Hardly anyone treats it as the only argument against religion, but for many people here it is a fully sufficient argument.
You just need to apply the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor) correctly.
Now a very weak way of applying it is as follows “In the absence of evidence of a deity, a hypothesis of no god is simpler/more parsimonious than the hypothesis that there is a god. So there is no god”. If that’s what you think we’re arguing, I can understand why you think it weak.
However, a much stronger formulation looks like this. “If there were a deity, we would reasonably expect the world to look very different from the way we find it. True, it is possible to hypothesize a deity who intervenes—and fails to intervene—in exactly the right way to create the world that we see, including the various religious beliefs within it. But such a hypothetical being involves so many ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses and wild excuses that it is highly unparsimonious. So we should not believe in such a being”.
Here are some examples of the ad hoc hypotheses and excuses needed:
A god creates complex livings beings, but chooses to create them in precisely the one way (evolution by natural selection) that would also work without an intelligent designer/creator. This happens to be a woefully inefficient form of design and creation; about the least efficient means possible.
In case that method might lead to some doubt about its existence and powers, the god then carefully hides all evidence of the method it used, by burying them in ancient rocks and deep inside the creatures’ DNA. Further, the god ensures that the creatures cannot even imagine the correct explanation for their existence until all the evidence is eventually dug-up and pieced together. Further, that they will fiercely resist the correct explanation when it is finally discovered. Instead they will infer creation by other, directly supernatural means, and hence come to believe in the god by erroneous reasoning.
The god is capable of inducing belief directly in its creatures, but doesn’t do so because it regards that as a violation of their free will. However it is happy to use other forceful means of inducing belief, such as early childhood indoctrination, constant repetition and ritual, strong cultural expectation and moral pressure, ostracism for disbelief, or even state persecution/coercion for disbelief. These are presumably NOT considered violations of free will.
Notwithstanding point 3, the god chooses to reveal itself directly to some of its creatures, but then chooses methods of revelation which are highly inconsistent between subjects, and indistinguishable from various forms of sensory illusion and mental illness. Evidences of these revelations are then arranged to be preserved imperfectly in oral accounts and eventually written up in unprofessionally-authored documents, rather than being preserved via more reliable recording methods.
Is all of that story impossible? No it isn’t.
Is it at all plausible? No it isn’t.
Does the principle of parsimony make us reject such a story? Yes, it does.
I’ll point out here that even in America, many theists accept evolution, but most believe in guided evolution, where the deity set the process in motion and then directed the course of evolution to the desired result. This doesn’t offer predictions that deviate nearly as much from our observations as the predictions of creationism, but our observations still contain a suspicious number of evolutionary dead ends, do-overs, and failures to use the best available evolutionary mechanisms (why couldn’t our evolutionary guide have given us eyes more like squid eyes?)
Hardly anyone treats it as the only argument against religion, but for many people here it is a fully sufficient argument. You just need to apply the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor) correctly.
Now a very weak way of applying it is as follows “In the absence of evidence of a deity, a hypothesis of no god is simpler/more parsimonious than the hypothesis that there is a god. So there is no god”. If that’s what you think we’re arguing, I can understand why you think it weak.
However, a much stronger formulation looks like this. “If there were a deity, we would reasonably expect the world to look very different from the way we find it. True, it is possible to hypothesize a deity who intervenes—and fails to intervene—in exactly the right way to create the world that we see, including the various religious beliefs within it. But such a hypothetical being involves so many ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses and wild excuses that it is highly unparsimonious. So we should not believe in such a being”.
Here are some examples of the ad hoc hypotheses and excuses needed:
A god creates complex livings beings, but chooses to create them in precisely the one way (evolution by natural selection) that would also work without an intelligent designer/creator. This happens to be a woefully inefficient form of design and creation; about the least efficient means possible.
In case that method might lead to some doubt about its existence and powers, the god then carefully hides all evidence of the method it used, by burying them in ancient rocks and deep inside the creatures’ DNA. Further, the god ensures that the creatures cannot even imagine the correct explanation for their existence until all the evidence is eventually dug-up and pieced together. Further, that they will fiercely resist the correct explanation when it is finally discovered. Instead they will infer creation by other, directly supernatural means, and hence come to believe in the god by erroneous reasoning.
The god is capable of inducing belief directly in its creatures, but doesn’t do so because it regards that as a violation of their free will. However it is happy to use other forceful means of inducing belief, such as early childhood indoctrination, constant repetition and ritual, strong cultural expectation and moral pressure, ostracism for disbelief, or even state persecution/coercion for disbelief. These are presumably NOT considered violations of free will.
Notwithstanding point 3, the god chooses to reveal itself directly to some of its creatures, but then chooses methods of revelation which are highly inconsistent between subjects, and indistinguishable from various forms of sensory illusion and mental illness. Evidences of these revelations are then arranged to be preserved imperfectly in oral accounts and eventually written up in unprofessionally-authored documents, rather than being preserved via more reliable recording methods.
Is all of that story impossible? No it isn’t.
Is it at all plausible? No it isn’t.
Does the principle of parsimony make us reject such a story? Yes, it does.
I’ll point out here that even in America, many theists accept evolution, but most believe in guided evolution, where the deity set the process in motion and then directed the course of evolution to the desired result. This doesn’t offer predictions that deviate nearly as much from our observations as the predictions of creationism, but our observations still contain a suspicious number of evolutionary dead ends, do-overs, and failures to use the best available evolutionary mechanisms (why couldn’t our evolutionary guide have given us eyes more like squid eyes?)