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As a motivating example, I have in mind the minimal facts argument for the resurrection of Jesus, espoused by Christian apologists such as Gary Habermas, Michael Licona, and William Lane Craig. The argument is based on a few historical data points widely accepted by scholars, both skeptical and believing, regarding the events surrounding Jesus's death and post-death appearances. These facts typically include:

  1. The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans.
  2. The empty tomb where Jesus was buried.
  3. Post-mortem appearances of Jesus to various individuals and groups.
  4. The sudden and profound transformation of the disciples, moving from fear and desolation after Jesus's death to a bold proclamation of his resurrection.

Christian apologists argue that these minimal facts demand an explanation. Alternative hypotheses challenging the resurrection of Jesus include the hallucination theory, suggesting post-death appearances were hallucinations; the stolen body hypothesis, proposing the theft of Jesus's body to fake resurrection; the swoon theory, which argues Jesus didn't die but merely lost consciousness; and the legend or myth theory, positing that resurrection accounts evolved through myth-making over time. Christian apologists argue that each of these theories faces challenges in explaining the combination of accepted historical facts—such as the crucifixion, the empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the disciples' drastic transformation—unlike the hypothesis of Jesus's resurrection, which is argued to provide a more cohesive and comprehensive explanation for these collective data points.

With that said, a big problem with the resurrection hypothesis is that resurrections, for all we know, are extraordinary events, as their occurrence would challenge all our current scientific understanding of human biology and, for all we know, they do not happen very often (if at all). In other words, the apologists are putting forth an extraordinary hypothesis as the best explanation.

More generally, and in principle, can an extraordinary hypothesis ever be the best explanation for a (minimal) set of historical facts?

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    Can you give any examples of non-Christian scholars who accept 2-4 as fact? Anyway, apply the same standards of evidence to Muhammed, Joseph Smith, or Buddha. They also had contemporary accounts claiming they had performed miracles. Do you believe them all?
    – causative
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 17:19
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    The list I've seen of accepted facts by the historical community regarding Jesus is include: 1) Jesus was a historical person - he was not made up 2) Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist 3) He was crucified by order of Pontus Pilate c. 33 AD Sadly, that is it. The ravages of time and Jesus's obscurity outside of Judea all but guarantee that very few contemporaneous accounts will survive.
    – Annika
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 21:16
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    Historians, scientists and skeptics say no, theists say yes.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 22:18
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    @Annika The existence of a preacher named Jesus who was baptized and crucified can fairly trivially be accepted, because none of that is extraordinary, nor should it really have any impact on us in the modern day (unless additional extraordinary claims are true). If those claims did imply I should dedicate my life to something, I'd question whether the evidence is really strong enough to support those claims (much like if a stranger told me their car broke down, I can trivially provisionally accept that as true, but if they then ask for money, I'll apply a higher standard of evidence).
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 22:30
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    @NotThatGuy ok - we don’t. We have more information on “dunked in water” than “came back to life”. I’m getting out of my area of expertise but take a look at discussion of the historicity of Jesus.
    – Annika
    Commented Nov 13, 2023 at 1:37

4 Answers 4

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Sure, and have been so. 'Extra-ordinary' is contingent upon historical accident and context.

Let's take germ theory of disease. When miasma theory was dominant, the notion of tiny living beings invading your body and growing into a society of beings that affected your flesh and organs was an extraordinary hypothesis. In Austria, one of the intellectual capitals of the world, germ theory was resisted as absurd. And then suddenly by the evidence provided by Pasteur and others, it created a scientific revolution and shifted the paradigm.

Common descent by Darwin and Russell were extraordinary claims too that challenged 1,000 years of the Great Chain of Being and brought great intellectual upheaval that some denominations of Christianity still violently refute.

Since the incident at Roswell, NM, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is a contemporary modern claim to truth which would be settled if a single craft lands on the Whitehouse lawn and holds a pressconference. Some astrophysics claim is an impossibility, and others cite the history of science to undermine those claims. Earlier in history learned astronomical minds found heliocentrism an extraordinary claim!

If 'extraordinary' is taken as challenging the dominant intellectual consensus, then one can defend the thesis that all rapid changes in epistemelogical consensus are to some extent the triumph of the extraordinary over the ordinary.

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    Much of this is extraordinary in the sense of challenging the status quo. But the status quo shouldn't be retained just because it's the status quo. Another interpretation of "extraordinary" (that's commonly used) is an explanation for a very small bit of evidence that doesn't generalise, that there are other simpler explanations, that it might be at odds with the rest of observable reality, that it requires contrivances to make compatible with other observations. As soon as you have good evidence supporting some explanation (i.e. when you should accept it), it's no longer extraordinary.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 20:19
  • @NotThatGuy On the status quo, that we are full agreement. On other senses, I fully concede that just how one interprets 'extraordinary' is the meat of the issue, and meant only to suggest the general principle, and not take a stance on which sense. Should aliens land and say they reanimated Jesus of Nazareth to shape our culture, certainly how to apply 'extraordinary' will require some hashing out.
    – J D
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 21:48
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Trivially so, yes

Question is: can an extraordinary hypothesis ever be the best explanation for a set of historical facts?

Well, yes, because before any explanation for any kind of phenomenon exists, every hypothesis — that then turns out to be accurate — is extraordinary.

When the explanation is then understood and accepted, the phenomenon and hypothesis becomes mundane.

