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146:, namely that "belief in God can be reasonable even if the believer has no arguments or propositional evidence on which the belief is based". The idea is that all beliefs are based on other beliefs, and some "foundational" or "basic beliefs" just need to be assumed to be true in order to start somewhere, and it is fine to pick God as one of those basic beliefs.
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Hitchens is attracted repeatedly to the principle of Occam's razor: that simple explanations are more likely to be correct than complicated ones. (E.g., Earth makes a circle around the Sun; the Sun doesn't do a complex roller coaster ride around Earth.) You might think that Occam's razor would favor
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And remember, miracles are supposed to occur at the behest of a being who is omnipotent as well as omniscient and omnipresent. One might hope for more magnificent performances than ever seem to occur. The 'evidence' for faith, then, seems to leave faith looking even weaker than it would if it stood,
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Academic philosopher
Michael V. Antony argued that despite the use of Hitchens's razor to reject religious belief and to support atheism, applying the razor to atheism itself would seem to imply that atheism is epistemically unjustified. According to Antony, the New Atheists (to whom Hitchens also
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devised a 'principle of economy', popularly known as 'Ockham's razor,' which relied for its effect on disposing of unnecessary assumptions and accepting the first sufficient explanation or cause. 'Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.' This principle extends itself. 'Everything which is
38:
regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.
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religion; the biblical creation story certainly seems simpler than evolution. But
Hitchens argues effectively again and again that attaching the religious myth to what we know from science to be true adds nothing but needless complication.
29:
that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence". The razor was created by and later named after author and journalist
92:
Jillian
Melchior in 2017, the phrase "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" was "Christopher Hitchens's variation of Occam's razor". Hitchens's razor has been presented alongside the
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alone and unsupported, all by itself. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the 'evidence' eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.
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Mr. Coffman cited Christopher
Hitchens's variation of Occam's razor: 'What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without'
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explained through positing something different from the act of understanding', he wrote, 'can be explained without positing such a distinct thing.'
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belonged) invoke a number of special arguments purporting to show that atheism can in fact be asserted without evidence.
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blogger
Rixaeton in December 2010, and popularised by, among others, evolutionary biologist and atheist activist
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that
Hitchens was rather fond of applying Occam's razor to religious claims, and according to
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outlined some common
Christian theological responses to the argument made by Hitchens,
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What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
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Why
Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges
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was created from a revision of this article dated 25 October 2019
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The
Politics of Trauma and Peace-Building: Lessons from Northern Ireland
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Razor") in an online forum in
October, 2007, and was used by
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after Hitchens died in December 2011. Some pages earlier in
626:. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic. pp. 16–17.
482:"Readers' tributes to Hitchens: The final day, with music"
53:. The term "Hitchens's razor" itself first appeared (as "
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Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
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Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
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Rixaeton's Space Adventures in Space and Other Places
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Rixaeton's Space Adventures in Space and Other Places
258: – Evidentiary standard for extraordinary claims
217: – A philosophical razor devised by Mike Alder
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General rule rejecting claims made without evidence
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47:The dictum appears in Hitchens's 2007 book titled
508:God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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364:God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
50:God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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453:"Correcting Hitchens' Razor to Hitchens's Razor"
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510:(Kindle ed.). Twelve Books. p. 119.
366:(Kindle ed.). Twelve Books. p. 258.
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568:"Inside the Madness at Evergreen State"
565:Melchior, Jillian (21 September 2017).
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400:. New York, NY: Twelve Books. p.
362:Hitchens, Christopher (6 April 2009).
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299:Oxford University Press
222:The Demon-Haunted World
86:The Wall Street Journal
785:Love, Poverty, and War
736:Prepared for the Worst
250:List of eponymous laws
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156:Listen to this article
34:. It implies that the
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486:Why Evolution Is True
390:Hitchens, Christopher
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954:Christopher Hitchens
852:The Portable Atheist
682:Christopher Hitchens
480:(25 December 2011).
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32:Christopher Hitchens
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845:Blaming the Victims
271:Philosophical razor
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536:"In God, Distrust"
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478:Jerry Coyne
103:New Atheism
101:within the
73:. In 2007,
63:Jerry Coyne
959:Skepticism
934:Principles
929:Heuristics
908:Categories
516:B00287KD4Q
372:B00287KD4Q
314:4 November
278:References
203:Audio help
194:2019-10-25
105:movement.
827:Mortality
639:21 August
546:21 August
491:20 August
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118:Criticism
55:Hitchens'
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820:Arguably
813:Hitch-22
392:(2007).
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43:Analysis
964:Eponyms
578:19 June
192: (
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919:Adages
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163:minute
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