Special Guest Blogger: William of Ockham

Most people have heard of Occam's razor and explain it as 'The simplest answer's always right!' which ironically isn't right at all.
Firstly i was from Ockham in Guildford, Surry so where the Occam bit came from i have no idea and secondly the razor in question belonged to me and i was a Franciscan friar and a prominent philosopher and i would teach that as a rule of thumb, among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected as a starting point, or, and here is the razor bit, the extraneous information should be shaved away.
So let's say for example you notice that every time you put a bowl of nuts outside your door, it's gone an hour later. What accounts for this phenomenon? Well, maybe there's a hungry squirrel in your neighborhood. Or maybe your next door neighbor has a nut allergy and patrols his surrounding area to make sure nothing is left just hanging around which will kick off his allergies.
Obviously i would say, 'Y'know what, let's go with the Squirrel theory, because it has the fewest assumptions'. I'm not saying that the hungry Squirrel theory is right, it's just an obvious starting point where there is no evidence for one solution than another so it may turn out that your other neighbour really likes nuts and is nicking them to make a cake but the squirrel one is simpler and requires you to make the fewest assumptions about your neighbours.
Some of my other ideas included denying the right of the papacy to interfere with the affairs of states which brought me into conflict with the Church and saw me hauled before a Franciscan meeting in Avignon to defend my views which didn't go too well.
Somehow i ended up accusing the Pope of heresy and decided the best course of action was to flee Avignon and found refuge in the Holy Roman Emperor, who protected me whilst i was excommunicated but my theory did influence others.
St. Thomas Aquinas believed that Occam’s razor helped prove the existence of God. He suggested that the simplest theory about Earth’s creation was that God created it but Atheists now try to use my own theory to dismiss religion.
For them Ockham’s razor doesn’t cut it with God but in the debate of atheism against religion what's the simpler explanation, evolution over million of years or a man in the clouds creating the first couple who were enticed into eating an apple by a talking snake? Seriously, what's so hard to understand about that? Sheesh.