Keith: Let me try a deliberately "naive" response to ECREE and the Resurrection, to see what you think. How extraordinary was the resurrection, really. OK, people don't walk out of their tombs in the ordinary course of events. But this guy wasn't an ordinary guy. He healed lepers and paralytics. In fact he healed ten lepers at once, so much for the idea that miracles can't be repeatable. He multiplied loaves and fishes. He walked on water. He withered the fig tree. He raised Lazarus. He turned water into wine. Nature did funny stuff when he was around that it doesn't do when he's not around, except maybe when his first-century followers were around, who did a lot of the same stuff he did, as recorded in the Book of Acts. From that evidence base, the darned resurrection looks almost what you should expect. You could almost write out the laws of supernature and make a prediction. If the disciples hadn't been looking for some sort of political deliverance, they could have been confidently waiting for it to happen.
Of course, I am responding to Parsons, and he doesn't believe that any of those other events happened either. But is ECREE a principle that is supposed to be used by everyone, not just naturalists? Doesn't it beg the question in favor of what naturalists believe in order to insist that theists have the same negative priors for something like the resurrection that naturalists use?
Is there a non-belief-system relative standard for extraordinariness? I don't think so.
44 comments:
"Doesn't it beg the question in favor of what naturalists believe"
No, it favors an evidence based approach to claims. Suppose I say that pigs can fly. That may seem like an extraordinary claim. However, I then say that this is quite normal since in may backyard, the laws of gravity are different and anything can fly and a flying pig is no more out of the ordinary than my floating dog house. At this point, one would ask for evidence for this claim.
Without evidence, both claims are unsupported and, therefore, not believable. Adding a second extraordinary claim may take the focus off the original claim, but it does not make the original belief any more rational. If you don't support the second claim, your case is not a smidgen better.
OK, but how do you figure out what the base line is, so that you know how much evidence is needed for what. When I consult my own personal experience, I've got some stuff in there that I am not sure I can account for naturalistically. Is one's personal experience the base line?
Except people who believe in the resurrection have evidence, and what makes a claim 'extraordinary' is part of the point Victor is getting at. Further, it's not as if Victor and others don't argue for theism.
Further, you are making an assumption that you know what is extraordinary. That's what I'm questioning.
What if I were to report, right here, that I saw a flying pig. I think, by my reactions to various questions about my experience, you could have convincing evidence that something very unusual had happened to me which is difficult to explain.
"Doesn't it beg the question in favor of what naturalists believe"
No, it favors an evidence based approach to claims. Suppose I say that pigs can fly. That may seem like an extraordinary claim. However, I then say that this is quite normal since in my backyard, the laws of gravity are different and anything can fly and a flying pig is no more out of the ordinary than my floating dog house. At this point, one would ask for evidence for this claim.
Without evidence, both claims are unsupported and, therefore, not believable. Adding a second extraordinary claim may take the focus off the original claim, but it does not make the original belief any more rational. If you don't support the second claim, your case is not a smidgen better.
“OK, but how do you figure out what the base line is, so that you know how much evidence is needed for what. When I consult my own personal experience, I've got some stuff in there that I am not sure I can account for naturalistically. Is one's personal experience the base line?”
I suppose the base line would be your experience, or more pertinent, your body of knowledge. This would make the criteria for extraordinary experiences “subjective,” since it is dependent on your level of education (formal or informal). Suppose that you or someone with a degree takes a trip through the Amazon and visits some tribes that have never had outside contact. Someone with a university education would be more informed about the world and, therefore, they would be less likely to find certain notions to be extraordinary. You would know more about medical scenarios, more about weather patterns, more about our biases, more about extracting information from data, not even to mention notions like special relativity, etc. If you told them about some of this stuff and they found it to be implausible, asking “how do you know this?” it would be your duty to provide them the evidence even if you think that they are ordinary.
“Further, it's not as if Victor and others don't argue for theism.”
And? Arguing for something is irrelevant. People argue that astrology or homeopathy works, but that doesn’t change the fact that neither has supporting evidence. Arguing from ignorance, anecdote, etc. doesn’t impress me, but it apparently impresses some people. Just because some people are willing to argue about something ad nauseum doesn’t give it any more credibility.
