An Argument against the Argument against Miracles

[Don Mc]

According to Hume's famous "general maxim" against the confirmation of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." The basic idea is that the laws of nature being what they are, and human nature being what it is, the probability of a miracle is always lower than the probability that the testimony given for it is simply false. In this Hume seems to have anticipated the logic of Carl Sagan, who popularized the idea that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

While this principle appears rational enough at first blush, there are reasons to think it's not sound. First, it was Hume himself who spelled out the problem of induction – that there is no logical basis for inferring future outcomes from past experiences. Assuming there exists a set of well-defined "laws of nature," those regularities would seem to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. But if the laws of nature are descriptive, there is no reason to think miracles cannot or should not occur. Second, the argument against miracles is essentially circular. Hume asserts that there is "uniform experience" against the resurrection, for example, adding that a man risen from the dead "has never been observed, in any age or country." The question of the resurrection, however, is precisely whether or not Jesus was observed by his disciples to have risen from the dead. To say that a resurrection event was never observed because there is "uniform experience" against it is to beg that question (and we should bear in mind that there is equally uniform experience that life does not arise from nonliving elements – yet here we are). Finally, while it's true that human nature has the potential to corrupt the testimony of eyewitnesses and the writings of biographers and historians, it also has the potential to corrupt the field reports, lab results, journal articles, textbooks, etc., that lead us to accept the same scientific theories thought to render miracle reports implausible or even impossible. The problem of "confirmation bias" among humans, and scientists in particular, is well documented.

Evidently underlying popular skepticism of miracles is a belief that miracles are inherently, extremely improbable. But that seems to hold only if a miracle is defined in naturalistic terms. After all, the proposition "A man rose from the dead by natural processes" appears considerably less probable on its face than the proposition "Jesus Christ rose from the dead by the power of God." As Paul put it, "Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?" (Acts 26:8)

Questions for debate:
Are miracles improbable? If so, how improbable are they and why?
Could historical evidence for a miracle give us good evidence for theism?

[Mithrae]

1) Any supposed miracle will have uniform experience against it.

Not to jump in on your discussion with Don too much, but this seems to be simply an attempt by Hume to define miracles out of existence. If a long-dead corpses are seen to be resurrected and start talking and eating and walking on water on one or two occasions, then there's no longer uniform experience against it so it mustn't be a miracle? That's absurd. A miracle is an act of a god distinguished (both observationally/pragmatically, and theologically from Christian 'providence' and God's general 'sustaining' of the universe) by its marked deviation from the normal expected course of events. If god decided to miraculously heal someone a few times each day, somewhere in the world, then there'd be thousands of miracles per year; that still wouldn't make them normal or expected - most folk would still go their whole lives without themselves or even their close friends and family experiencing one - and certainly wouldn't mean that they're not acts of god!

Occasionally getting in a correct guess about our nearest and dearest's behaviour based on extrapolation from the past is a far cry from objectively observing neural activity to predict behaviour with high/100% accuracy (proving or strongly implying causation). In the latter case the only way to save the idea of free will would be an ad hoc and possibly incoherent assertion that our experience of a freely-made decision is distinct from and follows after the 'actual' decision, which we therefore didn't consciously make at all.

I don't agree. I think the difference is entirely quantitative rather than qualitative, even if extremely different quantitatively-speaking.

Would you agree that it should be possible to demonstrate both that decisions are caused by brain chemistry and, more importantly, that this brain chemistry precedes our experience of choice? And if so, that it would follow that the actual decisions are not being consciously made by us at all - that what we experience as choice is an effect rather than a cause?

Yes, but that's true of naturalistic explanations also; ad hoc alterations can be introduced to adjust virtually any theory to new observations. Doing so isn't best practice in science of course, but miracles (like most things which we as individuals accept as true or useful information) generally aren't a subject of science to begin with. If your wallet goes missing and someone tells you "Jack took your wallet," that is 'non-falsifiable' and always functional in the sense you're describing; if someone says they saw Jack elsewhere maybe it was a twin, if your wallet is found in Jill's room maybe Jack put it there, if Jack is dead maybe he left instructions in his will etc.

As I said, conventional scientific theories* have to be made consistent with other observations, which is exactly what you are doing with these ad hoc alterations (which weaken the theory).
*Perhaps we shouldn't call them scientific theories per se, just inductive theories in general.

