"Thomas de Groot" <t.d### [at] internlDOTnet> wrote:
> Elegant, like William's Razor.
> Out of curiosity, I just browsed again through William of Occam's book I
> have here. No easy stuff. He uses his Razor to prove the existence of God in
> a "scientific" way.

That's odd, because many people consider God the ultimate violation of
Occam's razor!  But then, William of Occam didn't have the benefit of
today's scientific knowledge.  While science has not disproved God, it is
giving God less and less to do.

I'll have to take a look at "Occam's proof."

One example of Occam's god getting his razor was Benjamin Franklin's kite
trick. When he demonstrated that lighning was nothing more than a humongous
electric spark, and could be defeated with nothing more sophisticated than a
metal rod, God's wrath became a superfluous entity--and a rather wimpy one
at that, if a heathen like Franklin could control it!  Franklin also pared
away any entities needed to explain why God smote church steeples far more
often than brothels.

The scientific method itself has also advanced.  If one were to propose a
scientific hypothesis "God exists," one must be able to test it some place
other than a book (an exercise conveniently forbidden by most religions,
incidentally).  That there is no science of theology shows that William
came short of today's lab standards.  Ironically, these modern standards
speak *not* of proofs, but of falsification and best explanations.

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