Not really Hitchen’s best argument.

Potential Theist I'm not so sure it's a bad argument. It seems like a straightforward application of Occam's Razor. The two simplest options are that religions converge on the same truth (pluralism) or that religions all diverge from the truth (atheism). Occam's Razor obviously favors the latter.

Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins Potential Theist Replace the word religion with science and evaluate

Since it is impossible that all scientific theories are true, then we should entertain the idea they are all wrong.

It would be nonsense

Layne Wallace Potential Theist I agree that would be a bad argument, but only because scientific theories have other explanatory virtues like explanatory power. Those are relevant, non-simplicity considerations which differ between religious and scientific explanations.

Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins Layne Wallace Potential Theist Are you suggesting that religions do not have any explanatory virtues beyond simplicity? I can't see why that would be. They do, of course, also have explanatory power. Some of what they explain is of a different kind than empirical observations, but since when have humans +

Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins Layne Wallace Potential Theist only cared about explaining observable, quantifiable phenomena?

I think this is a really awful argument. When there are competing theories, there is no sense in which the occurs razor just obviously favors rejecting all of them.

Dolores G. Morris Layne Wallace Potential Theist I'm not so sure about that. There is an obvious sense in which Occam's Razor can shave away astrology explanations. When Laplace (allegedly) quipped to Napoleon that 'he had no use of that hypothesis,' I think that was an appeal to Occam's Razor too.

x.com/SpeedWatkins/s…

Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins Layne Wallace Potential Theist The tricky thing about invoking Occam's Razor is that it so often involves a judgment about which explanandum are essential, & which are disposable. (Even Kim says as much!) The result is not really a comparison between 2 explanations of the same set of explanandum. I think +

Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins Layne Wallace Potential Theist this is especially true here. (Religion vs science--when framed as competing explanations. But to be clear, I don't actually see these things as competing! More often as complementary.)

Got to teach now. I can come back.

Dolores G. Morris Layne Wallace Potential Theist I would concede everything here. Religious hypotheses do not need to be formulated as explanations of observable phenomena, and simplicity is not a decisive theoretical consideration, rather, it's a much more nuanced consideration. Hitchens (mistakenly) treats it as decisive.

Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins Dolores G. Morris Potential Theist What Hitchens misses, I think, is that competing, mutually-exclusive claims are part of almost every discipline.
Psych:
Freud, Behavioralism, Cognitive Psych, Socio-biology...
Econ:
Keynes, Smith, Friedman
Physics:
Quantum, String
In other words a diversity of theories...