Limitations on 'functionality' are a consequence of specificity in the theory and the parameters constraining causal factor/s, and there's no reason - in principle - why miracle explanations shouldn't be limited thus. For example in Christian orthodoxy God is good, God is "not the author of confusion" (one or two stated exceptions aside, I suppose ) and God alone is to be worshiped; so purported miracles being performed by someone would be falsified if they started telling everyone to worship the golden calf which gave them their power. But even so, I think it's a bit of a red herring to argue that a theory with <5% probability is somehow not 'falsified' simply because it's still 'functional.'

Yes, notice how here you rely on a logical inconsistency rather than an ad hoc alteration to explain the observation. This illustrates my point when I said it doesn't have to be made consistent with any other observation.

What you have here isn't even "falsified", because it never graduated beyond the realm of married bachelors.

Put another way, you are trying to "falsify" by deduction when the objection being raised is that it needs to be falsified by induction.

You seem to be contradicting yourself; you're saying that miracles are always a functional explanation but also, somehow, on the same level as married bachelors? You also seem to be mischaracterizing the scenario; the working hypothesis of miracles would be falsified by the observation of idolatry, or alternatively would have to remain consistent with non-idolatrous observations to remain viable. I'm not sure, but I think the distinction you're making between deductive falsification and inductive falsification is a consequence of your focus on functionality (versus my focus on probability): Functionality can only be limited or constitute grounds for falsification based on the specificity/parameters of the theory itself, as I suggested, which would correspond to what you're calling deductive falsification.

If it's a functional explanation then it must fall somewhere on the probability scale, even if that probability is zero or not precisely known.

OK, stop right there. This is epistemic probability we are talking about here. It doesn't make sense to say you don't "know" what the epistemic probability of something is, except perhaps to mean that you simply are unable to adequately interpret the information you have. And if it's categorically impossible to interpret the info you have, then... the probability is undefined!

What's the probability that Priam was actually king of Troy or David was actually king of Jerusalem? My answer (since I've used the example before) would be more or less the same for both, somewhere in the order of 60-90%. For some questions the probability range may be much broader, even 0-100%. That's not precisely known, but it's still on the probability scale. Doubtless many folk would have no ready answer and perhaps no idea where to begin if they wanted one, but that's obviously not the same thing as it being categorically impossible to interpret the available information.

If an alien explanation of Jesus' resurrection were found to have >99% probability, then divine intervention must have <1% (arguably much less, since the hoax/hallucination etc. possibilities are somewhere in there also!). The only way to describe that as not falsified would be by defining falsification as "absolute proof of impossibility," which seems absurd and would make most scientific theories 'unfalsifiable' too.

It can only be concluded to have >99% probability in the first place if you exclude miracles (which are incongruities by definition) as a matter of course.

This would seem to imply that in your view, philosophical naturalism or an axiomatic rejection of divine intervention is pre-requisite for all high-confidence knowledge??

I would say that miracles (and conspiracy theories, aliens, poltergeists etc.) don't need to be axiomatically excluded to have high confidence in another conclusion, just acknowledged to have prior probabilities close to zero. If the circumstances seem to support a 'miracle' conclusion obviously the probability of that conclusion being correct increases; if new information has the circumstances very strongly supporting the alien intervention theory while now supporting the miracle theory weakly or not all, then the alien intervention conclusion has a high probability of being correct and the miracle theory would be falsified.

What distinction are you seeing between a generic resurrection and a divine one? As above, I would think the less specific claim would necessarily have less scope for falsification; the only way to falsify a 'generic resurrection' would be by showing that there was no resurrection, but that would obviously falsify the divine one also, whereas the divine explanation can also be falsified by either proving some other cause or disproving the existence of god/possibility of god's intervention.

For a generic resurrection you only need to show it's incongruent with other observations of reality. For a divine resurrection, it doesn't matter if it's incongruent with other observations, because that's the whole point of a miracle.

I'm still not following you - what do you mean by 'other' observations? Observations of other corpses? That would be like saying that observations of a million other feathers falling lazily to the ground can falsify the claim of one feather falling at the same speed as a lead ball.

[FarWanderer3]

1) Any supposed miracle will have uniform experience against it.