But I think another problem is coming up with some idea of what real evidence would look like. There is a sense in which I agree with the ECREE thesis, it is just that I don't believe that there is any objective way of proving that one set of antecedent probabilities is rational and another is not.
I think that as you pull at the story of the founding of Christianity, as you play out the various scenarios all the way through, you end up thinking that none of the scenarios for what might have really happened fit the facts very well. They run into factual brick walls of one kind or another. The Christian story, IF you can get over the initial antecedent improbability of the miraculous, makes more sense of it that any other story does. I think there is no logical proof that a miracle cannot happen, since it is possible that God exists, and God is omnipotent. Further, I think that this miracle is one that God would have a fairly understandable reason to perform. So, given my prior probabilities, the evidence lifts the case for the resurrection at least over 90%. But I can't prove the someone else that they shouldn't have priors so low for the Resurrection that it never gets above 10 for them. Both can be rational, and that's just life in the big city. (I also don't think salvation is a matter of passing a theology test). If you don't believe in the Resurrection, then I think there are a bunch of inconvenient facts out there that are hard to make sense of. But I think every philosophy has to deal with inconvenient facts.
There's not much to comment on there...You basically said that you can't think of a good natural explanation for a certain set of unstated claimed facts and since God is not out of the question, then surely he is the answer. No wonder you sidestepped my point about failing to come up with a natural explanation, since that pretty much sums up your comment. Sorry, but I will not consider an appeal to ignorance to be rational.
The Historical Argument for Christianity is certainly not an argument from ignorance. Lydia McGrew gives the example of a cloud of dust that does not disperse as scientific knowledge predicts it would. We would not infer an "agent explanation" as (i)there is nothing in that cloud that an agent would value and (ii) this is not the sort of event that agents frequently produce.
However (i) there is much in the Resurrection that a rational agent would value and (ii) the Resurrection reveals valuable information about God; and communicating information is something that agents typically do.
Graham
As for "extraordinary evidence" - this is precisely what the apologist claims to have.
Because "extraordinary" is such a vague term, it seems that the sceptic can simply keep saying "well, it's not extraordinary enough".
Some discussion of priors is needed. Because it seems to me that the sceptic can just arbitrarily reduce the prior probability of a miracle to exclude any amount of evidence that provides evidence for a miracle.
This is armchair theorising.
As for naturalistic explanations:
In the 17th and 18th Century rationalist explanations for Jesus' miracles abounded. So Bahrdt could explain the Feeding of the 5000 as an Essene plot, with Essenes secretly located in caves to hand out loaves to Jesus' disciples. Jesus' walked on water by placing planks just below the surface (near the shore presumably!) When Jesus said "be calm" he was addressing the disciples. By chance, the storm calmed down soon after this command. And so forth.
Now Strauss rejected these explanations as more improbable than miracles. So he used the category of myth to explain the miracle stories. Ever since the unspoken principle seems to be that explanation by a conspiracy theory is no more plausible than an explanation by a miracle.
However, rationalist explanations are allowed for the Resurrection. Ehrman advances these in his debate with Craig. He is more cautious than the rationalistsm and merely insists that it is more plausible than the Resurrection, not that it is historicaly probable. Any non-miraculous explanation must be more probable than a miraculous explanation in Ehmran's view. But that seems to fly in the face of the consensus of historians from Strauss onwards. In any case, it is revealing that mainstream scholars will fly back to H.E.G Paulus to explain the Resurrection traditions, but not the feeding of the 5000 or the calming of the Storm?
After all, if we can allow that some conspiracy or coincidence lies behind the Resurrection traditions, then why not Jesus walking on water, or the exorcism of Legion? If we can use psychological explanations for the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, why can't we use them for the nature miracles?
Graham
The point being, the "nature miracles" are generally considered to be too extraordinary to be anything other than pious fictions.
But the evidence for the Resurrection appearances is so good that scholars fall back to "hallucination" etc. to account for those experiences.
