Let me first summarize my argument against Faizal’s claim before responding to yours. My argument is, given the presence of a phenomenon (i.e. ‘The historical evidence indicates that there were people in mid-first century CE who claimed that they had seen Jesus alive after his crucifixion, they truly saw something, what they saw was not caused intramentally but extramentally, and the extramental entity was not anyone else but the same Jesus who died on the cross. Therefore, Jesus resurrected’ as argued in my book), should we use methodological naturalism to exclude the hypothesis that ‘God resurrected Jesus’ as an explanation for the phenomena? I have explained that we should not, because ‘it is not unreasonable to think that an infrequent event happened as a result of a personal agent freely choosing to act in a certain unique way only on a special occasion’ (p. 175). Whereas we can use methodological naturalism to exclude hallucination as an explanation for the phenomenon ‘they truly saw something’ because ‘In the case of evaluating natural impersonal causes, infrequencies can help us exclude natural impersonal causes and naturalistic alternatives to Jesus’ resurrection given that natural causes are supposed to act in predictable and law-like ways. For example, by thinking about the law-like causal pathways that are required to produce perceptions, we can determine that, without a corresponding external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ, the mental states internal to each person within a group of people would not agree on various details concerning their experience of the external world.’
However, in your examples such as ‘I can observe right now that, if God exist, God isn’t choosing to supernaturally make the sky purple and green in stripes and dots’, ‘I observe that the sky isn’t filled with unicorns’, you are referring to the absence of phenomenon to be explained (absence of purple sky, absence of unicorns). Therefore, these examples are disanalogous to the case of Jesus resurrection where there is presence of phenomenon to be explained, as noted in the paragraph above.
There is a longstanding debate between determinists and indeterminists whether humans are really free. I personally affirm that humans have limited libertarian freedom; I emphasize that this freedom is limited e.g. if someone suddenly step on my toes really hard, I would not have the freedom not to say ‘ouch’. I therefore agree that in many cases it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that it is a priori extremely unlikely for humans to decide to do some things now or at any point in the future, and that is because humans are not supernatural nor perfectly free, rather their freedom is limited by many natural factors which can be studied by psychologists, sociologists, etc. I myself state on p.202 that ‘No group of people would be willing to sacrifice everything for what they do not believe to be true and be condemned by God after death for being false witnesses.’
Things are different when it comes to whether God would choose not to resurrect most other people but resurrect Jesus. In this case we do not have evidence to think that God’s choice not to resurrect most people is limited by natural factors which can be studied by psychologists, etc. Hence this would not be a valid reason to conclude that the prior probability that God would raise Jesus is low.
Yes as you say it is unlikely that anyone who claims to be able to naturally grow to 100 feet tall would naturally be able to do so, because we know that is not how the natural works when it is left on its own and given certain circumstances.
You tried to argue that it is likewise unlikely that anyone who claims to be able to supernaturally grow to 100 feet tall would supernaturally be able to do so, because we know that is not what God often chooses to do.
I disagree that ‘we know that is not what God often chooses to do’ is a good explanation for the unlikelihood of God making just ‘anyone’ taller. First, we need to consider who this anyone is. Is he as special as Jesus? (see the discussion of religious context of Jesus in Chapter 8). We cannot read the mind of God like a psychologist to rule out the possibility that a particular person X is specially chosen by God to manifest a miracle and reveal Himself within a specific religious context. Thus we might say that the prior probability is indeterminate (Swinburne argues that the prior probability of God doing a miracle given Jesus’ religious context is in fact high, but let’s set aside Swinburne’s argument first).
Second, in the absence of evidence the claim is indeed unlikely, not because we can read the mind of God to know that the prior probability that He would not make him tall is low, but because we know that there have been many mistaken claims of miracles. In other words, there are common naturalistic alternatives which—in the absence of evidence to rule them out—are very likely, and given that the probabilities must all add up to 1 this would imply that the miraculous claim is unlikely.
Nevertheless, in the case of Jesus’ resurrection there are evidences to rule out all the naturalistic alternatives as I argue in my book. I wrote on p.184 ‘one should ‘distinguish between the probability of a miracle claim considered apart from the evidence and the probability of the claim given that evidence’ (McGrew 2013). Therefore, while there have been many mistaken reports in general, one should consider the evidence that is specific to the particular case of Jesus’ resurrection and think about the possible ways by which the reports concerning Jesus’ resurrection appearances could have been mistaken, and these ways have all been excluded by the considerations explained in the previous chapters’.
We can arrive at the probability of the resurrection by using the logically exhaustive list formulated in my book and using argument by exclusion, without having to first assign a number for the prior probability of Jesus’ resurrection which (as I explain above) is indeterminate. As I wrote on page 185-186: ‘the probability of each of the seven possible categories of explanations concerning the claims of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances—viz. legends, no experience, intramental, mistaken identity, swoon, escape, and resurrection—must add up to 1. Since each of the six naturalistic alternatives has negligible probability and that the probability of the disjunction of six negligible probabilities is negligible, it can be concluded that the resurrection of Jesus happened (i.e. the probability of Jesus’ resurrection has negligible difference from the probability of 1)… Even if one disagrees with my assessment that each of the naturalistic alternative hypotheses has ‘negligible probability’ or ‘vanishingly small probability’ (to use McGrew’s term), one can still say that each of these naturalistic alternatives has been shown to be very improbable. For example, even if one assigns to each of the six naturalistic alternatives a probability of one in a thousand (which is very generous and much higher than the vanishingly small probability calculated by McGrew), that still leaves the resurrection with a probability of 99.4%.7 This should warrant assent from a reasonable person.’