Not to jump in on your discussion with Don too much, but this seems to be simply an attempt by Hume to define miracles out of existence. If a long-dead corpses are seen to be resurrected and start talking and eating and walking on water on one or two occasions, then there's no longer uniform experience against it so it mustn't be a miracle? That's absurd.

And yet if such a thing were to be witnessed en masse and well documented, the epistemic probability of corpses naturally rising from the dead etc. would skyrocket, would it not?

A miracle is an act of a god distinguished (both observationally/pragmatically, and theologically from Christian 'providence' and God's general 'sustaining' of the universe) by its marked deviation from the normal expected course of events.

I fail to see much if any significant difference between what you are saying here and "Any supposed miracle will have uniform experience against it."

If god decided to miraculously heal someone a few times each day, somewhere in the world, then there'd be thousands of miracles per year; that still wouldn't make them normal or expected - most folk would still go their whole lives without themselves or even their close friends and family experiencing one - and certainly wouldn't mean that they're not acts of god!

If we had thousands of well-documented cases of limb regeneration a year, surely you don't think it would in that world be regarded as "scientifically impossible" would you?

Occasionally getting in a correct guess about our nearest and dearest's behaviour based on extrapolation from the past is a far cry from objectively observing neural activity to predict behaviour with high/100% accuracy (proving or strongly implying causation). In the latter case the only way to save the idea of free will would be an ad hoc and possibly incoherent assertion that our experience of a freely-made decision is distinct from and follows after the 'actual' decision, which we therefore didn't consciously make at all.

I don't agree. I think the difference is entirely quantitative rather than qualitative, even if extremely different quantitatively-speaking.

Would you agree that it should be possible to demonstrate both that decisions are caused by brain chemistry

Not sufficiently, no. Free will is a presupposition people have independent of science. And I actually think scientific presuppositions exclude free will as a matter of course.

Yes, but that's true of naturalistic explanations also; ad hoc alterations can be introduced to adjust virtually any theory to new observations. Doing so isn't best practice in science of course, but miracles (like most things which we as individuals accept as true or useful information) generally aren't a subject of science to begin with. If your wallet goes missing and someone tells you "Jack took your wallet," that is 'non-falsifiable' and always functional in the sense you're describing; if someone says they saw Jack elsewhere maybe it was a twin, if your wallet is found in Jill's room maybe Jack put it there, if Jack is dead maybe he left instructions in his will etc.

As I said, conventional scientific theories* have to be made consistent with other observations, which is exactly what you are doing with these ad hoc alterations (which weaken the theory).
*Perhaps we shouldn't call them scientific theories per se, just inductive theories in general.

Limitations on 'functionality' are a consequence of specificity in the theory and the parameters constraining causal factor/s, and there's no reason - in principle - why miracle explanations shouldn't be limited thus. For example in Christian orthodoxy God is good, God is "not the author of confusion" (one or two stated exceptions aside, I suppose ) and God alone is to be worshiped; so purported miracles being performed by someone would be falsified if they started telling everyone to worship the golden calf which gave them their power. But even so, I think it's a bit of a red herring to argue that a theory with <5% probability is somehow not 'falsified' simply because it's still 'functional.'

Yes, notice how here you rely on a logical inconsistency rather than an ad hoc alteration to explain the observation. This illustrates my point when I said it doesn't have to be made consistent with any other observation.

What you have here isn't even "falsified", because it never graduated beyond the realm of married bachelors.

Put another way, you are trying to "falsify" by deduction when the objection being raised is that it needs to be falsified by induction.

You seem to be contradicting yourself; you're saying that miracles are always a functional explanation but also, somehow, on the same level as married bachelors?

Miracles are not inherently married bachelors. I was (clumsily, granted) trying to point out that your criteria for falsification was to show that in order for it to be true it would have to be logically incoherent. This is not how inductive reasoning works.

You also seem to be mischaracterizing the scenario; the working hypothesis of miracles would be falsified by the observation of idolatry, or alternatively would have to remain consistent with non-idolatrous observations to remain viable.

"It's a miracle unless there is idolatry" is your hypothesis, and it is unfalsifiable; even observations of idolatry don't falsify it.

If it's a functional explanation then it must fall somewhere on the probability scale, even if that probability is zero or not precisely known.

OK, stop right there. This is epistemic probability we are talking about here. It doesn't make sense to say you don't "know" what the epistemic probability of something is, except perhaps to mean that you simply are unable to adequately interpret the information you have. And if it's categorically impossible to interpret the info you have, then... the probability is undefined!