But when they do this they are being inconsistent. They would not accept this sort of explanation for the traditions behind the feeding of the 5000, or the Calming of the Storm. When explaining these text's, the principle seems to be it's either a case of myth or miracle.
Graham
Sceptics were forced to move from questioning the eyewitnesses' interpretation of what they saw to questioning whether we have the testimony of eyewitnesses at all.
But this option seems unavailable in the case of the Resurrection accounts. There are too many embarrassing details, there is too much independent attestation, the accounts differ too much from the kerygma.
Graham
Sceptics were forced to move from questioning the eyewitnesses' interpretation of what they saw to questioning whether we have the testimony of eyewitnesses at all.
I do indeed question whether the gospels were written by actual eyewitnesses. I believe that it can be shown that the gospels are literary constructs that were written to further certain theological points. I will concede that something unusual must have happened to spark the belief in the resurrection of a Galilean preacher, but it may have simply been a perfect storm of somewhat implausible natural occurrences that led to the birth of a wildly popular new religion. It's possible that one or two of Jesus' followers had visionary experiences following his death; and as the story was told and retold it began to snowball, accruing legendary embellishments with every retelling until the stories were finally "locked in" by the authors of the canonical gospels.
...or maybe Jesus really did beat death? We can never know with any certainty. You either have faith that it happened or you don't.
" I believe that it can be shown that the gospels are literary constructs that were written to further certain theological points."
Yes, that it true. However, what you miss is that the Gospel's clearly believe that their "theology" is empty if these events did not happen. Christianity is a historical faith. So the Gospel writers make an effort to get their history right.
" It's possible that one or two of Jesus' followers had visionary experiences following his death"
In which case the stories would have centred on Jesus 'translation' to heaven, or visions of Jesus angel. "Resurrection" would never have entered the picture.
"as the story was told and retold it began to snowball, accruing legendary embellishments with every retelling"
(i) studies of oral cultures show that this is a naive picture. In fact, oral cultures tend to be quite conservative.
(ii)as the story 'snowballed', "Resurrection" would become less and less likely to be invoked as an explanatory category. The church grew in Hellenised cultures. In a Palestinian and Hebrew culture would "Resurrection" meant more and would be less embarrassing.
(iii) the story of the guard at the tomb responds to a Jewish polemic - the apostles stole the body. It is impossible to see why the Jewish authorities would produce such a polemic unless the apostles preached a physical Resurrection from the beginning.
So we can rule certain scenarios out using historical methods.
Graham
"I do indeed question whether the gospels were written by actual eyewitnesses."
This isn't the issue. The first question is "do the Gospels (and 1 Corinthians) contain eyewitness testimony"? In the case of the women's testimony to the empty tomb, and the testimony of the Apostles to seeing the risen Christ, I think the answer is "yes".
The second question is "do the other traditions in the Gospel go back to eyewitnesses?" Again, the answer seems to be- mostly- "yes". Jesus teachings would have been memorised, just as any other Rabbi's would. His deeds would have remembered by his followers as his identity was essential to their identity.
Graham
"You either have faith that it happened or you don't."
You can have sufficient evidence to believe, yet lack the courage or commitment to believe. The Gospels often discuss this type of doubt. However, I don't think this is what you are alluding to. I think that you mean "blind faith".
As it happens I do have a fairly blind faith in certain parts of the Gospels - (assuming that I cannot cite religious experience and insight as evidence). The historical evidence for, say, the calming of the storm or the ascension, is very slender. It would not overturn the presumption against miracles.
However, I believe that the evidence for, say, the Resurrection, that Jesus taught that he would reign as YHWH's eschatological Lord, or that he taught the Beatitudes and Lord's Prayer more or less as they appear in Luke and Matthew, is very strong indeed. If I could only hold on to beliefs based on publicly available evidence, I would remain a Christian.
Graham
So the Gospel writers make an effort to get their history right.
I am not convinced of this. The evangelists seem far more intent on pushing theological agendas than relaying straight history. Also, there is clear literary interdependence between all the gospels--including John. This tells me that the later evangelists were just getting their "history" from Mark's story.
"Resurrection" would never have entered the picture.
