Occam’s razor: Difference between revisions

[[Richard Dawkins]] is very fond of using Occam’s razor to eviscerate God-botherers — to be fair to him, any explanation of ''anything'' predicated on an all-knowing, all-seeing, invisible and non-material creator is drawing a long bow — but by the same token, he does not seem to have noticed its application to fundamental physics, especially insofar as dark matter, the multiverse and unseen spacetime dimensions required by [[string theory]] are concerned.

That said, Occam’s razor is no principle of logic, but a convenient [[heuristic]]. There are plenty of examples where Occam would prefer the wrong explanation: Newton’s laws of motion, for example, do not require contorting the geometry of spacetime to the point where time is a variable and the speed of light constant, despite there being almost no hard evidence for it, but they have still been superseded by Einstein’s, which do.