Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply (41)

You don't have to do accept anything. The premise of this discussion is whether or not science as an epistemological framework has anything to say about the god hypothesis.

If you want to reject science and all that science tells us about reality that is your call. What you don't get to do is have your cake and eat it to, by claiming that you can accept science but reject what it would say about your made up god.

The approach to parsimony I have presented isn't "mine" its how science works. You can see it Bayesian model selection, or in something as basic as a statistical significance scale (hint why does the difference score increase for the same p-value as our degrees of freedom increase?).

Now this principle can be used for model-free approaches, but the same basic idea that predictive power has to scale up with degrees of freedom to maintain significance applies.