I think that belief in a physical resurrection of the body was a later development in Christian thought, and that the earliest Christians may not have believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus: cue Steven Carr's argument about how early Christian converts were openly scoffing at the idea of their god choosing to raise corpses.
I agree that Pr(one particular miracle|20 other miracles) is quite high.
The difficulty is establishing any particular miracle in the first place.
"The Historical Argument for Christianity is certainly not an argument from ignorance."
The argument I referred to is based on our inability to come up with a natural explanation. Please explain how using our ignorance of a certain natural mechanism to support a certain claim does not constitute an argument from ignorance?
"Lydia McGrew gives the example of a cloud of dust that does not disperse as scientific knowledge predicts it would."
Pre-Darwin, the cloud of dust would not have dispersed regarding the biodiversity of life. That was because of our ignorance of the mechanisms involved. To appeal to this sort of ignorance is to make an argument from ignorance. The solution is not to appeal to supernaturalism like IDiots, the solution is to try and find an explanation like Darwin did. That is even if the dust is not dispersed, an issue that is not agreed upon.
Walter
Thank you for sensible and polite debate!!! It's a breath of fresh air.
"The evangelists seem far more intent on pushing theological agendas than relaying straight history."
The point is that they clearly believed that "straight theology" depended on "straight history". So they would make every effort to get their facts straight.
At the moment I am reading "Letts Rip"Quentin Letts' Parliamentary sketches from the "Noughties". He's highly selective and pushes a political agenda. But if he does not base his sketches on what actually happened in the House of Commons, he would be a failure as a Sketch writer. And I wouldn't be reading a book of his sketches.
"I think that belief in a physical resurrection of the body was a later development in Christian thought, and that the earliest Christians may not have believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus"
(a)I've answered Steve's point with a quote from Crossan. Paul's argument in 1 Cor assumes that everyone accepts that Jesus physically rose from the dead. One small sub-group scoffed at the idea of a general Resurrection
(b)Why would Christians have "developed" such a difficult doctrine? And why does a doctrine that fits a Palestinian and Jewish environment develop as the Church becomes more and more Hellenised? And why does Matthew have to respond to a polemic that says "the apostles stole the body"? If your scenario is correct, such a polemic would have been unnecessary for the Jewish authorities. These are just a few of the many, many problems with the idea that a physical resurrection is a late development.
"This tells me that the later evangelists were just getting their "history" from Mark's story."
What it tells you is that they used their sources very carefully. They do not significantly add to Mark. The tendency of the Synoptic tradition is actually conservative. (This is also illustrated by their use of 'Q'). So the evidence is that Matthew and Luke did not feel free to create stories to aid their agenda. And this tells us something about how Gospels were written, and the Gospel writers attitude to history (for Mark is of the same genre and purpose as Matthew and Luke).
However, Mark was not the only source available. We need only compare the Passion and Easter narratives to see that independent but broadly coherent narratives circulated in the first decades of Church History. And Paul shows knowledge of Jesus' apocalyptic teachings that is coherent with Mark, but is clearly not dependent on Mark. (He also knows ethical teachings coherent with "Q", but not dependent on "Q").
Graham
Anonymous
My point is that agent-explanations demand that the explanandum either (a) brings about a state of affairs that an agent would value or (b) is a state of affairs that agents typically bring about.
A low probability event lacking a naturalistic explanation need not be (a) or (b). So ignorance of naturalistic causes is not enough to warrant an inference to a Theistic cause.
Your discussion of Darwin seems muddled. Perhaps this is my fault, as I could have clarified Dr McGrew's point. Lydia's example is from "Testability, Likelihoods and Design", published in Philo.
Suppose, for example, that we located a cloud of hydrogen molecules, not very large, floating in interstellar space and not dispersing.In the apparent absence of a sufficient amount of mass to hold the cloud together gravitationally, the discovery would certainly be anomalous on the assumptions of our current physics. But there would be no particular reason to consider design a better explanation than some as-yet undiscovered physical law or unknown factor in the vicinity of the cloud. There is no evidence,either a priori or from past observation, that agents have any inclination to make small clouds of gas serving no particular function.
I would add that the cloud does not bring about any value that a rational agent would obviously recognise.