This is why, in instances where religious people try to claim that some or such religiously inspired hypothesis is accurate — for instance "relics cure illnesses due to divine healing powers" — they are usually not instantly told to "go fish", even though we by now know how any double-blinded non-biased test of the claim is likely to end. Instead, they are given inordinate amounts of time and effort to check up on their claims...

enter image description here The Shroud of Turin for instance has been given much attention and effort. (Image source)

...before — finally — being told "Sorry, looks like we cannot verify your claim". They are given this, because — even though the hypothesis is indeed extraordinary — this is no different from how all hypotheses begin. What then sets them apart is if evidence is produced and accepted, and this is where religious hypothesis fail and others either fall into pseudoscience, or become accepted as scientifically derived theories.

We can have a long debate on the definitions of "extraordinary" and "mundane" here, but I will bow out before that starts, parting with the words of Sir Arthur:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology, is indistinguishable from magic"

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  • "Instead, they are given inordinate amounts of time and effort to check up on their claims" - it's more like: they spend inordinate amounts of time and effort to check up on their own claims. Skeptics have concluded that their claims are unjustified a long time ago, and keep concluding that as those people try to come up with new justifications. The effort others spend on those claims is more about showing that they're unjustified or false, for the many people who believe such things.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 20:05
  • The label of "extraordinary claim" is most often not used to refer to things for which we have no explanation, but rather for things which there are much more mundane explanations. We know hallucinations happen, so it would be extraordinary to say some experience is not due to a hallucination, but rather due to a being that exists outside of space and time, who wants a personal relationship with this one species here on this one planet here in this one galaxy, and who has a particularly strong interest about what happens in our pants.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 20:10
  • "Skeptics have concluded that their claims are unjustified a long time ago..." Yeah, but skeptics will also — quite often — entertain the notion and let the supernaturalist make a try. The James Randi Million Dollar Challenge was one example, until they got fed up with tying up a million USD in a fruitless endeavour. As for the use "extraordinary", as I said: we can have a long debate about that. But in the context of this answer, I will use it was described: a hypothesis of a hitherto unexplained phenomenon. (continued)
    – MichaelK
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 20:18
  • (continued) And while — to us — some explanation now appear mundane. For instance, radio-waves were akin to actual magic by the time Maxwell formulated his equations. Just imagine... invisible waves that lets you receive legible messages from the orbit of Pluto and beyond... that is rather extraordinary, at least in the optics (pun intended) of someone leaving in the mid 1800's. It is no surprise that Hertz so — now seemingly comically — misjudged the practical application of his confirmation of these waves.
    – MichaelK
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 20:22
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TL;DR: To answer your question, the answer is yes, but only if it can be argued that it explains something better than ordinary hypotheses. Every extraordinary hypothesis usually comes at the cost of simplicity and so greater explanatory power must make up for it.

In general, when deciding between two hypotheses, you cannot purely look at a single data point and then compare them. If one were to look at the resurrection hypothesis in isolation, it may well be argued that those minimal facts are better explained under theism than naturalism.

But the world doesn’t contain events in isolation. When we bring in the whole history of the world, along with all the differing accounts of different types of miracles specific to different religions, we can now explain all of the data in a more comprehensive way purely by naturalistic means.

But let’s assume we did just look at this single data point. Of course, if Christianity is true, and the resurrection was indeed a unique event, the “minimal facts” that you listed would be expected. This, however, involves creating a God hypothesis that is tailored to fit that data point. For example, it assumes the kind of God that chooses to act in such a way where we can’t go back and directly see this happen in front of us.

But one can do this with naturalism too. If one of the naturalistic hypotheses are true, such as the hallucinations or the myth making accounts, then you would also expect the exact same minimal facts that you mentioned.

So what we have here are two hypotheses explaining the same event, with the exact same expected data, with one crucial difference. The theistic hypotheses have additional ontology, namely gods. The naturalistic hypothesis requires explanations of the sort that the theist already agrees is possible but just not probable. As such, the naturalistic hypothesis is simpler while having the same explanatory power as the theistic one.

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  • The evidences are an okay fit for a non-material explanation. They're a great fit for a particular theistic hypothesis, but this isn't unexpected, it's because the hypothesis is shaped to fit the evidence. Is that "tailored"? Well, yes, but no more than any other (good) scientific hypothesis. The evidences however are a poor fit for a material explanation, because the "obvious" material explanations would not be expected to produce the evidences which are observed.
    – Matthew
    Commented Mar 7 at 21:13
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The argument you present, known as the minimal facts argument for the resurrection of Jesus, relies on historical data points that are purportedly widely accepted by scholars. However, I must express my skepticism regarding the reliability and credibility of these so-called "minimal facts." We must question the sources and the potential biases that could have influenced the accounts, as they were written long after the events they describe and were influenced by religious beliefs and agendas.

Furthermore, the argument assumes that the resurrection hypothesis is the only possible explanation for the minimal facts, which I find problematic. It disregards the possibility of alternative explanations that have not been fully explored. We should not simply accept that the resurrection hypothesis is the most cohesive and comprehensive explanation, as it relies on supernatural claims that lack strong evidence or reason.

As for whether an extraordinary hypothesis can ever be the best explanation for a set of historical facts, I would argue that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Without substantial and verifiable evidence for the occurrence of resurrections or other supernatural events, it is more reasonable to explore naturalistic explanations that align with our current scientific understanding.

In evaluating the minimal facts argument, we must approach it with skepticism and critical thinking. We should question the reliability of the historical accounts and challenge the assumption that the resurrection hypothesis is the best or only explanation for the data points presented. Let us emphasize the need for evidence-based reasoning and a naturalistic approach when considering historical claims.

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  • "They were written long after the events they describe", false. "[They] were influenced by religious beliefs and agendas", true, the Romans/Jews really wanted to discredit the movement. That they were unable to do so lends additional credence to the claims. Aside from the factual errors, your approach is steeped in circular reasoning.
    – Matthew
    Commented Mar 7 at 21:06

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