Loke: Investigating the Resurrection

Peaceful Science
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But you then use “methodological naturalism” to exclude other possibilities like mass hallucinations.

I know you refuse to see the problem here, but I am just pointing it out again.

And to be clear, I do not think mass hallucination is a reasonable explanation. Just that once we dismiss “methodological naturalism” as a method to judge the likelihood of claims, anything goes. We have no means of ruling out any possible “explanation”, no matter how unlikely or outlandish. Mass hallucination is just one of a potentially endless list that only incidentally happens to include a real resurrection.

I should also clarify that, in this context, “methodological naturalism” means nothing more than the idea that we can determine the likelihood of something happening by our observations of how the universe operates.

In your book, you give the example of a society which has never experienced below freezing temperatures and therefore denies the existence of ice. But in that example, a scientist from that community could determine that it is possible for ice to form at sufficiently low temperature by observing the change in physical states that occur at various temperatures, such as how a metal liquifies when heated, and drawing further conclusions from that. It would be improper for someone in that society to simply accept the existence of ice on the mere assertion that “Hey, anything can happen. You never know!”, which is essentially what you are demanding.

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Lots of disagreements but the clearest and simplest has been expressed elsewhere by others: a god who can reanimate a bunch of corpses is a god who can delude people or induce mass hallucination or (much more easily, it would seem) inspire people to confabulate/embellish/self-deceive/lie about events and accounts of events. And so, all the work to carefully calculate “probabilities,” even if those calculations are impeccable, is meaningless once a supernatural power is introduced. Multiple reanimations of festering corpses is ludicrous, but much much more importantly, the actions of a supernatural omnipotent being–one, BTW, with bizarre and morally appalling habits, as reported by his spokespersons–make it indefensible to argue that the alternative explanations are unlikely or implausible.

But my more important point is that your sentence about “running away from God” was revelatory about the backdrop to this conversation, which is now not about evidence or probability.

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Or maybe see if this helps:

I want to argue that the disciples experienced a miraculous mass hallucination that Jesus had come back to life after his crucifixion.

Since this is a miracle I am claiming, if science shows that such hallucinations cannot happen, this does not matter.

Now, someone else could argue “What if Jesus actually did come back to life?” Then, I could simply point to the fact that science shows this does not happen.

All other naturalistic probabilities are ruled out for the same reasons you give.

I have now proven that the only reasonable explanation is that the disciples had a mass hallucination.

This is no different than the argument you are making. We both decided a priori which scenario we would favour with special pleading. We just each chose a different scenario.

The other difference is that I realize this is a foolish argument to make. You don’t.

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I don’t believe I am excluding the possibility of it merely by pointing to the fact that as far as we can tell using observation, God isn’t in the business of resurrecting the dead. And with respect to observation, we are not saying it isn’t allowed to use observation to gauge what God might or might not do if he exists.

I’m not, and as best I can tell, nobody here is seriously advancing a mass-halluscination hypothesis as an alternative we should believe. I also don’t like your insistence on using the word exclusion, which seems to imply we can categorically rule particular hypotheses out. I don’t actually think we can do that, we can only ever try to give statements about relatively probabilities, which implies we can only have relative levels of confidence about each specific hypothesis.

No the whole point is that in both cases, there is an absence of phenomena to be explained. We don’t actually have the resurrection before us, just like we don’t actually have a green and purple striped and dotted sky.
We just have some claims. If someone were to come and show me that it says in an old book that the sky turned purple and green in stripes and dots, I would have good reason for not believing that too. And the point is that I can use that same reasoning about both naturalistic and supposedly supernatural phenomena. Bodies don’t appear to spontaneously come back to life, whether naturally or by God’s will. Hence I’m going to consider it unlikely to be true when someone insists some body came back to life because it says so in an old book and God totally could have done so if he wanted to.

You won’t be surprised to hear I also don’t believe the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

Why would they have to be natural factors? The crucial point is whether resurrections appear to be something God is likely to do or not whatever the essential attributes of his reasons for doing so. There are millions of reasons imaginable for why a God might or might not do anything, and countless people have been their own unique and special type of person a God might or might not have had a unique, supernaturally-grounded interest in resurrecting. Even if a God exists, it appears to not have done so.

