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Updated: May 5, 2025
So obvious, indeed, is this inference, that to resort to any supernatural hypothesis to explain the diverse properties of the various chemical elements appears to me a most glaring violation of the law of parcimony as much more glaring, for instance, than the violation of this law by Paley, as the number and variety of organic species are greater than the number and variety of chemical species.
If it is said that the theistic aspirations of the human heart, by the mere fact of their presence, point to the existence of a God as to their explanatory cause, I answer that the argument would only be valid after the possibility of any more proximate causes having been in action has been excluded else the theistic explanation violates the fundamental rule of science, the Law of Parcimony, or the law which forbids us to assume the action of more remote causes where more proximate ones are found sufficient to explain the effects.
Consequently, the validity of the argument now under consideration is inversely proportional to the number of possibilities there are of the aspirations in question being due to the agency of physical causes; and forasmuch as our ignorance of psychological causation is well-nigh total, the Law of Parcimony forbids us to allow any determinate degree of logical value to the present argument.
For, as we have already seen, the law of parcimony forbids us to ascribe "the phenomena of conscience as a dictate" to a supernatural cause, until the science of psychology shall have proved that they cannot have been due to natural causes.
In deciding this question, just as in deciding any other question of a purely scientific character, we must be guided in our examination by the Law of Parcimony; we must not assume the agency of supernatural causes if we can discover the agency of natural causes; neither must we merge the supposed mystery directly into the highest mystery, until we are quite sure that it does not admit of being proximately explained by the action of proximate influences.
Indeed, it is these very feelings which, in the absence of any proof to the contrary, must be concluded, in accordance with the law of parcimony, to have generated this idea of God as "holy, just," and good.
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