Graham
I'm not sure that terms like "IDiots" help debate between strangers. My good friend Shane McKee/Heliopolitan over at his playful blog "Answers in Genes" can get away with these terms -but he knows me and my views.
"Please explain how using our ignorance of a certain natural mechanism to support a certain claim does not constitute an argument from ignorance?"
I'm agreeing with you. Absence of a natural mechanism is not enough to warrant an "agent explanation".
I am saying that the historical argument for Christianity is not an argument from ignorance. This is easy to demonstrate.
Suppose that you had the excellent evidence for a Resurrection. Suppose that you were a witness to a prophet's ministry, which predicted that he would rise from the dead. Suppose you witnessed him die. Then you, with a group that included sceptics, witnessed him alive several days later. Suppose you could run whatever scientific tests that you liked to confirm death and resurrection.
Now if the prophet were to assert that you now had good evidence that God existed, would you consider it reasonable to reply:
"No, that would be an argument from ignorance. I simply cannot think of a naturalistic explanation for these events. You have not provided any evidence for the existence of God"?
Graham
Suppose that you were a witness to a magicians ministry, which predicted that he would make an elephant disappear. Suppose you witnessed him perform the act. Then you, with a group that included sceptics, witnesses him bring the elephant back. Suppose you could run whatever scientific tests that you liked to confirm that this is the same elephant.
Now if the magician were to assert that you now had good evidence that he has supernatural powers, I would consider it reasonable to reply: "No, that would be an argument from ignorance. I simply cannot think of a naturalistic explanation for these events and am uncertain how the act was done. I must have missed the mechanism crucial to pull of the action, please perform the trick again."
I think this is what it comes down to. Are you willing to take the word of the magician or investigate further. Those who take his word believe in magic, while the rest look for a natural explanation. If we're both at a magic show and you ask me how he did his trick and I and everyone else in the audience says "I don't know", using that as evidence for his divine ability is to make an argument from ignorance. Do you not agree?
Anonymous
Oh, right, Houdini makes an entrance. Your contention is that the disciples did it with mirrors? Unfortunately, to pull off this kind of trick, magicians need a huge amount of control over a stage, and need to make detailed preparations.
DF Strauss put an end to this sort of nonsense. It has no relevance to the historical argument for Christianity.
Assuming that the prophet in my experiment was dead (suppose he was beheaded. Suppose you were close when it happened, and that he did not have a magicians control of his environment. Suppose you held the head.)
The prophet then appears to you, physically alive and well, and tells you that you have evidence for God.
You'd be looking for a trap door? Asking him how he did it?
So, basically your belief in naturalism is cannot be falsified.
Didn't a judge in Dover have something to say about that attitude?
Graham
In other words, you've dodged my argument with a story about Houdini! Frankly, I'm appalled.
Graham,
What is the single best book that you have read that defends the Resurrection? Is it Licona's new book? I have read some of Habermas's work, is their anyone better? I have read quite a lot of skeptical literature over the past three years, so I think it only fair to investigate the BEST arguments from the believers' side.
Bring on the book recommendations!
“Oh, right, Houdini makes an entrance. Your contention is that the disciples did it with mirrors? Unfortunately, to pull off this kind of trick, magicians need a huge amount of control over a stage, and need to make detailed preparations.
DF Strauss put an end to this sort of nonsense. It has no relevance to the historical argument for Christianity.”
Actually, it fits perfectly in the methodology that you described. If you think otherwise, you need to fine tune what you accept as to not include believing in magic. That is a flaw in your methodology, me bringing it up is only to demonstrate that; not a dodge by any means. Magic is a fairly relevant topic to this sort of discussion because it employs methods of how to deceive the mind. It applies how we make mistakes and false assumptions in order to let us make false conclusions and then exposes those false conclusions. If you think that knowing how people are deceived and misperceive events has no relevance to a discussion of how people perceived an event, then your input on the topic is worthless.
“So, basically your belief in naturalism is cannot be falsified.”
