GAE hypothesis: some student confusion

Sounds like a fun class!

For this, emphasize the text of Scripture (“from the dust” and “from a rib”) and the phrase “without parents.”

The key point there is that a miracle is allowed in the hypothesis, but not in the assessment of the hypothesis (see here: Does the GAE violate methodological naturalism?).

You want them to understand that rule #5 is required for assessment of the evidence, otherwise we can just start invoking miracles willy nilly to explain away difficult data. That would pollute our analysis and prevent us from being able to rule out any hypothesis, so it just is not allowed in scientific analysis. If we can posit ad hoc miracles, there is just no way to test a hypothesis in a rational way.

One pedagogic strategy might be to consider Coyne’s quote in the first chapter. He considers the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and Adam and Eve. How does he does he make the (correct) scientific claim that evidence doesn’t rule out the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth?

Another pedagogic strategy would be to consider an argument that posits ad hoc miracles to explain data away. You could specify a hypothesis that is falsified by evidence (such that the students agree this to be the case), and then ask them to posit miracles that give an alternate explanation. Alternatively, you could ask them to falsify a clearly false statement (e.g. that the class is now on the Moon), and posit miracles to dismiss all the evidence they present against this statement.

The point is that we can’t make evidential assessments of a hypothesis if we are allowing miracles to do any explanatory work for us. If we did, we would not be doing a fair assessment.

4 Likes