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Sunday, 19 June 2005
Wherefore there is no reason to consider it
A most important, straightforward, and unassailable statement:
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the Gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
—Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), What I Believe, 1925
Professor PZ Myers echoes Russell's rationality in these times of ours when the supernaturalism mind virus remains uncontained: "There is no evidence for gods of any kind..."
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate!
Methodological naturalism is the norm in comprehending how our universe ticks. It has stood the test of time by becoming the most fecund and successful approach available to us. On the other hand, positing entities beyond that which we can detect, observe, and verify and falsify does not add to our fund of knowledge. To aver that such inscrutable entities are responsible for this and that empirical phenomenon is merely to propound an ad hoc hypothesis, immune to testing and falsification, effectively stifling further inquiry and understanding. For a hypothesis/claim to be of epistemic value it must, not only account for a host of observations, it must have predictive value as well (thus, implying a deterministic universe). Therefore, postulating preternatural entities to account for empirical phenomena does not satisfy the criteria of adequacy for vying explanations and hypotheses, if only on the basis of parsimony, testability and falsifiability. The naturalistic option remains the favored one.
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