And why, I asked, is simplicity such an epistemic virtue?
"There are innumerable examples to illustrate this," he said, "and not just from science. A crime has been committed. A bank has been robbed. There are three clues. A chap called Jones was reported to be near the scene of the crime at the time of the robbery. Jones's fingerprints were found on the safe. Money from a bank robbery was found in Jones's garret. Plausible explanation: Jones did the crime. Why do we think that? Well, if the hypothesis that Jones did the crime was true, you would probably find such clues; and if it wasn't, you probably wouldn't. But there are an infinite number of other hypotheses that meet this dual condition – for example, the hypothesis that somebody dressed up like Jones as a joke and happened to walk near the bank; and another person, not in collusion with the first, had a grudge against Jones and put Jones's fingerprints on the safe; and a third person, having no connection to the previous two, put the proceeds from a quite different robbery in Jones's garret. That hypothesis also meets the dual condition for being true. But we wouldn't think much of any lawyer who put it forward. Why? Because the first hypothesis is simpler. Science always reaches for the simplest hypothesis. If it didn't, one could never move beyond the data. To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world." (p. 96)
While this line of reasoning was used to set up a rationale for the existence of God (i.e. the simplest explanation for how an universe that contains everything that it does is one that posits God), I was struck by some tangential explanations that can be found in Swinburne's last few sentences. The first is the "science always reaches for the simplest hypothesis." If this is in fact true, then could it be that in this grasping for the most concise and "simple" that scientists may dismiss the more complex and complicated explanations because they do not jive with held beliefs on the theories with the fewer dependent conditions being most likely to be most valid? In a perverse way, this could take Adolf Grünbaum's comments earlier in the book regarding complex theories not necessarily being the least valid and turn his non-theist conclusion on its head. (Mind you, this is a conclusion that in turn could be reached through a simplistic interpretation and not something that would refute Grünbaum's stance on the question of the origin of "something", if there can be such a thing as "origin.") Furthermore, for some, the possible resultant distrust in the conclusions reached by a methodological "scientific" approach can perhaps explain some of the rationale for views of the world, its prime movers, etc. that others might consign to the category of "conspiracy theories." Reductionism by some oddly seems to cause a reactive expansion of (im)plausible hypotheses and guesses on the part of others.
Curious to see if Holt's book will address these tangential thoughts of mine, because it seems to me so far that he's setting up a lot of metaphysical and theoretical physics pins for a giant bowling ball to come crashing down (or not) on them.