Occam's Razor

The debate (if it can be called that) about Intelligent Design is raging through cyberspace, but I can't find many people who are willing to look past this discussion to the next one. Buried deep within today's controversy is a bigger one that nobody wants to deal with. It is the clash between one invisible God and many invisible universes.

If today's materialists were willing to examine the evidence, they would have to admit that there are "gaps" in the materialistic explanation of what we see. These gaps include the following:

• Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Why is the universe as orderly as it is, instead of a chaotic fog of particles?
• Why do the fundamental physical constants make carbon-based life possible?
• How did the first self-replicating molecule take shape?

If we could find a satisfactory answer for each of those questions, materialism as we know it today might be intellectually satisfying. As it is, however, today's materialists must skip over the really big questions to get to the ones they have answers for.

The most satisfying materialistic answer that I have found is in the notion of a "multiverse." This theory proposes that there are countless alternate and/or parallel universes that we cannot detect, and that the sheer number of such universes overwhelms the improbability of life in a materialist monoverse.

But the notion of countless invisible universes forces us to take a good hard look at Occam's Razor, the rule of thumb that leads us to choose the simpler of any two competing theories. One should not "multiply the essences" needlessly, William of Ockham insisted, and so should choose the theory with less moving parts, so to speak.

But which theory is simpler: a materialistic multiverse, with countless invisible universes, or a theistic monoverse, with one invisible God?