psac: Imagine that you hear tomorrow that your neighbour died (and nothing else). Consider the following explanations:
- cancer
- mauled by a bear
- killed by a hamster
- steamroller related accident
- drowned in a torrent of beer
- aliens killed him
- assasinated by foreign agents
- car accident
- a virus killed him
- God killed him
all of these explanations are possible, and for each and every one of them i could come up with a scenario that explained how it happened.
But - and you got to give me this - they are not equally likely. Its not like you imediately think there is a 10% chance of each of these are the real cause of death, and in an investigation of his death we should treat each hypothesis differently: they would require different standards of evidence, if you know what i mean.
So why is that?
There are mainly two reasons: First off we know they are not equally likely (a-priori). the chances of getting killed by cancer is a lot higher than getting killed by a hamster, or aliens, or foreign agents; to keep things simple, one very important thing is how many elements the explanation require; like the foreign agents require many more elements than a few of his cells going nuts.
The second reason is more subtle but even more important.
Lets say i focus on only cancer and aliens as explanation. For cancer, there is only a few symptoms which are compatible: I basically expect to be able to cut him open and find cancer.
But with aliens its more fuzzy: How would an alien kill a man? its very hard to tell; it might be very subtle and give him a virus or something, or it might use a nuclear warhead. aliens can explain a wide range of phenomena, while cancer can only explain relatively few. Therefore new information, even though its equally compatible with the explanations, should not be treated the same.
I hope you can see there is more to this than asking of something can be explained. the hypothesis are simply of different quality and must be treated accordingly.
if this is not done, one end up with eg. conspiracy theories (which are compatible with all observations because they are infinite flexible) and it become impossible to have a rational conversation. Its also how fundies argue: "god might have used his magic to make the water cover the earth"
I left a few things open, like which criteria should be used to evaluate each of the two above step. what i claim is that every rational criteria used will point to God being a horrible explanation by any measure, basically because its very "large" and explain many different "things".
it does not mean God does no exist. But it mean we cant treat the God-hypothesis like any other hypothesis. if you disagree with me on these points, try to indicate if you agree or disagree with the points i made under "reason 1", or those under "reason 2".
