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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Occam's razor has been brought up by several nonbelievers as if it is definitive proof that God does not exist.  As Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride, "You keep on saying that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."

OR is itself a theory about shifting the burden of proof between hypotheses.  It is not an incontrovertible law of physical science.  It is itself a hypothesis, and an often misunderstood one at that.

The author of this hypothesis was a Catholic priest and logician who believed in God.[/quote]

This is just tap-dancing.  The funny thing is, you're correct in your characterization of OR, but you don't seem to understand the implication of what those words mean.  Bertrand Russell offered what he called "a form of Occam's Razor" which was "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."

Your "god hypothesis" has the greater burden of proof, because 1) it is more complex, and 2) it has *less* explanatory power than the infinite succession of universes hypothesis.  The only reason theists don't think so is because they fallaciously start with the assumption that an infinitely complex god exists, and work their way backwards.

From wikipedia:

[quote]William of Ockham himself was a theist. He believed in God, and thus in some validity of scripture; he writes that “nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”[38] In Ockham's view, an explanation which does not harmonize with reason, experience or the aforementioned sources cannot be considered valid. However, unlike many theologians of his time, Ockham did not believe God could be logically proven with arguments. In fact, [b]he thought that science actually seemed to eliminate God according to the Razor's criteria[/b][/quote]

Since we're talking about amusing things, what's really amusing is the argument offered up by an adult, that OR supports the god hypothesis because Occam himself was a believer.  It's like arguing that electric light bulbs cannot illuminate blue rooms because Edison hated that color.  Simply comical.

[quote]It gets amusing to watch nonbelievers state that ANY alternative hypothesis of creation MUST be more plausible than God, because God is impossible.  So an infinity of successive universes, a "spontaneous creation" of everything from nothing for no reason, a black hole...all of these things are more plausible than an Uncaused Cause.[/quote]

Wrong, you're apparently still not paying attention.  The God hypothesis isn't "impossible", but God doesn't get special privileged status on your say so.  If rationalists have to deliver a valid story for the origin of the singularity, believers need to do so for "God".  Just saying "he's an uncaused cause" is casuistry--in the perjorative sense.  Our story is that there's this fairly well-understood phenomenon, but we don't know how it came to be yet.  Yours is that there's this mystical force for which there's no concrete evidence whatsoever.  But how did it come to be?  Ah!  See, it didn't!  It's always been there.

Puh-leeze.

[quote]OK, if that is your faith, I can respect your free will to believe as you will.  I just hope you don't decide to form a society based on that premise.  Those societies have not worked out so well for the people living in them. [/quote]

More silliness.  As though the long succession of holocausts wrought by irrational societies founded on organized religion is somehow preferable to the handful wrought irrational societies founded on personality cults.
[/quote]

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