Maybe you could show me which comment you mean. What appearances? The appearance of the resurrected Jesus? If so, I've told you that it doesn't matter to me that Paul claims to have had a vision of the risen Jesus, nor it matter that the Bible claims that there were witnesses to a resurrection. Did you see those replies? I didn't see you acknowledge them or try to rebut them.
Criterion for what? Belief? It's not a criterion for belief and doesn't claim to be. Like all razors, it's a method for ordering hypotheses, not for deciding among them. Maybe this will help:
He: "you want to discuss a statement about using occam's razor to dismiss prophecy, as if occam's razor is a reason that prophecy is not true. But you're the critical thinker."
Me: "You misunderstood. Occam's razor is the reason the best explanation for the existence of biblical prophecy doesn't include a god - a complication that while logically possibly the source of the prophecy, isn't necessary to account for its very human-appearing words. No offense intended, but you probably shouldn't be mocking thinking you haven't mastered and don't appear to recognize.
"Focus on the precise meaning of the words you read and resist the temptation to transform them into something you assume they mean before looking at them more closely. I have never said that the prophecy was true or false. I have said that it doesn't suggest transhuman prescience. Those are different ideas. And Occam's Razor dismisses no possibilities. Like all statements called razors, it orders possibilities. Hitchens' Razor says that that which can be offered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Sagan's is similar: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Neither says that the claims are wrong, just not justified, and so, not to be accepted as correct.
"We have one in medicine that says that if you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras, where horses refer to diagnoses that are commoner and zebras rarer things, and is roughly the equivalent of the duck razor: "If it looks like a duck, etc.." Popper's razor refers to falsifiability, and places unfalsifiable statements at the bottom of any list of things to investigate without calling them wrong."
No. You apparently got that from something I wrote. You don't seem to understand what the razor says. It's not looking for the explanation with the least amount of complexity, which may be an insufficient hypothesis for its failure to account for some observation, but the simplest explanation that DOES accounts for all relevant observations. A falsified claim is one that has been successfully rebutted.
Are you familiar with Ptolemy's epicycles for explaining the retrograde motion of Mars in his geocentric model, where from earth, Mars appears to move in one direction, reverse direction for a while, and then reverse again? It adds considerable complexity to his model. To keep the earth in the center and the other planets orbiting about it, he added these phantom movements that had planets orbiting around nothing and the earth simultaneously:
But put the sun in the center as Copernicus did, and watch what happens. The paths of the planets are greatly simplified. That's parsimony. A simpler mathematical treatment is a preferred one:
Once again, you demonstrate that you don't understand what Occam is calling for. It's not about how many ideas can be "explained" with a hypothesis. All relevant observations need to be accounted for by every hypothesis. Naturalistic hypotheses also account for all of that but do so without invoking a supernatural realm. Both can account for all of that, but one does so with fewer assumptions about reality.
How about ordering these in terms of likelihood:
1. The dog is missing because somebody left the door open.
2. The dog is gone because your angry ex-girlfriend took it to make you suffer.
3. The dog is gone because a cartel broke in, took it, and intends to ransom it.
4. The dog is gone because extraterrestrials beamed it up for an anal probe.
5. The dog is gone because Odin teleported it away.
You know the order. It's as listed from most to least likely, but do you know why? It's because each new answer requires something extra be true. For 1 to be true, all that's necessary is that a door was opened. For 2, we need the ex-girlfriend to be willing to commit crimes. For 3, we need to have been a target of some unseen dog-nabbing cartel that may not exist. For 4, we need for there to be an advanced technological civilization to have visited earth recently. And for 5, we need supernaturalism and Odin to exist. We can add even more unnecessary complication. Odin sent the extraterrestrials at the request of the angry ex, but not until his wife nagged him for a while at the behest of her mother because Odin had offended her. Let's add more unnecessary detail, shall we, or do you get my point? The simplest explanation that requires the least variables be true is most likely the correct one (preferred one).
Error as an explanation refers to people witnessing something that they mistook for a resurrection, but can also include gullibility or suggestibility. It's a category along with fraud (deliberate dissembling, mythmaking).
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