Anyone who ever lived is special and unique in their own way particular way. Good people, righteous people, bad people, faithful people, faithless people, people who knew their scriptures and took them seriously and really tried to live by them. People who had particular shades of skin colour, moles in particular shapes and locations, arteries with particular levels of clogging. People who were sincere and tried to spread the faith, and gave to charity. Or whatever other unique and specially deserving attribute you can imagine a God would deem worthy. They died and God didn’t bring them back.

That undermines your own argument. If you can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him unlikely to choose to resurrect someone, you also can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him want to resurrect someone. In effect you are the one making a judgement call about what you suspect God wants. But you truly have no idea. Your probabilities for the resurrection are in effect made up.

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Yes, that is much better worded than I have managed.

The position that rejecting resurrections as highly improbable does not entail taking any position on the existence of a god. Even if he exists, it is quite obvious that he only rarely, if ever, brings a dead person back to life. His tendency, by a very large margin, is to just leave them dead.

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Concerning the disagreements mentioned to me by others in this thread, I’ve already replied to them above and replied to other objections in my book. Concerning “running away from God”, my point is, by making assertions without replying to arguments, Faizal was refusing to consider the evidences for God.

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Your reply marked with >, my reply marked with *

*Should we use methodological naturalism to exclude the hypothesis that ‘God resurrected Jesus’ as an explanation for the phenomena?

But you then use “methodological naturalism” to exclude other possibilities like mass hallucinations.

*Yes, because in the context of my argument, mass hallucination is a naturalistic hypothesis which claims that the natural world when left on its own can operate in such a way as to produce experiences in the minds of the early Christians such that they ‘saw’ Jesus when there is nothing extramental there. You agree that this is unreasonable, because our observations of how the natural world operates indicate that such mass hallucinations do not happen.

You claim that since I use methodological naturalism to rule out a naturalistic hypothesis I should also use methodological naturalism to rule out a supernatural hypothesis. But this is false, because a supernatural hypothesis is not supposed to be a hypothesis about how the natural world when left on its own operates. On the contrary.

You define “methodological naturalism” as…the idea that we can determine the likelihood of something happening by our observations of how the universe operates.

Whether it is appropriate to use methodological naturalism or not depends on the ‘something’ in question. If the ‘something’ is supposed to be an event caused by how the universe operates when it is left on its own, then of course we should use methodological naturalism. However, if the ‘something’ is supposed to be an event caused by how the universe operates when it is NOT left on its own, then we should not use methodological naturalism.

As an analogy: suppose I have a computer program that types letters randomly on a Word document. I later discover that a Shakespeare play has been typed. There are two hypothesis: 1. my computer program randomly typed it by chance 2. Someone intervened and typed the Shakespeare play. We should reject 1 by using the principle that we can determine the likelihood of 1 happening is extremely low by our observations of how the computer program operates. However, we should not reject 2 by using this principle.

Your statement ‘Just that once we dismiss “methodological naturalism” as a method to judge the likelihood of claims, anything goes’ once again MISREPRESENT my methodology. I do NOT dismiss (methodological) naturalism as a means of assessing possible claims. Rather, it depends on WHAT KIND OF possible claim we are considering. If we are considering the probability of a naturalistic hypothesis, then of course we may use methodological naturalism to exclude it. However, if we are considering the probability of a supernatural hypothesis (‘a miraculous event is supposed to be caused by a supernatural personal free agent’, who may ‘freely choosing to act in a certain unique way only on a special occasion’), then it would be unreasonable to use methodological naturalism to exclude it as explained above. The means that you use to assess a claim must be appropriate to the kind of claim that is being assessed. Your fallacy lies in failing to understand this point.

I know you refuse to see the above problem with your reasoning (perhaps because you are too proud to admit that you are wrong), but I am just pointing it out again.

