The Law of Parsimony favors Intelligent Design

Hello to my good opponent. I hope you had a great holiday. I did. Onto the debate. My opponent misrepresents the Rule of Parsimony - which is derived from Occam's Razor. He seems to believe it means "the simplest explanation". It doesn't. Basically it states plurality should not be assumed without necessity. Or, don't make stuff up. Or if you have to, make up as little as possible. Suppose I have a cat. One night, I leave out a saucer of milk, and in the morning the milk has gone. No one saw who or what drank the milk. Lets say there are two possibilities: 1. The cat drank it or 2. The milk fairy drank it Occam tells us to reject option 2. This is because option 2 requires us to invent an unnecessary entity - the milk fairy. It is an invention because we have no evidence that the milk fairy exists. And it is unnecessary because there is a plausible explanation that does not require a milk fairy - the cat. Note also that strictly speaking, both solutions are equally simple. The cat hypothesis is only simpler in that you haven't had to invent a new, unnecessary entity. Occam says that if you insist it could be the milk fairy, you have invented an unnecessary entity. And why would you do that? 1. Intelligent design posits a Creator. WHO created the Creator? -Evidence of a Creator boils down to implied design. That the universe was made for us, not that we evolved to live in the universe. Fine, if Earth was the only place in the universe. But seeing as how 99.9% of the universe in uninhabitable, there is nothing parsimonious about ID. It raises more questions. 2. Potentially observable? How? Hubble? Maybe if it were an alien species that seeded the earth, but seeing as you are stepping out of naturalistic explanations into the realm of supernatural - you are positing an impossibility (at least by the scientific method, which we are ultimately dealing with...). Parsimonious? Hardly. 3. Probability theory is treacherous. For one, you are making a common error - after the fact assessment of probability, which is unreliable without a very careful consideration of all possible alternate contingencies. Math is unique in its ability to bamboozle a lay audience, which helps explain why you find it so appealing. One important and often-confused aspect of this is the difference in Bayesian probability theory between prior and posterior (formally, a priori and a posteriori) probabilities. The prior probability is the probability of an event occurring without taking evidence into account, while the posterior probability is the probability calculated when subsequent evidence is observed and analyzed. For example, it is highly improbable that the winning numbers on a lottery ticket would be 1,2,3,4,5 -- and if it were, people would suspect chicanery on the part of the lottery company. But it is exactly as unlikely that the winning numbers should be 4, 16, 24, 26, and 31. Before the lottery is held, all winning combinations are equally unlikely -- but after the lottery concludes, it is obvious that some unlikely pattern must have been the winning one. For this reason, we cannot conclude that just because a proposed event that has already happened is unlikely, that the event itself did not occur and the proposed explanation is false. Similarly, in the first example, the fact that the origin of life might be wildly implausible does not in and of itself mean that it never happened. If life had not originated on our planet (through whatever means), no one would be here to discuss it. Therefore improbability by itself cannot refute an explanation of an event that has already happened. As Sherlock Holmes put it, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Law of parsimony test - invoking a God opens up much larger and more difficult questions to answer, God is enormously complex by definition. This is the fallacy of presumed design. When you jump to the conclusion that an ordinary object like a house or desk was designed by an intelligence, you are subscribing to a conclusion that provides the simplest and most likely answer. It is all to easy to try and draw analogies of ordinary observation to the biological world (or cosmic, depending on the question you are asking), but you end up creating many more problems than you solve. This is why it is very dangerous to assume that just because something in the natural world has the illusion of design, that the most reasonable explanation is design. How did the Universe come into being? Let's look at the observably evidence - * First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning. * Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted. * Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery. * Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins. Parsimony would suggest the Big Bang. Thank you. I will cite references in the last round due to lack of space.