Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Charlemagne]

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I think it was Mark Twain who said "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
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Yes and as a fellow atheist he'd have had a laugh with me about you.

"God puts something good and lovable in every man His hands create." Mark Twain

Doesn't sound like an atheist to me. Yes, Twain was a successful satirist who mocked many venerated institutions. I've never read a sentence in which he denies the existence of God. Sculptor, can you produce one for me?

[Baby Augustine]

Fine but Ockham was a monk, A Catholic, and he would call that ILLOGICAL.
You can't take an assumption or principle that is foundationless and use it to say something else is illogical !!

I am reminded of Bernard Lonergan's take
The canon of parsimony is related to ‘Occam's razor’, which is often vaguely articulated as a preference for simplicity rather than complexity in scientific explanation. This is not wholly satisfactory, for theory ought to be driven by data, whether their explanation be simple or complex. Bertrand Russell is closer to the canon of parsimony when he formulates Occam's razor thus: `Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.’ In other words, the aim of empirical method is theory in which all components refer to empirically verifiable phenomena.