Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam’s Razor. The hypotheses “Always comes up heads” and “always comes up tails” and “always lands on the edge” are all already on the reject pile when you’re trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the “HTTHHT” sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being simple.
Indeed, if you’ve only got one hypothesis that fits, it’s still too soon to apply Occam’s Razor, except informally as a heuristic to encourage you to invent another hypothesis because your existing one looks excessively complicated. Only after you’ve got more than one hypothesis that fits the “HTTHHT” sequence can you actually use any formalization of Occam’s Razor to judge between those hypotheses.
It occurs to me that Trinitarianism and similar are likely best explained as the theological equivalent of wave-particle duality.
Does light really sometimes behave like a particle and sometimes behave like a wave? Probably not. More likely there is some underlying, unified behaviour that we simply haven’t figured out yet due to limited data and limited processing power.
Similarly, when trying to comprehend and describe an infinite… something-that-has-intent, with a finite human mind and viewpoint as your only tool, there are likely going to be some similar bits of weirdness. God in three persons? More likely you have a “blind men and the elephant” situation. Only this elephant is too big to ever see more than a tiny piece of it at a time, and too mobile to know for certain that you’ve found the same part of it to look at twice in a row.
So you could easily have a case where the Unitarians are technically more correct about the overall nature, but the Trinitarians have a better working description.
This says nothing about whether Theism as a whole is the most correct explanation for the observed phenomenon. Just note that the “practical explanation that mistakenly comes to be thought of as the way things really are” is hardly limited to Theology, and I highly doubt theologians are measurably more likely to commit this error than anyone else. The very reason that you have to use placeholder tokens for thinking about concepts that can’t fit in your brain all at once leaves you susceptible to occasionally forgetting that they’re just placeholders.
Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam’s Razor. The hypotheses “Always comes up heads” and “always comes up tails” and “always lands on the edge” are all already on the reject pile when you’re trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the “HTTHHT” sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being simple.
Indeed, if you’ve only got one hypothesis that fits, it’s still too soon to apply Occam’s Razor, except informally as a heuristic to encourage you to invent another hypothesis because your existing one looks excessively complicated. Only after you’ve got more than one hypothesis that fits the “HTTHHT” sequence can you actually use any formalization of Occam’s Razor to judge between those hypotheses.
It occurs to me that Trinitarianism and similar are likely best explained as the theological equivalent of wave-particle duality.
Does light really sometimes behave like a particle and sometimes behave like a wave? Probably not. More likely there is some underlying, unified behaviour that we simply haven’t figured out yet due to limited data and limited processing power.
Similarly, when trying to comprehend and describe an infinite… something-that-has-intent, with a finite human mind and viewpoint as your only tool, there are likely going to be some similar bits of weirdness. God in three persons? More likely you have a “blind men and the elephant” situation. Only this elephant is too big to ever see more than a tiny piece of it at a time, and too mobile to know for certain that you’ve found the same part of it to look at twice in a row.
So you could easily have a case where the Unitarians are technically more correct about the overall nature, but the Trinitarians have a better working description.
This says nothing about whether Theism as a whole is the most correct explanation for the observed phenomenon. Just note that the “practical explanation that mistakenly comes to be thought of as the way things really are” is hardly limited to Theology, and I highly doubt theologians are measurably more likely to commit this error than anyone else. The very reason that you have to use placeholder tokens for thinking about concepts that can’t fit in your brain all at once leaves you susceptible to occasionally forgetting that they’re just placeholders.