Can you help us understand Occam's razor?

Do you think Islam, Judahism, and/or Muhammed (using razor)...

Not entirely. Most likely, it simply arose out of a more or less logical progression of thinking back farther until some general 'creation' concept indicated a primary single starting point. Perhaps that was even the origin of the 'razor' concept itself rather than using the 'razor' to arrive at that point.

The emergence of the Roman Catholic perspective of 'trinity' somewhat opposed the 'singularity' trend. In thinking about it, it does seem a little odd moving in that direction. That difference from Eastern Orthodoxy might have a 'razor' basis.

I suppose for ISIL it might simply come down to 'a single religion (ours) is correct'. A plausible consequence is the elimination of blasphemers. But then, who can account for all of the actions of individuals in any group of people?

Tom

Modern religions adopt symbols and practices from other religions to make their own. The triquetra, for example, was a pagan symbol long before the Christian Church adopted it and made it the symbol of trinity.

All religions are made up by man to explain what is not easily understood and to create a benevolent governance for control.

An interesting question which is now over a year old.

Occam was a minimalist who sought to explain things and in doing so leant heavily on Aristotle whose concept of reality was based on a notion of perfectness. The old "heavenly spheres" business. This idea of perfection lead him to his razor.

This sort of thing does not die easily. I have just listened to this years Reith lecture on BBC Radio 4 by Stephen Hawkins. The theme - black holes - had the usual conceptions : we don't know what is in a hole, things get crushed to nothingness, and so on and so forth.

It was Kip Thorne's student Jakob Berkenstein who first suggested that if you took a bunch of entropy and chucked it into a black hole it would disappear out of the universe contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. Thorne reported this to Hawkins who initially said so what? But it led him to think about holes, the event horizon and eventually evaporation, for which he is now famous.

But, he's still harping on about the fact that "information" gets lost and that somehow it mustn't. Now the research, which he is now following, seems to me to be along the same lines as Occam, namely a sort of perfection which one wants to find all over the shop.

I have never accepted this "singularity" in a black hole, the concept that gravity can be a sort of infinite all encompassing force. It strikes me as a bit too perfect, a sort of mathematical construction being imposed on nature. It has always ignored the particle aspect of matter, in particular the concept of quarks. It was Murry Gell-Mann who suggested in the sixties that there could be five membered quarks (we know of only three members), so why can't there be more that that? The problem is, it is not a pretty picture. But neither was the Copernican solar system model with ellipses instead of nice harmonic circles.

No, Occams Razor is a useful concept when thinking about things, but it is not a law that can be applied to resolve situations.