OK, anyone here interested in a group purchase on irony meters, since all of ours just blew up?
Yes. This is the game the apolgists like to play. If I may make an analogy to my own profession: In addition to being a psychiatrist I am also a psychoanalyst. As such I am well aware of the consensus that has arisen in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and related fields that the various psychoanalytic models do not provide an account of the functioning of our mind and brain that is scientifically sound (a consensus, I will add, that I accept.)
Now, if someone wished to defend psychoanalysis, how would one do so? Would he insist that the neuroscientist intimately familiarize himself with the enormous and highly abstruse psychoanalytic literature that has accumulated over the past century before the analyst will deem neuroscientist sufficiently informed to have an opinion on the subject worth taking seriously? I think the neuroscientist would be quite justified in calling the psychoanalyst out on this blatant ploy to avoid addressing the issue directly.
The situation is similar here. I have no problem with those who have decided to accept Christianity is true engaging in abstruse internal debates regarding the minutiae of the texts they hold sacred. But if they want to engage in the outside world, they need to do it on the terms of that world. And here, the problem is quite simple: There is no epistemic system which can determine that something which violates the laws of physical science has occurred, particularly not in the distant past, other than science itself. History, textual criticism and all the rest are subservient to science. That’s just the way it is.
If we were completely 100% satisfied there were 500 people who sincerely believed that yesterday they saw a unicorn, we still would not consider that sufficient to decide that unicorns actually exist. The empirical evidence against the existence of unicorns is just too strong. Same with resurrections.
Loke and his fellow apologists can spend as many millions of words they want engaging in special pleading. It won’t make special pleading any less a fallacy.