Is A Materialist View Less Parsimonious?

Two things about that:

1. If you are going to count every transitional as a separate assumption then by the same token we ‘materialists’ can easily trump you by saying that in your creation story God put every atom in the universe in its place. I’ll let you figure out for yourself the number of assumptions this would entail if we allow the use of this, frankly, silly kind of reasoning. Which we won’t, so you’re off the hook.

2. Although the fossil record is necessarily incomplete, many - indeed very many - transitionals have been found. They are not assumptions, they are actual facts of reality. And by induction, a technique you seem to be so fond of, we can conclude that transitionals must have existed for every pair of closely related species we care to think of, especially so if we consider the logical implications of the principle of evolution: imperfect replication under natural selection.

You don't get the point I was making. It's silly to count the number of transitionals as so many assumptions, just as it is silly to count every arrangement of atoms in God's supposed creation as such. That's why I dismissed these arguments. If you keep using this kind of reasoning we might have to upgrade the qualification of 'silly' to 'disingenuous'.

Less silly would be to count the phenomenon of transition between species as one assumption, and God's handiwork as another. And since there's no credible evidence for the latter and lots of evidence for transition, it's one-nil for materialism in the great game of Parsimony.

If it is, then why doesn't man, the supposed pinnacle of God's creation, have it?