Bought Eureka. Came with free copy of The Times, which I threw away.
—earlier today on Twitter
So Stephen Hawking has discovered Occam’s Razor.
William of Ockham (can I call him ‘Bill’?) is the monk and philosopher to whom is attributed the aphorism entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Put another way, “if you can explain something one way, there’s no need to invent complications.” Or, if you like, “the explanation of natural phenomena should not invoke supernatural causes.”
Let’s invoke Isaac Newton:
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes.
The natural world can be explained in natural terms. This is a 700 year old principle. To claim that a Supreme Being is necessary to explain the fact of our existence is not simply damnably poor science, it’s shockingly bad theology, too.
It has ever been thus.
RPG, you should also read this response to the book; I imagine DC’s feelings mirrored your own after reading the book.
Bah! Humbug!
If the universe could spontaneously come into existence, then so could a supreme being.
🙂
I am surprised you threw away The Times because I think the front page banner headline and amount of page-space devoted to the story is very funny, and must be somewhat unusual (if not unique) for a headline in a newspaper.
I flicked through Eureka as for the past few fortnights I’ve either been away (one) or found Eureka has not been included with my copy of the print paper (the rest). Apart from the padding/Hawking book extract, my general reaction was “remains defiantly un-female”. (Admittedly I only spent two minutes on it so there may have been one or two XXs buried in there somewhere, suitably quarried away into a backwater.)
Of course, I should have written “As well as the padding…..” not “Apart from…”
The Times really is a grown-up version of The Daily Mail, though, isn’t it?
I could find precisely one XX in Eureka. There may have been another, but I didn’t see her. That, actually, was the reason I bought it in the first place, to see how badly they were doing (=’very’).
Let me re-phrase that for Maxine’s benefit.
The front page of today’s Times is a classic example of ‘Cylon in wheelchair says something we think will upset the punters.’
It’s hardly journalism.
When I was a lad the first rule of journalism was ‘Read The Papers’. Now, perhaps I’m a not really a journalist in the sense that I’m not a news reporter, but I no longer read any newspaper regularly. The only things I look at (I won’t go as far as saying ‘read’) are the weekend Grauniad colour supplement, and the comment section in the Torygraph, but even those arcane delights are beginning to pall. I get all such news as I need on the radio, rarely the TV, and on the web, all of which I treat as entertainment rather than information. It strikes me that most ‘news’ is there for readers to be titillated, or to revel in the misfortunes of others – in other words, no more than playground gossip, or the rituals in which baboons partake inasmuch as which they remove lice from one another. And I can get that any day of the week (in term time). Playground gossip, that is. Not baboons. Or lice, for that matter.
Maxine, I had a quick look at Eureka in the bath and it still felt very male. But then, we poor dears don’t have “astonishing ideas” so you can hardly blame them.