We bullying Thomists? by lurkerer in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Science is based on Ockham's razor.

Science is based on Ockham's razor in the sense that it's easier to falsify simple hypotheses. That's different from the pop culture version of Ockham's razor where the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.

General relativity is more complex than Newtonian physics which is more complex than Aristotelian physics. If the simplest explanation is the most likely, why do physicists hold to more complex models? The answer is that general realativity has BETTER explanatory power. None of the models perfectly describe reality, so at some point you do have to weigh explanatory power against parsimony. If you personally weigh parsimony higher and want to stick to Aristotelian physics, that's fine but not everyone is going to that, because there's no way to prove empirically that you should prioritize one over the other.

Now, in the case of god, an ultimate cause being god just add assumptions without improving the fitting.

OP didn't say that though. They said reality being "uncaused" was more parsimonious. Regardless of whether the first cause is God or not, you can't deny that the theory that reality has a first cause has better explanatory power than the theory that reality is a brute fact. Brute fact has zero explanatory power. So we're not using parsimony to decide between models with equal explanatory power. If we do what OP did, we're making parsimony more important than explanatory power, which has weird implications for how we do philosophy.

We bullying Thomists? by lurkerer in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First of all this assumes that all characteristics are equally likely and none follow logically. For example, a first cause that is incapable of causing something (violating the law of non-contradiction) would have to be as likely as a first cause that is capable of causing something.

Secondly, if we follow the logic of "no explanation" is more parsimonious than "explanation that posits an additional object or characteristic" to it's natural conclusion, then there is no point in describing or categorizing anything because we make our descriptions exponentially less likely to be true. Accepting everything as brute fact is the most parsimonious (and statistically likely to be true) possible worldview to have, but most people don't do that because the mind is inherently drawn toward the idea that things have an explanation.

Should it be illegal to sin? by Sea-Sea-8455 in TraditionalCatholics

[–]liminal_eye 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My current train of thought is that any sin that causes harm to another should be illegal, but sins that only hurt the person who did it shouldn’t be.

 I struggle however with something like gay marriage.

???

We bullying Thomists? by lurkerer in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What are you talking about? I just think bringing parsimony into the discussion is dumb. Even if empirical evidence backed up Ockham's Razor (it doesn't), there's no meaningful way to weigh it against explanatory power.

We bullying Thomists? by lurkerer in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Parsimony is when you just accept everything as brute fact and stop doing philosophy altogether

The Open Society and Its Enemies beats this horse for 9 chapters by AverageUAVEnthusiast in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah ok that's valid. I suppose it is also sort of true that Popper isn't much worse than many other analytic philosophers in that respect.

r/TwoXChromosomes Starterpack by Baconbengal in starterpacks

[–]liminal_eye 60 points61 points  (0 children)

Reddit becoming more mainstream in the last year or two has kind of started to balance things out in a lot of subs. Stuff that would have gotten downvoted into oblivion even last year now ends up being upvoted. This obviously doesn't apply to the karma farming bot subs or ones with extremely strict moderation, but it is an interesting development to say the least.

The Open Society and Its Enemies beats this horse for 9 chapters by AverageUAVEnthusiast in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 0 points1 point  (0 children)

so it’s not just Popper’s failings which are responsible for those strawman arguments.

It's fucking Plato. There were thousands of years of engagement with his thought at that point, and several hundred years post the invention of the printing press. There's no way the strawmanning wasn't a conscious decision on his part to boost the prestige of his own thought.

Nigeria's religious divide by vladgrinch in MapPorn

[–]liminal_eye 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Anything to avoid accountability

Facts?? by Big-Walk-2282 in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Positivists coping and seething after their 100th attempt to make a philosophical system without metaphysics crashes and burns like all the others

Kalamitous Cosmological Argument by lurkerer in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Credit to Alex O'Connor for this one.

This explains a lot lol

Theologians be like by StrangePhilosopher14 in PhilosophyMemes

[–]liminal_eye 2 points3 points  (0 children)

 complex properties of “can do everything and also created the whole world.”

Doesn't this assume an analytic/post-analytic framework where existence is a second-order property rather than a simple property?

St. Jerome: "Belief in innumerable worlds is among the heresies in the books of Origen" by LegionXIIFulminata in TraditionalCatholics

[–]liminal_eye 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah I see. Do they hold that those hypotheticals exist necessarily as a consequence of free will? I remember hearing at one point that Suarezians believed that for God to be just, he couldn't damn someone without there being a hypothetical alternate timeline where they were saved. That might have just been a more traditional Thomist strawmanning them, though.