Occam's Razor in action
To "lead with one's chin" was an expression my late father used to describe making the weakest part of one's argument its main thrust. The late Carl Sagan used to do precisely that in his gentle critique of theism. Sagan was fond of invoking Occam's Razor, otherwise known as the Principle of Logical Economy, or Inference to the Best Explanation.
The principle is really a simple one: the correct answer to a given problem or question is most likely to be the simplest one which accounts for all the known facts. It's a standard maxim of logic, and Sagan used to argue that since something has always been (either the universe itself or a god who created it), Occam's Razor required that we save a step by preferring the former.
In fact, he was "leading with his chin." Intelligent Design- really scorned far more on ideological grounds than logical ones by the secular academic community- is nothing more or less than the notion that an eternal mindless universe, while it might indeed be simpler than a universe created by an intelligent deity, fails to account for all the known facts.
Here is a reviow of a new book by Francis Collins, who played a pivotal role in the mapping of the human genome, which makes precisely that point. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief seems essentially to be an argument that in fact Occam's Razor leads by a rather direct route to theism, rather than its opposite.
The principle is really a simple one: the correct answer to a given problem or question is most likely to be the simplest one which accounts for all the known facts. It's a standard maxim of logic, and Sagan used to argue that since something has always been (either the universe itself or a god who created it), Occam's Razor required that we save a step by preferring the former.
In fact, he was "leading with his chin." Intelligent Design- really scorned far more on ideological grounds than logical ones by the secular academic community- is nothing more or less than the notion that an eternal mindless universe, while it might indeed be simpler than a universe created by an intelligent deity, fails to account for all the known facts.
Here is a reviow of a new book by Francis Collins, who played a pivotal role in the mapping of the human genome, which makes precisely that point. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief seems essentially to be an argument that in fact Occam's Razor leads by a rather direct route to theism, rather than its opposite.
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