That would be stating it too strong. I would just say that in order for a claim to be accepted, a demonstration of that claim would have to done. Let’s say he died and then actually came back to life. How does that make him God? How does it fulfill his other attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence? How does that demonstrate that he can create universes and move galaxies? I’m not really sure what you mean by naturalism; I suppose we would have to define supernaturalism first. If extraterrestrials had X-Men like powers, would we consider them to be supernatural? If we find a way to bring someone back to life under certain conditions, does that falsify naturalism? It’s hard to say, it would probably depend on the mechanism, but until that mechanism is demonstrated, you haven’t shown anything worth considering.
"If you think that knowing how people are deceived and misperceive events has no relevance"
I described the methods that magicians use. They were not available to Jesus. I also drew attention to the fact that similar explanations have been examined by historians, and have been dismissed as being more improbable than miracles.
“So, basically your belief in naturalism is cannot be falsified.”
Now that you have cited extra-terrestrials, I'm stumped. Even if someone came back from the dead and visited you, you would not believe. All I can say is that your naturalism may be falsifiable in theory, but not in practice. Any inductive conclusion could be undermined, in theory, by further discovery.
Graham
“I described the methods that magicians use. They were not available to Jesus. I also drew attention to the fact that similar explanations have been examined by historians, and have been dismissed as being more improbable than miracles.”
It appears to me that you misunderstood what was being suggested. I am not referring to props that magicians use to perform a trick. I was referring to psychological manipulations that they use in order to achieve a desired effect. This is not to say that Jesus was a magician or that someone “hypnotized” the disciples; think more along the lines of the mass hysteria of crowds. This just goes to show how easily people can be tricked, by others or their environment when they don’t have an adequate understanding of the principles at play around them. To say that this was not possible at the time is to, as I said earlier, diminish the value of your opinion on the topic to be worthless. If you think the hypotheses were so easy to be dismissed, could you link me to a paper or article that makes the case against them.
“Even if someone came back from the dead and visited you, you would not believe.”
Let’s say that someone is identified as being dead and they show up later. How does that show that they are were dead and raised back to life? I’ve seen the same story in the news. Family member identifies victim and then the person who was supposed to be dead shows up later. Does this mean that naturalism is false? No, it means that people can make mistakes. Now, if they have the ability to truly come back from the dead, then they would be welcome to repeatedly demonstrate it, then I would believe. I don’t put a lot of weight on onetime events. If something is possible, then it is possible to recreate it. If you can’t, then you probably made an error in the first place.
“All I can say is that your naturalism may be falsifiable in theory, but not in practice. Any inductive conclusion could be undermined, in theory, by further discovery.”
I am not sure how you reached this conclusion since I basically said I wasn’t sure how I would define supernaturalism (since I would let other people define it, same would go for similar things like God) and without a clear conception of supernaturalism, to say that something would falsify naturalism would be to say that supernaturalism would be confirmed (since I don’t typically consider naturalism to be a belief, since it would be the negative of supernaturalism). Since you have not offered a definition of supernaturalism, to say that something would falsify naturalism is nonsensical. Barring that, I have what I would conceive of something being supernatural and it refers to the mechanism behind the action so a hypothetical saying “X happens” is not enough to falsify naturalism. You would have to say “X happens by Y mechanism” to even consider falsifying naturalism.
For example, would the “virgin birth” be a miracle, would it be evidence of a supernatural entity? I don’t see why it would. It would be remarkable since it would be the first case of parthenogenesis among humans, but it happens in a few species in the animal kingdom. Same goes for biological immortality and regeneration of amputated limbs. Given a certain sequence of DNA, these things occur naturally; yet the first time it would happen to a human, it would be praised as evidence that the person is divine or as a miracle of God. The problem is that supernaturalism is such a strong charge (that is relatively ill-defined) that it would take a lot of evidence to meet its burden of proof yet it gets tossed around for seemingly ordinary phenomena like love, reason, empathy, humans, etc. It would be akin to saying that someone is omniscient and the offered justification is that they aced the SAT, which is something that would be expected given naturalism and supernaturalism. The evidence offered is insufficient to demonstrate the claim, and believing in spite of that is faith, which is not something I am willing to indulge.