Concerning my example of a society which has never experienced below freezing temperatures and therefore denies the existence of ice, the point is that the society should consider the evidence rather than dismissing it on the basis of their preconception. I don’t deny that a scientist from that community could determine that it is possible for ice to form at sufficiently low temperature. I agree it would be improper for someone in that society to simply accept the existence of ice on the mere assertion that “Hey, anything can happen. You never know!” You MISREPRESENT me by claiming that this is what I am demanding. Rather, my argument is: The historical evidence indicates that there were people in mid-first century CE who claimed that they had seen Jesus alive after his crucifixion (see the evidences presented in Chapter 2), they truly saw something (Chapter 3), what they saw was not caused intramentally but extramentally (Chapter 4), and the extramental entity was not anyone else but the same Jesus who died on the cross (Chapter 5). Therefore, Jesus resurrected’.

‘I want to argue that the disciples experienced a miraculous mass hallucination that Jesus had come back to life after his crucifixion….This is no different than the argument you are making. We both decided a priori which scenario we would favour with special pleading. We just each chose a different scenario.’

*But both scenarios would require the miraculous! What you said does not deny my point that we can use methodological naturalism to exclude the naturalistic hypotheses and that we should not use methodological naturalism to exclude the supernatural hypotheses. That may leave us with various possible supernatural hypotheses which we can then evaluate using other considerations which I mentioned in Chapter 8, given which my preference for the resurrection is NOT special pleading. But in any case we have identified a miracle (regardless of which miracle it is), which defeats your atheism.

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Your reply marked with >, my reply marked with *

I also don’t like your insistence on using the word exclusion, which seems to imply we can categorically rule particular hypotheses out.

*So you won’t say that we can rule out the hypothesis that Socrates didn’t exist but his disciples mass-hallucinated him?

**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.

No the whole point is that in both cases, there is an absence of phenomena to be explained. We don’t actually have the resurrection before us, just like we don’t actually have a green and purple striped and dotted sky.

*We NOW have the phenomena of plenty of historical documents which 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. But we do NOT NOW have green and purple striped and dotted sky. That is the disanalogy.

If someone were to come and show me that it says in an old book that the sky turned purple and green in stripes and dots, I would have good reason for not believing that too. And the point is that I can use that same reasoning about both naturalistic and supposedly supernatural phenomena. Bodies don’t appear to spontaneously come back to life, whether naturally or by God’s will. Hence I’m going to consider it unlikely to be true when someone insists some body came back to life because it says so in an old book and God totally could have done so if he wanted to.You won’t be surprised to hear I also don’t believe the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

  • You ignored my point that 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’.

**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.

Why would they have to be natural factors? The crucial point is whether resurrections appear to be something God is likely to do or not whatever the essential attributes of his reasons for doing so.

*My mentioning of natural factors is because you mentioned natural factors studied by psychologists etc, which I point out is disanalogous to the case of resurrection. Concerning your ‘crucial point’, I have already argued that the prior probability is indeterminate and that you should not conclude that it is low (rather than indeterminate) based on infrequency.

**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).

Anyone who ever lived is special and unique in their own way particular way. Good people, righteous people…or whatever other unique and specially deserving attribute you can imagine a God would deem worthy. They died and God didn’t bring them back.

*Not anyone who ever lived is special and unique in a religiously significant way, or claimed to be God and predicted his resurrection.

**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.

That undermines your own argument. If you can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him unlikely to choose to resurrect someone, you also can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him want to resurrect someone. In effect you are the one making a judgement call about what you suspect God wants. But you truly have no idea. Your probabilities for the resurrection are in effect made up.

  • Did you read my argument? I said that the prior probability is indeterminate! So how is that undermined by your statement ‘you also can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him want to resurrect someone’? Your statement confirmed what I said: the prior probability is indeterminate! I did not make up any prior probability, rather I said we do NOT have 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.’
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Not quite.

What you are doing is arbitrarily picking the one explanation you wish to argue for, unilaterally declaring it “supernatural” and thereby saying it is exempt from assessment by methodological naturalism.

Anyone could do the same for any other explanation they wish to argue for, such as mass hallucinations as I demonstrated.

Does that help?

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I wrote ‘You claim that since I use methodological naturalism to rule out a naturalistic hypothesis I should also use methodological naturalism to rule out a supernatural hypothesis. But this is false, because a supernatural hypothesis is not supposed to be a hypothesis about how the natural world when left on its own operates.’

