he razor with which I am most familiar is Ockham’s Razor. This useful instrument cuts through academic bagginess with the principle that “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”. It means that a simpler hypothesis is preferable to a complicat
Tthe other. It seems to me neater to say that, given that the cosmos has been made rightly and truly, oxygen must always behave with its familiar properties.
Luckily Ockham made a distinction and said that nature behaves reliably, and so does morality, because God has promised they will. Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009), the admirable Polish patriot and fellow of All Souls, once wrote a book with the blunt title God Owes Us Nothing. This is true, yet I’d say that morality is not arbitrary but is the best way for a human being to behave as a human being. God rewards that. Ockham says God could let the bad into heaven and keep out the good if he wanted. Wittgenstein said something similar about God and red-headed people.
The funny thing is that by the 15th century Nominalism (as his teaching
about universals was labelled) and the notion of God’s arbitrary power both appealed to leading schools of thought.
For good men, such as the theologian Gabriel Biel (1425-95), this meant that one just had to hold fast to the teaching that God had revealed. Biel wrote (as was customary) a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, of a solid kind, and a commentary on the Canon of the Mass that upheld traditional belief in the real presence and in the Mass as a sacrifice.
Biel is blamed or praised for influencing Martin Luther, but I doubt he can be held responsible. Details may be found in a chapter of Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation by Francis Clark.