Monotheism more parcimonous than polytheism?
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Hello!
Let's suppose it's certain that the Universe is designed by someone intelligent, and let's suppose we have thus only these possibility:
(1) This designer is one deity that knows absolutely everything about Universe, its mechanism, and how to make it.
(2) This designer is in fact plural: the contribution of several deities (each of them is limited to its own domain of competence); where a deity designed planets, another designed stars, another designed humans, and so on...
In that case, some theist apologetics claim that since the 2nd hypothesis makes more assumptions than the 1st one, then in virtue of Ockham's razor, one must prefer the hypothesis of a Unique designer, which is simpler.
Are they correct in thei reasonings?
thank you
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If you want to assume intelligent design at all then the answer is yes.
What is the substrate in which said deity exists? In this context what does the word 'exist' actually mean and who knows what is likely or not likely about it? For me both these assumptions are equally impossible to make and I accept my failure to, and apologise, for not answering the question.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Incorrect. The terms parsimony and Occam's razor both have well defined meanings. Basically, one does not add additional factors which do not add to the explanatory power of the logic at hand.
In this case, we are starting with what I will restate as:
So let's say that god is needed.
The first problem is that this is just some theist saying that god is needed without going into why a specific weakly defined entity is needed.
The second problem is that it begs the question of just why one god is needed and not additional gods. Pretty much, it assumes that additional gods are not required and add no additional explanatory power to whatever is being discussed. So there is an assumption that other gods are not needed and the theist then makes the claim that because no other gods are needed that the original premise of a single god is all that is needed. Basically, this is simple circular logic.
I could just as easily say that two gods are needed and then assert that a third god does not add any additional explanatory power to whatever we are discussing. Sure, more gods than are needed are not needed. What if ten gods are needed for the subject? Does an eleventh god do anything for the discussion? Not really.
Now let me get back to the first problem. Why are any gods needed? As we do not have an actual topic that might require any gods of whatever number, this is really the theoretical theist setting up a situation where what he wants the outcome to be is required before the discussion even gets started.
If I say that no gods are needed for this topic, then the theist is adding one more, which as we have seen above adds no additional explanatory ability to the discussion. And why is it so important to have a single god? Pretty much because the theist is “just saying” that one god is necessary and sufficient without bothering to explore why any are required or how many are required.
A related problem would be which god is the one that is needed. The god of the old testament? The god of some obscure amazonian tribe which has had no cultural contact with the west? The god of small furry beings from another planet we don't even have mapped out yet? Some concept of god that I pulled out of my ass to satisfy the discussion at hand?
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Here I go trying to oversimplify shit again ugh.
Simple in the respect that it is not challenging and really doesn't deserve much thought or explanation.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
If you are only considering those two options, monotheism is more parsimonious, but only in a weaker sense, regarding the number of entities.
Occam's Razor can be expressed as "the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question".
The "no gods" option is a far more parsimonious option than anything involving Gods, because it doesn't make the THREE giant unsupported assumptions that the universe requires a conscious entity to create it, AND at the same time a God critter does not, AND that the apparent contradiction between the first two assumptions can be resolved.
If you are prepared to allow those objections to pass, it is almost irrelevant to agonize over how many Gods might have been involved.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
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