Blaming William of Ockham for Everything Wrong

[Truthstalker]

I get the feeling some label him merely a victim of bad press. I don’t have time to wade through all his writings. Thanks to him, I get the impression some say, we have degenerate later scholasticism and so the (presumed) errors of Calvin, Luther et al, and because modern despair is rooted in subjective individualism, old Bill can be blamed for that as well.

Someone no doubt will come along and tell me I am simplifying things again. I think the above is indeed placing too much on the shoulders of one man, but how should he properly be regarded?

 

[Liberian]

Truthstalker,

I don’t think you should blame William of Ockham so much as you should blame the people who misapply his razor. Certainly once you have a sufficient explanation for something you should stop looking for further explanations, but among the things that need explaining are Fatima, the Resurrection of Jesus, and the Shroud of Turin. Also rational thought, basic morality, and free will. People who use Ockham’s Razor as evidence against the existence of God simply aren’t looking widely enough.

• Liberian

 

[Contarini]

Truthstalker,

When I first went to grad school I found this line of thought very annoying and was somewhat of a champion of Ockham. But I think there’s something in it–on the whole I find Servais Pinckaers’ critique in *The Sources of Christian Ethics *convincing, though of course there’s some over-simplification. Nominalism does seem to have led to an approach to the Christian faith based on legal technicality rather than on essence, and I think this lies behind both the distorted theology Luther rejected and the flaws in Luther’s own theology.

However, there are other independent factors to be considered, such as the growth of canon law. In many ways it sometimes seems as if the theologians and the canon lawyers were living in two different worlds in the later Middle Ages, and many of the things Protestants found most objectionable were coming out of canon law rather than theology.

Edwin