1) My original point was that we infer to an agent when an "event explanation" is weak or unavailable, AND when the explanandum is something that agents typically bring about, or contains features that a rational agent would desire to bring about.
So if an event is probable on Theism and improbable on Atheism it is evidence for Theism.
2) The Resurrection is an event that a rational agent should desire.
3) Of course many reports of miracles turn out to be mistaken. Many people are falsely accused in court. Many courts give unfair and unjust verdicts. That doesn't mean that courts always get it wrong.
If you have a naturalistic explanation, or a number of potential explanations, for the events that caused the early church to believe in Jesus' Resurrection, put it on the table. Then we can see if this purported miracle provides evidence for God.
Graham
You seem confused on naturalism and supernaturalism. May I suggest that you consult the literature on Theism and on Naturalism.
The definitions vary, but we can pick suitable definitions for the sake of discussion.
Graham
I also think that you have confused evidence and a deductive proof.
“1) My original point was that we infer to an agent when an "event explanation" is weak or unavailable, AND when the explanandum is something that agents typically bring about, or contains features that a rational agent would desire to bring about.”
And how does this exclude magic? This was the entire point of the exercise that you seemed to miss. A magician has the desire to entertain people. People are entertained by seeing things contrary to the laws of nature: levitation, things disappearing, etc. Then the magician making these objects disappear would be rational given his desires. A natural explanation is weak or unavailable for some tricks (which goes to your 3rd point, some tricks might be natural, but if we don’t have an explanation for a specific trick, we can infer it was magic). If someone were to accept your methodology, then it would call for believing in magic. To differ would be to engage in special pleading. This is why I referred to it as an argument from ignorance. If you ask me how the trick was done and I say “I have no idea how he could have done it naturally,” that does not become evidence that he used magic. I think that you have confused the difference between evidence and ignorance.
“You seem confused on naturalism and supernaturalism. May I suggest that you consult the literature on Theism and on Naturalism. The definitions vary, but we can pick suitable definitions for the sake of discussion. “
You must have not understood what I wrote. We could choose a definition, but we didn’t do that. You made the charge that my naturalism was not falsifiable without even knowing what I meant by super/naturalism. You made a false assumption on your part. I hardly see how describing that mistake would characterize me as being confused. I then made myself clear what definition I would use in the absence of an agreed upon definition and then described how the hypothetical you proposed would not even come close to being sufficient to falsify my notion of naturalism. May I suggest you consult the literature on English Composition.
We seem to be going round in a circle. It seems that you do think that "magic" can, in principle, account for the miracle stories in the Gospels in general, and the resurrection in particular.
I have pointed out that the apostles did not control the "stage" in the way that a magician does. (Even in "street magic" a spectacular magic trick requires accomplices and props).
I have also pointed out that this type of explanation was critiqued and dismissed several centuries ago.
I have no idea why you keep returning to this objection when it has already been answered. You have also alluded to "psychological" explanations.
These cannot account for the nature of Resurrection faith, as they would have produced a belief that the disciples had seen Jesus' "angel", or a "translation" of Jesus to the heavenly realm. They would not have produced a belief that God had resurrected Jesus before the last day. Psychological explanations cannot account for the Empty Tomb.
I believe that your naturalism - which minimally excludes a belief in God, and in the miraculous, and therefore can be critiqued before you iron out the remaining details - is not falsifiable as you alluded to extra-terrestrial beings as a possible explanation for the Resurrection. (Why ET should care for Galilean Rabbis who have no interest in ET is a bit of a puzzler...)
I you believe that ET is preferable to Theism as an explanation for the Resurrection (or any event of significant that takes place in a religious context cannot be accounted for by naturalism) then I think it reasonable to point out that, for all practical purposes, no amount of evidence could convince you that God exists.
As for English composition, and our relative IQs, I'm happy to concede that you win that competition. But in some circles that would amount to condemnation by faint praise.
Graham
Derren Brown has said that " a magician is a guard protecting an empty safe".
The obvious naturalistic explanation is usually the correct explanation.
The surprised member of the audience is usually a "plant". There usually is a trap door. The beautiful assistant is usually as skilled as the magician.
Graham
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