In Defense of Hitchens’s Razor

Abstract

In this chapter, I’m going to defend what has come to be known as Hitchens’s Razor, which he stated as follows: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” The point Christopher Hitchens was making is that miracle claims asserted without any evidence can be dismissed. Period! William of Ockham (1285‒1349) had previously articulated what is known as Ockham’s Razor, whereby “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” when it came to supernaturally caused miracles. According to Ockham, the best explanations are those that make the fewest assumptions, so simpler explanations are to be preferred over complex ones. This paved a pathway for modern scientific inquiry since the addition of supernatural entities adds unnecessary complexity into our scientific explanations.