You replied ‘What you are doing is arbitrarily picking the one explanation you wish to argue for, unilaterally declaring it “supernatural” and thereby saying it is exempt from assessment by methodological naturalism. Anyone could do the same for any other explanation they wish to argue for, such as mass hallucinations as I demonstrated.’

*You are confounding between two issues: 1.Whether methodological naturalism should be used to rule out a supernatural hypothesis. 2. Which hypothesis should we regard as supernatural (resurrection or mass hallucination)?

I was arguing concerning 1 while you are arguing concerning 2. So you missed my point and failed to rebut my argument that methodological naturalism should not be used to rule out a supernatural hypothesis. Therefore your objection fails.

Concerning 2, I did NOT arbitrary pick the resurrection as supernatural, rather I consider what is affirmed by the historical phenomena: the earliest Christians claimed that God raised Jesus from the dead. Nobody in first century claim that God caused a mass hallucination, so your supernatural mass hallucination hypothesis is ad hoc and arbitrary! I then go ahead and examine the historical evidence which indicates that there were people in mid-first century CE who claimed that they had seen Jesus alive after his crucifixion (see the evidences presented in Chapter 2), they truly saw something (Chapter 3), what they saw was not caused intramentally but extramentally (Chapter 4), and the extramental entity was not anyone else but the same Jesus who died on the cross (Chapter 5). Therefore, Jesus resurrected.

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This might be a cultural communication gap @Andrew_Loke @Faizal_Ali and @sfmatheson?

In the US, “running away from God” is not a kind or fair phrase to use. It is a type of ad hominem, claiming intellectual blindness based on psychologizing another person. It is not really appropriate, and I think that is part of why there was a strong response.

However Loke’s meaning might be different, and keep in mind he is an Asian scholar living in Hong Kong. It appears that he is means that his argument for God was not intellectually engaged. Whether he is right or not, that is a significantly less inflammatory meaning.

@Andrew_Loke I’d advise you against using that phrase again, because it is inflammatory in the US context, especially among atheists. It is an idiom, perhaps, with different meaning than you intend.

Everyone else, if you were offended, I understand. However, with the cultural gap here I request you overlook this legitimate offense.

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This is another example of the sloppy thinking that characterizes your argument.

We could just as easily include a resurrection as one of the six possibilities we are evaluating, and leave mass hallucination to he side. We could then conclude from empirical evidence that the odds of a resurrection along with the other five options are collectively negligible, therefore it can be concluded that a mass hallucination happened.

You just happened to choose a resurrection as the one possibility you wanted to win, so you arbitrarily excluded it from the evaluation by deeming it “supernatural”. It would no less justifiable to do the same for any of the other options.

I know I am just saying the same thing in different ways. Hopefully with one of them the light bulb will finally go on.

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You seem not to understand what we are discussing. The issue at question is why early Christians believed Jesus was raised from the dead. (I know there is some disagreement on even that, but I am not considering that for the moment.)

If they suffered a mass hallucination, that would explain why they believed it.

Sure you do not think it is rational to argue that because they believed a supernatural resurrection happened, that is the only supernatural explanation we are allowed to consider.

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So @Faizal_Ali I think I can rephrase your point, but I need your help.

You are objecting that if we allow for The Christian God (a good God, at least in our conception) physically Resurrecting Jesus, we have to consider a whole range of other hypotheses.

Perhaps it was a miraculous hallucination of Jesus (as some “modernist” Christians claimed). Perhaps it was not God but a demonic being that caused this hallucination too. Or perhaps God is deceptive, not good, and gave everyone hallucinations rather than actually raise him from the dead. In these cases, which you are claiming is not ruled out, the Ressurection would not have happened.

Alongside this, perhaps it was an evil or malicious God that rose Jesus from the dead. Or some other divine being.

Because if this lack of control by evidence, of so many alternate hypotheses you can’t rule out, you do not think his argument is sound.

Is that right?

If so, I have a question and a thought.

  1. Are these hypothesis covered in the list that @Andrew_Loke lays out? That is a critical question, because if they are not, he does have a gap in his argument, by his own terms.

