I have come to the conclusion that Andrew is incapable of treating any criticism, except with the most high-handed dismissal. So, although this comment is ostensibly a reply to his comment, it is more aimed at the wider audience of participants in this thread.
Andrew ‘the pot’ Loke calls Eric ‘the Kettle’ Bess black.
This is particularly risible given that Andre replied to Eric’s first criticism with:
Being repetitive does not affect the quality of the arguments, however, and may be helpful to remind the reader the points which they may have missed.
Overuse of repetition is however a sign of bad writing.
I will note that Andrew is yet again playing the “too busy” card. I would note however that Andrew was not too busy to spend six hours in babbling ramble on a minor Youtube apologist’s channel, most of it complaining about an even-more-minor Youtube counterapologist.
Much of Andrew’s reply comes under the category of the all-too-familiar argumentum ad read-my-book/watch-my-video. This become even more absurd, given that the level of detailed engagement Andrew seems to expect would seem to necessitate a whole article to respond to any single point, and a whole book to review Andrew’s own book to his satisfaction.
After misrepresenting my book multiple times, Bess concludes that my ‘overconfidence is evident’ because I assigned a minimum 99.4% probability to the resurrection’s historicity (Loke, 186, 201) and considers it a “historical certainty” (Loke, 201, 203f.) that should redefine history (Loke, 205). But why think that it is overconfident given that the six alternative hypothesis are evidently and demonstrably absurd such that assigning a 0.1% probability to each is already overly generous (see p. 186)?
I would like to address the hubris of this claim, whose perfect embodiment of the label would appear to approach a Platonic ideal. It also implicates what I was discussing on this thread.
If each alternative hypothesis has only a 0.1% chance of being true, it has a 99.9% chance of being false. Each of Andrew’s arguments against a hypothesis involve a number of assumptions, each of which would need to be true for his argument to be valid and the hypothesis false. I cannot be bothered to spend the time to count how many assumptions are involved in each argument, so will assume five (if somebody can be bothered I’m happy to redo this maths). This means (assuming for the sake of simplicity that the probability of each assumption being correct is independent), that each assumption would have to have a probability of 99.98%, or a one in five thousand probability of being wrong. I have to wonder how many of what we view as uncontested facts about history have a lower chance of being overturned.
Given this, the paucity of hard evidence supporting his speculations (well below the level of evidence supporting many of the “uncontested facts” I mention above), and the presence of contrary views (no matter how quick Andrew may be to dismiss them) I would suggest that it is Andrew’s own confidence that is “demonstrably absurd”.
The benefit of this line of thinking is that it avoids “getting into the weeds” of having to engage Andrew’s demands that address each and every one of his myriad speculations, no matter how absurd we may find them, in sufficient detail to satisfy him.