Question/Statement on Occam's Razor

[Magic_Man]

I hear people bring up Occam's Razor quite frequently to show whether a given statement is true or false. I'm not sure when this argument became so popular among the general public, but I always had a suspicion that it was after the dialog in "Contact" when dreamy Matthew McConaughey tells dreamy Jodie Foster that OR says "all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one."

At any rate, do people not realize that Occam's Razor is a principle, and by no means a physical law? Sometimes, believe it or not, the more complicated answer is the right one. I prefer MagicMan's SafetyBlade:
"Taking all available information into account, the explanation which seems to be the most correct tends to be the right one." Why would we even consider Occam's Razor when evaluating a statement? Also, how do we determine "simplest"? Specifically, this comes up quite frequently between theists and atheists. The conversation goes something like this:


Atheist: Blah blah blah, evolution

Theist: Blah blah blah, amazing coincidence

Atheist: Blah blah blah, Occam's Razor - What's more likely, that a magic man in the sky created complicated interacting biological systems from scratch and then denied us the ability to prove his existence, or that the systems arose by themselves through the simple idea of natural selection?




Why couldn't the conversation go like this?

Theist: Blah blah blah, creation

Atheist: Blah blah blah, evolution

Theist: Blah blah blah, Occam's Razor - What's more likely, that just the right molecules just happened to come together in just the right place at just the right time, and then despite mass extinction after mass extinction, life arose again and again, but didn't manage to do so on other planets?...or that an all-powerful being decided to create us the way we are?


For the record, I am an atheist. I post this question/discussion because I think that the 1st argument from atheists is extremely weak and opens them up to the 2nd argument.

In closing, a poll, for fun (ugh, can't edit the poll, but clearly I should say "principle"):


~MagicMan

[vhawk01]

The dialogue could go like that, and it frequently DOES go exactly like that. And the answer is, evolution, even with all the crazy, polysyllabic words you used to make it sound impossible, is by far the more parsimonious explanation. Think about it. All that crazy stuff is used to describe how simple life can reach, just for instance, the creative power of me writing this post. The other 'theory' states that a creative power MANY orders of magnitude stronger.

[IronUnkind]

Occam's Razor is appropriate to the extent that it predicts results and illustrates truth. I am not certain that a simplicity bias is warranted on this question, though I've always behaved as if it were.

With respect to discussions of origins, the debate rarely hits the bedrock of the issue, namely the character of the universe in the Planck epoch. It seems to me that as long as the conversation focuses upon processes within the manifest universe (creation vs. "evolution"), that Occam's Razor tends to cut away theistic explanations. But this doesn't get to the heart of the matter, so big deal.

In order to wield this weapon, one must establish that parsimony is warranted, and establish it rigorously. As clever as it might make atheists feel, Flying Spaghetti Monsters and invisible teapots don't go far enough in this regard.

Don't get me wrong. I fully expect that experimentation would show that parsimony tends to indicate accuracy (or the probability thereof). But I suppose that the simplicity bias usually has more to do with aesthetics than it does with logic.

Moreover, there are, at least theoretically, some instances where Occam's Razor makes for a dull weapon:

1. When it is unclear which of two (or more) hypotheses is simpler.

2. When the nature of the phenomenon is itself not well understood.

3. If the known principles of physics do not apply.

4. When the the verity of a clunky hypothesis might account for alternative phenomena in a more elegant way. (In this instance, if the less parsimonious hypothesis promotes simplicity in another context, then Occam's Razor has contradicted itself. It should not, in other words, have been wielded in the first place, since the competing theories did not actually have identical explanatory power).

Occam's Razor is a potent heuristic, but its use is not necessarily compulsory.

[drzen]

You need to get away from the whole "x simpler than y" thing. Occam's Razor means "don't use what you don't need", useful for simplifying hypotheses in themselves, and is a hopeless tool for judgement between dissimilar explanations.