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† Yes, I know there are people who don’t think like that anymore – some of them are currently housing Anders Breivik in a rather luxurious treatment centre: 
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/a-different-justice-why-anders-breivik-only-got-21-years-for-killing-77-people/261532/

It decreased significantly after the political power in Western Europe became decentralized and Rome the city started to decline.  The new proto-feudal political leaders were not particularly interested in building or funding libraries and as a result thousands of ancient texts were never recopied and ended up being lost to history.

You may have a point about the “science-vs-superstition morality play” but let’s not ignore the real, factual basis for calling this a dark age.  Scholarship declined to almost nill; many of the ancient works we’ve recovered were essentially preserved by accident because Christian monks were obligated to copy texts they probably often couldn’t even read. 

The Romans were pretty superstitious in their own right but their engineering feats are a testament to some pretty reliable scientific knowledge and the decline of Roman infrastructure during the period in question suggests much of that knowledge was lost.    This was a period in which the at least nominally educated Romans were losing political power to Gallic and Gothic tribes who had their own superstitions without the benefit of Greek rationalist influences.  Again, “dark age” seems to fit pretty well.

This obviously leaves the puzzle of what is this space-time stuff and  why is it deformed by mass, but the point is that we do seem to have figured out a few things since William of Ockham wrote on cosmology.  We’re no longer positing anthropomorphic spiritual entities who just magically make the planets move.  Instead we have a relatively simple and elegant theory that not only models most gravitational effects as accurately as they can be measured but actually made really remarkable and implausible predictions that turned out to be true: black holes and gravitational lensing. 

So since you seem to think we’re about as sophisticated as monks postulating that planets must be pushed around by angels let me ask you: could the “angel theory of cosmology” be used to predict any phenomenon as zany and counterintuitive as black holes?  If not it seems to me that relativity has some real predictive power over and above the angel theory of cosmology.  Maybe relativity is actually a pretty good theory.  Maybe Einstein isn’t an overrated hack.  Who knows.

Incidentally, “dark age” usually refers to a period with no widespread scholastic or artistic movements.  I think you’d have some trouble applying the term to the 20th or 21st centuries.

Another way to think about this is if you decide to go with a geocentric model you have to bring back Ptolemaic epicycles — the other planets have horribly convoluted orbits in a geocentric model.  Far simpler to model them as orbiting the sun.

Take your rock example.  If we only have a grainy photograph then perhaps the simplest theory about the object is that it is a real rock.  But suppose we can actually touch the rock and discern that it is plastic as in your example.  That observation is evidence that should then inform any further theories about the nature of the object.  Those further theories should abide by Ockham’s razor, however — if the plastic is of a variety widely used on earth for making fake rocks then the simplest theory would be that this rock was man-made in a fake-plastic-rock factory.

Another way to say this: the effectiveness of Ockham’s razor is limited by the amount of evidence we have about the phenomenon about which we wish to theorize.  Yes, since we always have a limited amount of information this means that Ockham’s razor frequently fails.  That’s a feature, not a bug — that is how scientific methodology works.  Trial and error.  Guess and check.  Darwinian selection of ideas.

Let’s take your UFO example.  Currently, the state of evidence on UFOs is:
-no verified instance of a recovered craft
-no verified instance of a recovered extraterrestrial organism
-a whole bunch of grainy photographs and videos of lights in the sky
-videos that clearly depict plastic bags blowing in the wind (not even kidding, here)
-crop circles that are essentially all confirmed hoaxes
-a variety of very convincing arguments that the spacecraft described by UFOlogists would be easily detected by radiotelescopes, etc.
-usually uncorroborated eyewitness testimony (a much less reliable form of evidence than is usually believed)

Now if we wanted a theory to tie these bits of evidence together, Ockham’s razor would suggest that human error is the most likely explanation for ET spacecraft sightings.  This is not because we definitely know for certain that these sightings are in error but because so far the evidence doesn’t warrant any stronger conclusions.  When we get more evidence we may want to update this theory.  Again, this is just how scientific methodology works.  It’s not a conspiracy to suppress your secret knowledge or anything.

There you have it, The mind is pure machine. Free will is an illusion. 
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But mark this – atheists still go on getting angry at religious bigots as if they were actually responsible for their actions.

This is pure straw, Moody.  Materialist accounts of free will are much more sophisticated than your lame-brained “machines can’t have free will” line.  Are you misrepresenting materialism intentionally or are you merely ignorant?

