[YuriNiyazov]

Not solely, but mainly. The following is by no means a iron-clad tight argument, but here goes.

When the concept of God is invoked, it is usually not precisely defined. In various interpretations, it is a life force permeating the universe itself, or a being that is benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, or a being that has a "personal guiding light" relationship to every individual human, or a force that was "the prime mover" that setup the conditions of the universe just right, wound up the spring and then let it go, and has never interfered since, or rarely.

So, we postulate the existence of an ill-defined 'thing' or 'being' that has multiple unrelated purposes: to establish an explanation to questions about physical reality which are unexplained by current scientific knowledge; to establish a moral society; to establish a system of personal ethics for an individual human; to establish a sense of security and purpose in an evil and impersonal universe. Mind you, in the most common statement, all of these postulates are untestable in principle, under the guise of "well, if it was testable, it wouldn't be faith, would it?"

So, Occam's razor, in its Wikipedia form, is that an explanation with the fewest new assumptions is usually the correct one. An explanation that requires assuming an entity with multiple qualities, where each one of those qualities is untestable in principle, fails with aplomb.

[aik]

How do you go about weighing assumptions? I imagine not all assumptions could be worth equally. What is that scale and how do you determine it? An interesting quandary also arises out of contemplating the weight placed on the assumption/belief whether Occam's razor is true in the first place.

[YuriNiyazov]

The belief that Occam's razor is true is based on its explanatory power when it is used in scientific exploration. Assumptions are weighed positively when they have predictive power, and belief in God has notoriously low predictive power.

[adamzap]

Interesting. Thanks for the response.

If one obtains answers to a number of questions (meaning, morality, afterlife, etc) by postulating the existence of God, is the nonbeliever exempt from having to answer those questions?

In pursuit of the answers, the nonbeliever must make new assumptions outside of simple nonbelief because simple nonbelief doesn't provide answers. Doesn't Occam's Razor then side with belief in God? I am not referring to simple belief in some higher power, but Biblical Christianity.

I believe that those questions (meaning, morality, afterlife, etc) are essential to a coherent worldview and are human questions rather than religious questions.

[YuriNiyazov]

The nonbeliever is not exempt from having to answer those questions. The reason that Occam's razor is on the side of the nonbeliever is because the nonbeliever's answers to those questions are unrelated: on the standard humanist worldview, how the universe was created (stuff that we don't know anything about but we hope the LHC will tell us) has absolutely nothing to do with what moral choices one makes in life (utility maximization). In other words, those two answers are "simpler" because they are not linked as compared to an answer that links the two by saying "well, God is responsible for those".