I'm not really even sure that you disagree with me.

@ChrisP +1 for analysis of stools

@All
Ockhams Razor is a guide to probability. It tells what is MOST LIKELY not what is TRUE. It PROVES nothing.

I might have had pizza and salad for dinner this evening or I might have had quail's eggs poached by a michelin starred chef wearing a negligee and high heels. Ockham's Rzor can help you choose an answer but the proof lies elsewhere.

@All

For fun I looked up Ockham's Razor. Wikipedia, quoting Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy has it as “For 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.”

Note the final caveat. The bible says it is true therefore it must be. We have been wasting our time in this thread (in case you had not already realised that).

Well whatdaya know C-Man was righter that I tought. lol

"It's interesting that your naturalist makes a lot of qualifying statements but your theist is unequivocal in his speech. Wouldn't be an intentional skewing of the position would it? ;-)"

Oh most definitely!

Occam's razor is quite overrated. I said it earlier, it is neither logically rigorous nor scientific. I wouldn't trust it to deal with material issues either. It makes a good rule of thumb, applicable to very diverse situations, but it is definitely not the last word.

Also, that pretty much discredits the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy in my eyes. =P

Actually it's Ockam's Razor as he wrote it or closer than any that I've seen. He was a clergyman and a pretty conservative one. He criticized the church in Rome for their teachings that Christ and the apostles were rich (like earthly kings-which according to the argument made it okay for the clergy in Rome to live the same way). He was sent to the Inquisition and found pretty much innocent without even losing his teaching credentials.

if i were to use ockam's razor moreless as coservative man suggested at the beggining of this thread, i'd say that the simplest thing i can ever imagine is the NOTHING, so this universe is NOTHING, and was created from NOTHING

I've been to a Bhuddist shrine and meditated. Imagining nothing is not so simple for me.

no, i guess it's not simple to achieve. but if you achieve it, no doubt it's the simplest thing you can ever imagine.
even if you, in particular, don't manage to imagine it, the point is that whatever you imagine, it will be more complex than "nothing", and so, only the "nothing" itself can be the simplest thing you can imagine.

Actually Crazy Anglican, you think of nothing a lot of the time, we all do. It's just that whenever you check to see if you were thinking anything you suddenly are. Wake up one Saturday with the goal of thinking constantly for the entire day and see if you don't realize you've had a lapse in time. It's just that we fill the holes in retrospectively.

I think that would be an interesting psychlogical experiment. I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is though. Even when asleep your brain is active and "thinking".

I think that experiment has been done already. Somehow I feel like you are bringing up irrelevant arguments to the table Crazy Anglican: so what that Ockam was a clergyman? His original definition does not stand up to the tool we are talking about here: unless you want to argue that he has propriety of this idea, and so, we all should stick to his original definitions, and only believe in Sacred Scripture - which actually would have stood in the way of this tool being used for the advancement of scientific ideas.

"The Bible says it's true, therefore it must be" - if this is the bottom line and a premise you are not willing to give up in the least, then probably the whole argument has been pointless.

By the way I am not some sort of atheist - I was just hoping that I could advance my point of the world being run by a race of underground dwarves and pixies (they are really small, and can vanish whenever they want so it's impossible to observe them) who watch over us and drive us in our actions. I know they are around. I have a firm "belief" in their existence. You probably don't know that many people with similar convictions as mine, but it's probably because we keep quiet about it. We have been persecuted, people have lost jobs over their convictions, have been branded crazy, some have even been locked up. But if you would like to know more about pixies I would be happy to tell you more. I am currently writing a book based on what the pixies transfer to me by way of entering my mind; somehow I think that in about 2000 years it will be a best-seller.

I get really varied reactions form people when I tell them this. Would you question my beliefs if there were a couple of million of us? A couple hundred million? I hope you guys don't think I'm crazy.

those pixies are related with the spaghetti monster?

@ tom

Perhaps it has, do you have a link? I'd certainly like to read the study. It's my understanding that measurable brain activity (which people who are adept at meditation can manipulate at will) is pretty much consistently active during periods of wakefullness and it takes a specific act of will to manipulate that activity. In which case the brain might be considered to be like the engine of a car. It idles but doesn't turn off.

