I hadn’t intended to write anything today, but I just had an encounter with something both brilliant and concise. When you find those two attributes in a single package, applause isn’t just appropriate; it’s damn near mandatory.
First, have a quote that’s rather popular among atheists:
“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen F. Roberts
Appended to that slogan is this summary of a particular pseudo-argument against belief in any god:
As a dear departed friend liked to say, “It has a certain syrup, but it doesn’t actually pour.” He had a way with words, even if most of us didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, much of the time. But enough of that. What do Roberts’s statement and the appended image actually contend? Do they concern themselves with anything factual or logical?
Of course not. They don’t offer an argument, but a rejection of argument. “These previous claims are substanceless; therefore all other claims that have certain specific similarities to them can be dismissed without examining the associated logic or evidence.” That looks a lot like “It never happened before, therefore it can’t happen.”
Now on to the good part:
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. If you don't keep your feet, you may end up regurgitating unhelpful slogans that obfuscate reality.
— Limit and Mind | Know the Times (@limitandmind) April 27, 2026
> The "absence of discriminating evidence" is the entire game. Taking me on this journey only gets us to where we already… https://t.co/8YKdXic0Fn
Allow me to repost the really striking portion, as I don’t want my Gentle Readers to stop short:
The "absence of discriminating evidence" is the entire game. Taking me on this journey only gets us to where we already were...evaluating the evidence for and against different god claims. Otherwise we are collapsing into the same boring mantra that we hear all the time "there is no evidence for god."
Parsimony is misapplied if explanatory power is not equal. If you hold that the universe is brute, as many atheists do, the theist has an explanatory advantage, and I don't have to believe Zeus is real or treat his claim of divinity as equally serious as the Christian God to get there. Which feeds into the next point.
All deities are obviously not in the same reference class. The slogan treats them as if they are. The Greeks never considered their deities to be the sufficient ground of their existence. Overall, I think it's clear how unhelpful to the conversation the slogan is.
When both atheists and theists are saying it's time to retire this one, it may be time to retire it and move on.
Extraordinary. I’m in awe.
I’ve ranted before about the widespread misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor, alternately known as the “Principle of Parsimony.” (Please read that earlier essay if you’ve forgotten.) The universe is decidedly not simple. We probe for simplicities beneath the complexities we can see, but we’re not guaranteed that the understratum is any simpler than the layer of reality we can perceive. That’s why we keep probing.
As the embedded tweet says, you cannot validly use “parsimony” to dismiss an explanation for a phenomenon without examining the evidence for it. It’s an especially egregious violation of logic to do so when no other explanation has demonstrated validity – even conditional validity. If we maintain that existence itself demands an explanation, we must be dispassionate in our consideration of any candidate explanations.
Even those atheists who claim that no explanation is required continue to probe. They seek to reach and know that understratum as avidly as theists seek to know God. That makes their militancy against theism, especially Christianity, particularly ironic. If they could accept that our explanation is no worse logically or evidentiarily than their “it just is” dogmatism, and allow us to go our own way, an awful lot of bad feeling could be avoided.
What’s that you say? You want to know why they can’t allow us to go our own way? I wish I knew. But ultimately, it’s irrelevant. We all believe what we prefer to believe. Our respective choices in that regard are a great part of what defines us.
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