Actually, I know what you’re trying to do — the standard neoscholastic strategy of substituting your intuition for solid philosophical analysis. Sorry, the nature of free will isn’t intuitively obvious. It’s cute how you guys always use unsolved problems as proof that God must be out there but you’d think you’d catch on to the unrelenting track record of failure for that strategy.

Before you start crowing about your victory maybe you should demonstrate how the notion that free will is physically instantiated in the brain contradicts the experience of free will itself? (Bear in mind that cold weather causes the subjective experience of coldness — that is, a cold body makes your mind feel cold — and this isn’t regarded as any kind of contradiction. The situation with free will doesn’t seem appreciably different to me — there’s the physical reality of it and the informational/subjective reality of it.) You may have to actually perform a rigorous analysis of free will to do this rather than relying on folk psychology to do all the work for you.

I rest my case.

While failing to make a point.  Your definition of “nothing” contradicts the uncertainty principle — by the laws of logic, either the uncertainty principle is false or your version of “nothing” is logically impossible.  (This isn’t even getting into the ontological difficulties of talking about the “existence” of “nothing” which is where you’re headed.)  The uncertainty principle has both a philosophical and an evidential basis behind it whereas your definition of “nothing” is simply a definition; no one can point to an instance of this sort of “nothing” in the real world.

Um, that’s what I was saying. That’s what the reference to fundamental particles and forces was about.

So you’re admitting that it’s logically possible for fundamental particles to be uncaused?

But it seems you make my point while refuting it. First you reject the idea that atheistic explanations explain things away – and then, in the case of free will, you go right ahead and explain it away:-
“ As for free will, there’s plenty of neuroscientific discoveries that suggest that the application of will is the result of neurological events, right down to the fact that a big EM field aimed at a brain can actually suppress the will.”
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There you have it, The mind is pure machine. Free will is an illusion. 
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But mark this – atheists still go on getting angry at religious bigots as if they were actually responsible for their actions.
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I’ll leave the rest for now.

But pick it up, and you find out it is a plastic ‘rock’, made by a factory.  The skeptics’ misuse of Ockham’s quote has FOILED the correct answer.  The correct answer  turned out NOT to be so simple, it was not the most obvious explanation.

Skeptics will argue that once we picked up the rock, we knew immediately that it was the simplest explanation that the rock is manmade.

Here is the rub: UFOs and other phenomena often present a very limited amount of data on themselves.  A pinpoint of light in the sky photographed can be any number of things.  That same craft landed on the ground and touched begins to imply the simplest explanation that it is man-made.  Step inside and meet the aliens running the craft, and now the simplest explanation turns out to be what?  Humans in alien suits running a gag?  Aliens?  A dream?

For this reason, I take skeptics SKEPTICALLY, they look for the convenient EXCUSE out and arrogate it to the status of ‘correct’ answer, then spread the potential lie.  

Given a God’s eye view of existence, we might then finally apply the false (not his original quote) Ockham’s Razor properly and it would WORK properly — given less information, we invariably make potentially false conclusions.

Your definition of “nothing” is also question-begging. If it’s not a logical contradiction for God not to be caused then there’s no basis for asserting that everything must be caused.

Nevertheless, it is precisely these that allow the theist to do justice to those parts of the universe that the materialist account invariably explains away: things like free will, morality, beauty and so on.

This is simply begging the question.  First of all, all atheist theories of mind attempt to account for these things, not “explain them away”.  Your characterization of materialism is entirely pejorative and does not take the arguments seriously. 

Second of all, theism doesn’t really “do justice” to these items at all.  Theism just assumes that there is something that accounts for them without bothering to do all the legwork of what God actually is or how God could account for free will, morality, beauty, or so on.  The idea of God is consistent with any set of facts, not only the facts we find to be true, so God is really an explanation for nothing at all.

Finally, materialism accounts for what we know about free will, morality, and beauty far better than theism does already.  Morality and beauty both seem to be highly subjective and dependent on personal life history — just as materialist theories of the mind would suggest.  As for free will, there’s plenty of neuroscientific discoveries that suggest that the application of will is the result of neurological events, right down to the fact that a big EM field aimed at a brain can actually suppress the will.

You’re entirely wrong on this.  God is the biggest possible assumption, an assumption that can explain any set of facts.  Such an explanation is not really an explanation at all.  GawainLavers was exactly correct on this score.

What I’m saying here is that Geocentric and Heliocentric are worthless from a philosophical perspective. They are just frames of understanding the same thing observed from a different standpoint. 

Yay philosophical wankering. 

What is a gravitational “pull?”

I’m not sure, but I’m pretty positive that it’s illegal outside of Nevada.