of physical necessity and chance over time. That does not automatically make Divine intervention the prefered hypothesis but neither can it yet be ruled out. Simply having a bias for ontological naturalism doesn't ensure a natural explanation will be found. And if I remember the point of RR's example was not to claim abiogensis was true; but rather, to provide an example of something most atheists believe is true despite any supporting evidence. And since some here are defining belief in something without evidence as delusional that would mean that, at least on this one point, those atheists are delusional. Personally, I find that a sound comparison.
