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http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/
Hmm. To clarify my meaning:
Since anyone who applies Occam's Razor in the correct form will reject theism to start with, I strongly doubt that any such person has, in fact, wasted the time to actually work out whether the vast convolutions necessary to "rationalize" theism are ultimately made more or less simple by the introduction of a variant of multiple personality disorder into the theistic godhead.
So, I doubt anybody is actually in a position to say that unitarian theism is, in fact, simpler than trinitarian theism. A rational person would never spend the time and effort to work out which ridiculously convoluted theory is actually simpler, because he's already discarded both of them, and there's no point in debating which is more ridiculous. The irrational can't be trusted to do the reasoning correctly, and thus the rational can't leverage their results.
Therefore, it's optimal when making the case for rationality to avoid comment on trinitarianism. A rationalist is unlikely to actually be able to demonstrate it is actually inferior to unitarian theism, and he wouldn't get any benefit from bolstering the relative case for unitarian theism anyway.
Hm... this doesn't seem right. Let me take a stab at this.
What you're saying assumes that rationality - or such specific tools of it as Occam's Razor - get applied equally to everything. Theists are making this big salient mistake, and so we assume they make this mistake everywhere. Which is not how people work. Like you have overall successful people who happen to also be, say, creationists.
To say that everything in theism is equally worthless is the outside view: we can see the whole field is based on an undeservedly priviledged hypothesis, so to us everything in that volume of theory space is not worth distinguishing between. Like distinguishing between two conditional probabilities where the condition itself is extremely unlikely; not practically useful. But from the inside, where the condition is already granted - there's still bound to be some things that make considerably more sense than others. To deny that is to just say that you're not interested in the distinction (which is reasonable), not that it couldn't be made for good reasons.
I haven't studied it, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that theology, past the fact that it takes its theistic assumptions as a given, contained quite a lot of good thinking and that historically it contributed to our understanding of logic and valid reasoning. The reason I think so is that for long periods of time in history, becoming a clergyman was the main way of getting an education and getting to work on anything science-like, so at least some of the greatest minds in history were clergymen. Like Thomas Bayes. ;)
So I see a warning sign whenever aspiring rationalists dismiss theists as idiots.
(I'm probably failing to signal my allegiance to the tribe here ;) )
Taken out of context, my statement is too general, yes, and does look like the dismissing-theists-as-idiots thing, yes.
What I was saying was intended to be understood as "Those who accept theism can't be trusted to have correctly reasoned about the specific nature of the theos, because the very same influences that caused them to be theists are going to be inducing them to defend a specific theos whether it makes more or less sense than the alternative."
Given the tendency of people to put things in domains, I will, in fact, (reasonably) trust what a Vatican astronomer says about the Andromeda Galaxy, or a Creationist nuclear engineer says about Three Mile Island, et cetera. But the existence of a theistic deity and the nature of a theistic deity seem closely-enough related, domain-wise, that I won't trust a theist to tell me he's rationally evaluated whether God is One or Three, rather than rationalized it.
And, from my outsider perspective, I'm just not going to guess whether trinitarianism is more complicated, or if it just seems more complicated when you don't know what problems it solves. In physics, I trust that if the more-complicated-seeming answer of relativity didn't give better answers than the simpler-seeming Newton, physicists wouldn't use relativity. In theistic theology, I can't trust either proponents or opponents of trinitarianism to be giving me a rational evaluation as to whether the Trinity is an overcomplication or, overall, simplifies things.
Wouldn't having three deities instead of one be more complex by their interactions with one another? Even if they existed on separate planes of existence, they would have to all be exerting some kind of influence for them to be gods, no? And in their shared application of influence, would they not be interacting?