Hijacking Ockham’s Razor

It is interesting to me that whenever I speak of wielding Ockham’s Razor for the case of theism, people, including and not at all limited to theists, insist that I’ll only lose. I strongly believe this is due to a misrepresentation of Ockham’s principle.

William of Ockham was nothing if not a Christian. He did indeed recommend a rigorous empricism, but it should be recognized as to what kind of empiricism he was suggesting. Ockham believed “in God, father almighty; which I understand thus, that everything which does not involve a manifest contradiction is to be attributed to the divine power (Lawhead, 210).”  It is important to understand that this was Ockham’s presupposition in his empiricism: that God’s omnipotence was first and foremost.

I would suggest that William of Ockham would disagree completely with the idea that his principle, known popularly as Occam’s Razor or Ockham’s Razor, could be used to exclude God from any explanation. The principle itself states, according to Ockham, that “What can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlesssly by more (210).”

Anti-theists in general seem to reinterpret this as “A naturalistic explanation is the only one.” Now, I do not mean at all to disregard Ockham’s own empiricism, but would it not seem that his original statement would not, given his own presupposition, exclude theism in any account? Not only that, but it would seem to suggest that theistic accounts are better because they are indeed simpler, by virtue of less principles. “God upholds the universe” could be used to explain almost infinite systems within the universe. That statement seems at face value much simpler than naturalistic explanations of events such as the Earth’s movement, gravity, life’s origins, etc. Now, I am not suggesting the use of Ockham’s Razor to halt scientific inquiry, but I would suggest that the hijacking that has occurred goes entirely against the principle’s presupposition, which is that, barring contradictions (and a scientific explanation of an event does not contradict a theistic explanation, it merely explains how God may do something), things are to be attributed to divine power.

Scientific inquiry can only explain how things work, it cannot exclude God from any equation. Using a principle such as Ockham’s Razor to try to argue against theism not only goes against the very nature of the principle, but it hijacks it entirely. Naturalism, in my opinion, tends to do that with most things. If it can’t explain something, it changes the definition. This has been done in science as well. The definition of science was changed to be exclude any supernatural explanations. While that is a topic for a different debate, I just think it is interesting that when naturalism fails, as it inevitably does, proponents of it cheat. Ockham’s Razor is just another way in which they do so.

Source:

Lawhead, William. “The Voyage of Discovery.” 2007. Wadsworth Thompson Learning.