  2. If such a gap exists, it could be a bridgeable gap, but a gap nonetheless. Systematically working through historical evidence, however would not be enough. We would have to actually engage in careful theological reasoning, taking into account perhaps other sorts of evidence.

Am I correct in explaining your objection?

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I am more than happy to overlook this. It was just a mistake. I am a global subject-matter expert on mistake-making. :slight_smile:

I’m not sure that I am the intended audience of this book or of discussions about reanimation of corpses, so I will excuse myself.

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Also along these lines, I can rephrase the situation in light of @Faizal_Ali’s objection:

  • @Andrew_Loke’s main contribution in this new book is that he classifies all the logically possible naturalistic hypotheses according to a finite list of yes/no questions.
  • He also advances arguments for the small probability of each of these hypotheses. (A naturalistic resurrection hypothesis would also have vanishingly small probability.)
  • Assuming Loke’s arguments work, we are left with the large probability that a non-naturalistic (or supernatural) hypothesis must be true.
  • @Faizal_Ali argues that the (supernatural) Resurrection hypothesis is not the only possible supernatural hypothesis, but there are potentially a large number of these, each with their own probabilities.

My observations:
First even allowing his objection, @Faizal_Ali has to concede that there is a greater probability than normal that something supernatural happened in this case, even if we don’t know which supernatural being caused it or what it is. (Unless if he has some other objections to Loke’s specific arguments against the naturalistic hypotheses.) Thus, Loke’s argument is still effective against naturalism, even if it might not be effective for showing the truth of Christianity per se. This is I think what he is saying here (Chapter 8, pp. 197, emphases mine):

On the other hand, the miraculous resurrection of Jesus is not contrived given this religious context. Even if the resurrection of Jesus has a natural explanation which is yet unknown to twenty-first-century scientists, we still need to ask how it could have been known and utilized to resurrect Jesus in the first century and vindicate his claim to be truly divine. Such a knowledge and ability to manipulate natural laws would still require a supernatural agent in any case.

Thus, even if one might not be convinced that Jesus is the Son of God, one has to concede that in light of the historical evidence we have, it is likely that Jesus (or some other power behind him) had supernatural-like powers. (Again, assuming Loke’s arguments work.)

Second, what the objection shows is that these arguments do not work in a vacuum; as Loke himself continues after the above passage, other arguments for the truth of Christianity can improve the odds of the supernatural Resurrection hypothesis compared to other supernatural hypotheses (pp. 197-198, emphases mine):

Alternative naturalistic causes such as aliens or alternative supernatural causes such as demons are ad hoc, because there is no good independent reason for believing that an alien or a demon who had such powers to resurrect the dead exists. However, there are good independent reasons (viz. the cosmological and fine tuning arguments) for thinking that there is a God who created the universe with its laws of nature (Loke 2017b, forthcoming; Craig and Moreland 2009); a God with such powers would have no difficulty raising the dead. There are also reasons for thinking that such a God would interfere in history by becoming incarnate and that it is highly improbable that we would find the evidence we do for the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as the evidence from witnesses to his empty tomb and later appearances, if Jesus was not God incarnate and did not rise from the dead (Swinburne 2003, 2013a, 2013b; cf. Cavin and Colombetti 2013).

Third, apart from the above conclusion, even if he doesn’t spend time on the independent arguments for the existence of God (he has done that in other books), Loke does actually spend some time in Chapter 8 (specifically section 8.3) discussing some related problems in picking out a supernatural hypothesis, including Alvin Plantinga’s argument from dwindling probabilities and Michael Martin’s argument for the low probability of Jesus’ resurrection even if God exists. Both of these arguments are, in my view, more sophisticated versions of Faizal’s objection. However, I haven’t seen any engagement in this thread on this material, and I don’t have time to summarize them from scratch for everyone.

Fourth, one idea would be to consider all of the logically possible supernatural hypotheses similar to what we did with the naturalistic ones. For example, we would have the supernatural mass hallucination, supernatural Resurrection, supernatural body stealing, etc. It would be more difficult than with the naturalistic case, but perhaps one could argue against each of these supernatural alternatives by showing that they are ad hoc as opposed to the Resurrection hypothesis, by (for example) using other arguments for the truth of Christianity.