@ tom (again)

I don't think you're crazy at all, I'd like to know all about them. So you're the only one writing this book? It's completely by you and about your experiences over one lifetime? That's what you said right? That's great, please tell me the basic precepts and tenets of this religion so that I can contrast it with my own. You never know I might convert.

@ tom (again, again)

Well? Are you communing with the pixies? I thought this was a belief sysytem? Most Christians Missionaries would have been all about the opportunity by now.

@tom (sidebar)
"'The Bible says it's true, therefore it must be' - if this is the bottom line and a premise you are not willing to give up in the least, then probably the whole argument has been pointless."

You realize that you were quoting diplomat61 there and not me, right?

@checkmate - Don't be silly. His Noodliness has nothing to do with pixies or fairies. He is all about the sauce, the meatballs, and the noodles!

Wait! There could be a hybrid faith the pastafairyans! We won't know until we hear from the prophet Tom.

I can hear it now...

RAmen-tinkle (that's the sound of Tinkerbells pixie/fairy dust after you say RAmen).

@checkmate

Imagining nothing is impossible. We perceive all things in two realms, space and time. If there is nothing space and time do not exist. We cannot imagine anything without confining it to space and time.

If you imagine nothing, you instantly imagine nothing as a void, an empty "space." Which is wrong for nothing has no context of space and thus cannot be perceived by humans.

If you managed to somehow unrealistically remove space, you then contend with time. You will instantly imagine the place as occupying a time. See the big bang theory for example: "In the BEGINNING there was nothing." We cannot just say "There was nothing, nowhen, and then the big bang happened." We cannot make sense of that statement; its impossible for us as beings who exist in space and time to think outside of it. Hence why we claim a beginning which time existed, but space did not.

So to contradict your point, the hardest possible thing to imagine is in fact NOTHING. The easiest thing we can imagine is an imaginary space and an imaginary time. Nothing is an a priori concept we cannot understand, visualize, or show to exist.

The prophet Tom has abandoned us :-(

I guess all religions aren't equivalent after all, and there is certainly more to establishing a religion than making up fairy tales.

Maybe his fear of persecution was well founded. Maybe some vigilantes have taken him and executed him in some cruel and painful way.

Perhaps he was right, there really is something in this new religion but the establishment can't let it happen because they have so much tied up in the existing religions.

"There is certainly more to establishing a religion than making up fairy tales."

Not necessarily a whole lot more though; cf the book of Mormon, Dianetics, and dare I say it the Quran. Not to discredit these great tomes wrt the bible, just that they are (more or less) the work of one man rather than sustained tradition

@hopsyturvy

I'm not sure that I followed this:

"Not to discredit these great tomes wrt the bible"

is your intent to discredit the Holy Bible without doing so to the Bokk of Mormon, Quran, and Dianetics?

It seems to me that while partially refuting some of my statement with the intimation that these books are made up fairy tales, you actually back up the stronger assertion that all religions are not equivalent. It is true that one of the things that set The Holy Bible apart from those texts though is that it was written over a few thousand years, in many different modes, by many different authors, for arguably many different purposes. This is not the case with the Book of Mormon, the Quran, Dianetics, or the proposed pastafairytales book. Does that mean that the Holy Bible is correct where the others are false? No, it merely shows one area in which the Holy Bible proves to be different from others. From an atheists perspective I would assume that means little, but from a Christian perspective it is likley to be what we would expect.

How do you know about the Pastafariyans?!

Um.......cuz, you ......told me about em?


Wait a minute you've been gone an awfully long time and Tom was all keen to let us know about his pet theory. How do we know that you didn't knock him off and are merely impersonating him?

Hmmmmm, false prophet Tom?

Go ahead tell us something that only Tom would know.

Well, Dianetics is clearly fiction/fairy tale. Hell, L Ron Hubbard admitted it was just a way to rake in some cash. Although some of the ideas presented in so far as mind over matter and power of positive thinking are actually sound, it's the whole aliens in human bodies bullshit that was the scifi fairy tale.

The only thing that I know about Dianetics is that it's a book by L. Ron Hubbard and that they used to have stupid commericals for it during my favorite after school TV shows.