The well-known term “Occam’s Razor” and probably lesser known definition of this philosophical ‘entity’ is often used in the atheist/theist dialogues that atheists use to shift the ‘burden of proof’ (although incorrectly) to the theist’s side. This entity states that “all other things being equal, a simpler explanation is preferred over a complex one.” This principle, ironically credited to logician and theologian William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349), can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and is known as the principle of economy or brevity. Of all people, it was devised by a theologian!
So often I have heard proponents of atheism and skeptics use this principle to describe the belief in God as unnecessarily complex, and for lack of a better term, therefore unnecessary in general. This is damaging to many people on the edge between attempting to decide whether, philosophically, a belief in God or a disbelief is rational or even applicable in today’s post-modern culture because it is (and I say this sincerely) an egregious error to assume that a belief in God is pointlessly complex and erroneous. Atheists make the mistake that ‘belief in God is complex’ is the same thing as ‘God is complex’ and therefore the ‘belief in God’ is incorrect. I will do my very best to show in this post that the idea of God is actually simple, regardless of how complex His works are! How can the idea of God be so simple? The following dialogue roughly illustrates a conversation I had with a buddy of mine on the team recently where this cropped up:
‘So you say God exists. Alright. But, why do you propose an additional theory to the theories that we already have about the origin of the universe, life, mankind, and their purposes when these theories pretty adequately show how each of these came to be? Doesn’t this violate Occam’s razor? You have to be able to prove that God is the ultimate source of these entities for your God not to violate Occam’s razor?’