Occam's Razor and All

In the 80’s, I read an article about British archaeologists who had unearthed several Stone Age villages. Based on the foundations of the buildings left behind, they believed they knew how the villages were laid out and how the homes were designed. They knew where the hearths and the cooking areas were. They knew where the families slept.

One thing they couldn’t explain was a dip which occurred just inside the front door of every dwelling. They imagined all sorts of things, including a theory that the area was used for some kind of ritual used to greet the father figure when he returned home.

Eventually they built a Stone Age village, based on these excavations. They found families to live in them. They gave them the same kind of uncomfortable looking clothing that the Stone Age people had worn, the same kind of tools and farming implements and the same sort of animals, and left these families to live a Stone Age life.

After many months, the archaeologists returned and found the families thriving. Things were going really well. And much to their surprise, they found inside the front door of each dwelling a dip just like in the original villages. They were thrilled. They even imagined for one brief moment that their experiment had been so successful that the modern families had started practicing Stone Age rituals.

So they asked, what was the dip inside the front door?

And the new Stone Age families shrugged and said, “That’s where the chickens take a dust bath.”

I bring this up because I think we have a tendency sometimes to do the same kind of thing with our religious life. We take a small thing, a verse, a word mentioned and turn it into something more powerful than it is. We make doctrine out of one vague reference. We define sin by half a verse. We get all involved in words and puns and the “true” meaning of things. We play little number games. We make up rules and we decide who belongs and who doesn’t.

But none of that is important to our relationship to God. Our religious life should be defined by our relationship with God and very little else.



I like to operate in a sort of an Occam’s Razor version of religion. If you haven’t seen the movie Contact, Occam’s Razor is the scientific principal which says that if you have several hypotheses to a certain problem, the simplest one is probably the correct one. That chicken dust baths are more likely to be true than patron welcome home rituals.

My relationship with God, my religion, if you will, works best when it is as simple and pure as possible.



I know people who have taken Matthew 6:6 literally.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I usually use the Revised Standard Bible or God‘s Word, but for this verse, I had to use the King James version, so it would contain the word Closet.

They go home and build a prayer closet. Verses 1 through 5 are talking about not doing things just for show. 6:1 Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no regard from your Father in heaven. I don’t think that’s saying hide your piety, but don’t do it for show only.

I do not believe that 6:6 is saying go home and build a closet and sit in it to pray. For one thing, you should be praying all day long. But then again, I do a lot of praying in the shower. I am alone and usually undistracted and it’s quiet there. So I’ve sort of got my own prayer closet, which I can use if I want to.

I was recently accused of being an antichrist. Not the Antichrist. Not the big one. Just one of the ones spoken of in 1 John 2:18, As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. The finger wasn’t pointed at me, but the definition the man speaking gave of an antichrist was me.

He said that the antichrists walking among us are the ACLU and people who are liberal, progressive and broad minded. That’s me. Not the ACLU but the liberal, progressive, broad minded part. I also include tolerant and accepting.

At first I was very insulted. And then I thought, But I am not the Antichrist, or even an antichrist. And I know I am not because I talk to God, and He is happy with what I am doing. He tells me so.

I think that this man is not listening to God when he says these things, but listening to his own fears. I‘ve heard several people stand in pulpits and espouse ideas that are their own, particularly the preaching of politics, as if any idea they might have is divinely inspired.

I don‘t think God deals too much in specifics. We do. The Israelites surely did. They had whole books of them, Leviticus for one. I think God is more concerned with intent, with spirit, with the truth in your heart.

This fellow who called me the antichrist said we antichrists were watering down the church. And maybe from a certain perspective, Occum Razor and all considered, I am. And maybe that‘s uncomfortable for him. No prayer closets, no Us vs. Them, no ritual, no list of sins. Maybe he and others like him cannot operate that way. And that‘s okay.

I cannot operate his way. I like to think it’s because I am more highly evolved, but that’s probably just my intellectual ego.



We are all different and we have different needs, and God knows that.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 1 John 4:16