Life requires several biochemical mechanisms that work together to be in place at the same time such as energy production, translation, transcription and self replication. As matter requires protons neutrons and electrons to be together at once. The origin of life is no less mysterious then the origin of matter according to Yockey 1977 as life also requires information.
A murder scene is something the police need to explain yet most the evidence can be contained in that scene itself. Blood DNA and fingerprints are examples.
The evidence for what you are trying to explain can be contained in the entity you are observing.
In the universe we observe matter and life which in themselves are evidence of the cause.
I don’t understand the first bit at all, and I don’t recognize the second bit as true, so I reject your conclusion. At any rate, the final explanation is always the simplest one that accounts for the data, so Occam is doing fine.
How would you know they don’t happen? Remember, the demons have cleverly disguised to ball-bearings so that there is no way to distinguish them from peanut butter by physical examination. (It’s like how the consecrated host is really the body of Christ, even though there’s no way to distinguish it from a cracker.) The only way to “know” you live in a universe where demons don’t substitute peanut butter is by assuming Occam’s razor.
Thanks. It doesn’t seem that way to me. Once matter was in place, self-replicating forms had plenty of time to develop bit by bit, and we know life has the ability to develop itself over time. On the other hand, why matter exists at all is a basically unanswerable question.
That doesn’t seem logical to me. If we’re trying to determine the cause of matter and life, matter and life itself can’t be evidence for it. It’s circular. It doesn’t do anything to point to “God” in any event, and the problem of God’s causation is still present.
Let me explain with an example.
The initial hypothesis about how organic matter arises from inorganic matter was spontaneous generation. It was a very parsimonious idea.
As data became available. It was falsified and increasingly complex explanations needed to be adopted. Each subsequent hypothesis was more unparsimonius than the first one.
This shows that there is no tendency in nature to prefer the simple explanations and our parsimonious explanations are wrong more often than right.
If it was true that parsimonious explanations are always true. Then there would be a tendency for explanations to become simpler as more data is accumulated. This is not the case. The universe has no bias for simpler explanations.
My answer would be I cannot know.
Ockams razor does not give us any knowledge.
Are you proposing it as a way to decide what to believe?
As to the consecrated host becoming the body of Christ. Many Christians including me do not believe it. It’s a catholic tradition. This belief is connected to theological issues like the role of tradition, biblical hermeneutics and so on. Nobody would approach it using ockhams razor. It’s not a fit tool.
Were trying to determine the cause of the universe. Your argument may be circular but it is your own straw-man. Components of the universe are certainly evidence for its origin as components of a murder scene are evidence of a murder. This inductive reasoning and part of the scientific method.
This is because you don’t understand what it takes for matter to become living organisms. The simple to complex argument is a fallacy as there is not such thing as simple life that has ever been observed. The claim is simply not scientific. As why matter exists is an unanswerable question is yet to be understood but the origin of life is in the same boat at this time.
This gets much worse then most people realize as the origin of the eukaryotic cell appears to be a second origin even as it is so different then prokaryotic cells and like the origin of life requires lots of new functional information.
This problem continues as the diversity of life unfolds and additional functional information is required. Science really does not understand the origin of new life forms and certainly cannot test the claims of their origin.
Do you understand the issues around creating biological functional information?
But that’s not what you’ve presented as evidence in your statements, you referred to life any the universe as a whole. I wasn’t strawmanning, I accurately characterized your previous statements. But given this, what components are you referring to?
We have no way of knowing if matter is a component of the universe or vice-versa. Life, fair enough, but I will simply say I am not convinced that this points to gods in any way, and in any event leaves us with the larger questions to answer.
I have spent a fair amount of time studying cellular biology and looking at Dr Craig Venters work trying to find the minimum amount of genes in a living cell which is around 500 at this point. That is a substantial amount of functional information that needs to come together at one time.
More power to you. A living cell now is not the end all of all possible forms however. I do know that abiogenesis is a significant field of study, presumably with people with considerable expertise who must think it is feasible to look into various possibilities for the genesis of life here on Earth.
I have been following evolution and OOL research for 4 years and it is one step forward and 3 steps back. The functional information problem is a substantial barrier to both. Combinatorial mathematics is great for making it difficult for someone to guess your long password but the only source we know of for things like passwords is conscious intelligence. DNA is sequence dependent like passwords. The debate is around how sequence dependent.
By the way, the above description confuses falsifiability with parsimony. A more complex explanation need not be unfalsifiable… though at some point they do become very difficult to empirically verify (for example the multiverse theory, String theory etc). The reason physicists seem to entertain these latest hypothesis seems to be that dont have a simpler falsifiable explanation to compete with these ideas.
Coming back to your example. If i asked my wife and family who boughth the peanut butter and it turns out no one did… IF there is no evidence of a break in. Then i might have to either leave the phenomenon as a mystery or come up with increasingly unparsimonius explanation which also might be unfalsifiable.
I would heartily agree that Occam’s razor is a rule for constructing models, but not a rule for how reality works. As you state, if we don’t use parsimony then it becomes really hard to create models that are useful.
Given the trend in topics on this forum, the rule of parsimony used in comparing DNA is a good example. When we see a one base difference we use the rule of parsimony and say that the difference was caused by a single mutation. In fact, as evolutionary distance increases between two lineages the higher the chance of a single base difference being due to more than one mutation. However, parsimony is used a lot in comparative genomics because it is probably true when comparing closely related species and models would become cumbersome without the rule.
Parsimony is not about the simplicity or complexity of an explanation. Parsimony is about the number of unevidenced assumptions one has to make. “Leprechauns create rainbows” is a much simpler explanation for the phenomenon, but light refraction is the most parsimonious explanatoin, even if it is a more complex explanation than “Leprechauns do it”. We don’t have to assume that light bends and reflects in water, but we do have to assume that Leprechauns exist.