OCKHAM'S RAZOR AND THE GENESIS FLOOD

Anyone who has spent much time studying science or the philosophy of science is at least superficially familiar with Ockham’s Razor.  But what is it?  Well, you can read all about it in Wikipedia here, but the entry is 21 pages long, and it might test your patience.  It did mine, so I thought I would offer my own abbreviated version.

The principle was named for William of Ockham, an English Franciscan monk and philosopher who lived from 1287 to 1347 CE.  Although it bears Ockham’s name and he certainly supported and employed it, the principle predated him, and its initial formulation does not appear in his writings.  Ho hum.

OK, so much for history.  What are we talking about?  As originally stated, the principle provided (in Latin), "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate,” or in English, “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”  Clear?  Hardly.  A more modern—and understandable—version reads, “Among competing hypotheses, the one requiring the fewest basic assumptions should be preferred.”  A lot clearer, but what does that really mean and how is it used in practice?

First, Ockham’s Razor is not a “law of nature.”  It is not like, for example, Newton’s laws of motion or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It is not assumed to work in every situation.  Instead, it is a strategy for deciding between competing hypotheses when both are fully consistent with the set of facts on which the hypotheses are based.  It is a method that is not infallible but that has proven valuable as a guideline, at least on an initial basis, for choosing among rival theories or explanations.

Second, Ockham’s Razor does not state that the simplest explanation is to be preferred.  Rather, it provides that the basic assumptions underlying rival explanations for an observation are to be compared and the explanation that includes the least number of such assumptions is to be preferred.

An example might help.  I recall as a youngster attending a magic show at which the magician picked a young girl out of the audience, quickly put her into a hypnotic trance, placed her on a table, draped a cloth over her, and then appeared to cause her to levitate above the table just by waving his hands.  He then demonstrated that she was not being suspended by wires by passing a metal hoop around her body.  Probably all of us have seen this trick, either in person or on TV.

How do we explain the girl’s apparent levitation?  Two possibilities are (a) the magician employed trickery (wires) to make the girl appear to levitate and deceived the audience by how he moved the hoop around the girl, or (b) the magician had the power to suspend the law of gravity.  The “simplest” hypothesis would be that the magician possessed a power to overcome the law of gravity.  But, as stated, Ockham’s Razor is not about simplicity.  Rather, it is about fundamental assumptions.  Both explanations for the girl’s apparent levitation assume that there are laws of physics that generally apply, but the “magic” explanation requires an additional assumption—that the magician had a power to override the law of gravity.

OK, here’s a second example that’s a bit more complex.  For a young earth creationist (YEC), one of the important events in the early history of the world was the Great Flood described in Genesis.  For most YECs the Flood is just as much a part of history and just as real as, say, World War I.  Moreover, YECs consider the Flood to have occurred only some 4,500 years ago.  To survive skeptical scrutiny the Flood hypothesis needs to be consistent with what we observe in such fields as geology, paleontology, biology, and anthropology, and it needs to do that without resorting to a much longer time scale than the less than 10,000 years that YECs assign to the period of time since the events described in the creation story.

So how does the Flood hold up under Ockham’s Razor?  Not well.  Let’s consider just a couple of observations from the fields of physical geography and biology.  (There are many others to choose from.)

First, the Genesis narrative states that all of the land on earth was covered with flood waters.  But the fact is there simply isn’t enough water on earth to accomplish that feat, given the earth’s general topography.  The earth would need to be much “smoother” than it is currently, without the ocean depths or the mountain heights that we observe today, even if the highest mountain had been Mt. Ararat, where Noah’s ark supposedly settled when the flood waters began to recede.  Or water would have had to be added from somewhere and then taken away again.  Or there would have had to have been cataclysmic changes to the earth’s topography, raising mountains and increasing the depth of much of the oceans.  There is no credible evidence that any of these explanatory events took place.

Second, the manner in which fauna are distributed geographically is wholly inconsistent with the Flood narrative that describes all animal life as having been destroyed except for those animals on Noah’s ark.   So, according to creationist theory, all parts of the earth had to be repopulated with animals, presumably more or less in the manner they are now distributed, in the relatively brief period since the Flood.  Just ask yourself: Why did all the kangaroos wind up in Australia?  The same could be asked of all the other species that have limited and specialized geographical habitats.  How did the penguins make it to the antarctic once they got off the ark on Mt. Ararat in Asia Minor?  And why just the antarctic and not the arctic?  The latter would have been a lot closer.  I could go on and on.

OK, so how does this relate to Ockham’s Razor?  It needs to be kept in mind that one applies the heuristic only when rival hypotheses both account for all of the observed facts.  In this case, on a general scale, both the Great Flood and what I would refer to as the secular hypothesis need to account for the all of the observed facts.  How do the YECs reconcile the Flood narrative with observation?  They have to resort to special circumstances; that is, they have to invoke additional assumptions.

If there isn’t enough water to cover all the land on earth, then either God must have supplied additional water (and then taken it away again) or the earth’s topography must have been radically changed.  There is, of course, no evidence for either, so whatever mechanism YECs describe to accomplish this requires an added assumption.  If all the kangaroos wound up in Australia, then God must have directed them there, or the pair on the ark must have simply taken off in the direction of Australia and their progeny must have made it there, even though there is no evidence of kangaroo fossils or remains in other parts of the world and even though there are any number of other habitats between Mt. Ararat and Australia that would have served kangaroos just as well.

Essentially, to maintain the Flood hypothesis, its defenders must invoke additional assumptions.  I say additional because both the secular hypothesis and the Great Flood hypothesis assume that there are natural laws that generally govern the cause and effect events that we observe.  But YECs must make additional assumptions regarding Flood-related events, such as additional water or divine guidance in the geographical dispersion of various species.  Or they need to add the assumption that God orchestrated the entire process by overriding the laws of physics that would otherwise naturally have limited both the flood itself and the post-flood events.  In either case, acceptance of the Flood hypothesis requires additional assumptions not required by hypotheses based on generally accepted scientific processes.  Therefore, Ockham’s Razor would call for favoring the secular hypothesis over the Great Flood hypothesis.

Having said all this, Ockham’s Razor doesn’t prove that the Great Flood didn’t occur as described in Genesis.  As I said, it’s just a rule of thumb for evaluating competing hypotheses.  In this case it favors a secular hypothesis.  This represents a dilemma for YECs, so their solution is to look for observations that the secular hypothesis cannot explain, thereby rendering Ockham’s Razor inapplicable.  Thus YEC “scientists” spend their time looking for observations inexplicable under a secular hypothesis.  Oddly enough, it seems that only creationists find such observations.  Why is that?


© 2017 John M. Phillips