This is not a new endeavor at all: this is exactly what one would have to do to argue for the Resurrection to someone who is a Muslim, Jew, animist, or other religions. In fact in the Gospels we see the Pharisees who do not deny the reality of Jesus’ miraculous acts; they just argue that it came from Beelzebul (Matthew 12:24).

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The list that I lay out is supposed to be a list of NATURALISTIC hypotheses alternative to Jesus’ resurrection. There is no gap where that is concerned. SUPERNATURAL mass hallucination is NOT a naturalistic hypothesis. Supernatural hypotheses can be evaluated using other considerations as Daniel Ang noted. One does not need to embrace Faizal’s unrestricted methodological naturalism to rule out all supernatural hypotheses, which as I have explained before is unreasonable because a supernatural hypothesis ex hypothesi is not supposed to be a hypothesis about how the natural world when left on its own operates. Rather, one should use methodological naturalism to evaluate naturalistic hypotheses only, and when one discovers that all of them failed to explain away Jesus’ resurrection, we have identified a miracle and refuted atheism, and we then go on and evaluate different supernatural hypotheses using other considerations as Daniel noted.

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Daniel Ang has summarized the situation well in his latest post on this thread. His observations and his quotations from my book would be my reply to you.

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I found Dr. Loke’s syllogistic approach helpfully clarifying for someone interested in reviewing the available historical considerations (I realize that’s not everyone). I also appreciate this book generously being made available for free (and his willingness to engage with comments here)!

For anyone who has seen or read debates on this topic, it can seem like there are endless hypotheticals to consider. To help wrap your mind around this, I recommend starting by looking at section 1.4 “The approach of this book” and I think you will see more immediately how this can helpfully organize one’s thinking about it (whichever side of the debate one is on).

For Dr. Loke, I was wondering whether he felt eschatology was a fundamental component to the definition of resurrection (or understanding the resurrection as a concept). I have not finished the book yet, so I may have not come to that section.

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I’ve been trying to avoid unlurking on this board, given previous experiences, but could not stand silent for the abuse of the field of Statistics occuring in this thread.

[Loke] also advances arguments for the small probability of each of these hypotheses.
What is the margin of error of these probability estimates? Given the length of times, the thinness of source data, the tangential nature of much of the evidence, and the inevitable caveats-and-disagreements-between-experts on the details of what they mean, I would expect them to be very high for the high-level 'analysis' contained in this book.

To put it another way, how certain can we be that the “small probabilities” are definitely as small as Loke thinks they are, given how murky and small the lens is that we’re looking through (figuratively speaking)?

Having, on occasion, had to calculate, and document, calculations based upon tenuous and ropy data, I can tell you that the margins of error overwhelm the value (or even the order of magnitude) of the calculated measure very quickly.

Assuming Loke’s arguments work, we are left with the large probability that a non-naturalistic (or supernatural) hypothesis must be true.
I would argue that this is false. Either we assume methodological naturalism, and the probability of the supernatural is zero by definition (so that the natural probabilities must be either underestimated, or non-exhaustive), or we reject methodological naturalism. In which case the probabilities of all outcomes (natural or supernatural) are incalculable, as they rely on the whim of whichever supernatural entity (or entities) control the outcome (whether that entity is Yahweh, Ra, Odin, or whoever, and no you don't get to cherry pick which).

We can estimate, given methodological naturalism, and a bunch of date, what the probability will be of rain tomorrow. Given the existence of the Goddess Demeter (for example), we can’t (it all comes down to whether she’s pleased with us or not).

I would further point out that, even if the probabilities of all the natural causes summed to 1, there is no requirement that the estimates of these probabilities must also needs sum to 1 (due to estimation errors). Therefore the claim that the difference between those estimates and 1 must be the the probability of a supernatural event, is demonstrably fallacious.

@Faizal_Ali argues that the (supernatural) Resurrection hypothesis is not the only possible supernatural hypothesis, but there are potentially a large number of these, each with their own probabilities.
As above, I would argue that the probability of all "supernatural hypothes[es]" are equally zero (assuming methodological naturalism), or equally incalculable (relaxing this assumption).
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