Religious and Scientific Faith in Simplicity *

Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses that all equally explain the observations, the simpler hypotheses are more probable (Occam's razor or the law of parsimony). That is, explanations should be made as simple at possible (though no simpler, since then they would not explain what is observed).