What's the probability that Priam was actually king of Troy or David was actually king of Jerusalem? My answer (since I've used the example before) would be more or less the same for both, somewhere in the order of 60-90%. For some questions the probability range may be much broader, even 0-100%. That's not precisely known, but it's still on the probability scale. Doubtless many folk would have no ready answer and perhaps no idea where to begin if they wanted one, but that's obviously not the same thing as it being categorically impossible to interpret the available information.

That you have made these claims in the past doesn't mean that they made sense when you made them. I mean, when you give a range of 60-90%, then what's the probability that the probability is 60%? And what's the probability that the probability is 78%? Etc etc. it's absurd.

The only reason to frame it in such a way that I can think of is to indicate you haven't really thought it through by that point, and that you are just providing a rough 2nd order estimate for what your conclusion might be.

As for miracles, you could interpret them to have a fixed probability of infinitely close to zero, I suppose.

If an alien explanation of Jesus' resurrection were found to have >99% probability, then divine intervention must have <1% (arguably much less, since the hoax/hallucination etc. possibilities are somewhere in there also!). The only way to describe that as not falsified would be by defining falsification as "absolute proof of impossibility," which seems absurd and would make most scientific theories 'unfalsifiable' too.

It can only be concluded to have >99% probability in the first place if you exclude miracles (which are incongruities by definition) as a matter of course.

This would seem to imply that in your view, philosophical naturalism or an axiomatic rejection of divine intervention is pre-requisite for all high-confidence knowledge??

It's required for any knowledge acquired through induction, yes.

I should clarify that you can also presuppose an explanation for anything you want on faith (as opposed to induction) and then still be able to build inductive knowledge around it. For example, to me the Christian worldview functions on faith in God first (and his miracles), and on that basis that the rest of the world he made for us is comprehensible through induction. Of course many would disagree, but I think they are just confused.

So the Christians are perfectly capable of using induction (doing science, etc.) within their own framework.

What distinction are you seeing between a generic resurrection and a divine one? As above, I would think the less specific claim would necessarily have less scope for falsification; the only way to falsify a 'generic resurrection' would be by showing that there was no resurrection, but that would obviously falsify the divine one also, whereas the divine explanation can also be falsified by either proving some other cause or disproving the existence of god/possibility of god's intervention.

For a generic resurrection you only need to show it's incongruent with other observations of reality. For a divine resurrection, it doesn't matter if it's incongruent with other observations, because that's the whole point of a miracle.

I'm still not following you - what do you mean by 'other' observations? Observations of other corpses? That would be like saying that observations of a million other feathers falling lazily to the ground can falsify the claim of one feather falling at the same speed as a lead ball.

Let's back up. I realize the source of confusion.
If there's is an event with the effect of a resurrection, the effect is falsifiable. Assuming that the effect is confirmed, a hypothesis that the resurrection was the result of divine intervention is unfalsifiable.

When I said "generic" resurrection I was referring to the effect only. And when I said "divine" resurrection I was referring to the cause only.

[koko]

As we discussed on another thread, there simply is no argument against miracles. The Bible teaches that Jesus is the same today as he ever was. He was the one who said his ministers could duplicate and surpass his miracles. No time stamp was ever put on that promise. Therefore, we are supposed to have miracles today precisely as happened and as promised in the New Testament. There is no biblical foundation to any claim that would attempt to counter this.

[Mithrae]

I'm still not following you - what do you mean by 'other' observations? Observations of other corpses? That would be like saying that observations of a million other feathers falling lazily to the ground can falsify the claim of one feather falling at the same speed as a lead ball.

Let's back up. I realize the source of confusion.
If there's is an event with the effect of a resurrection, the effect is falsifiable. Assuming that the effect is confirmed, a hypothesis that the resurrection was the result of divine intervention is unfalsifiable.

When I said "generic" resurrection I was referring to the effect only. And when I said "divine" resurrection I was referring to the cause only.

Backing up a bit might be helpful; sometimes I feel a bit bogged down in the back-and-forth of so many post segments. So just trying to get my bearings here... to begin with, I'm not sure if or where you've shown yet that a divine intervention hypothesis is substantially different from any other hypothesis of comparable specificity?

In post #48 you said that divine intervention hypotheses can and often have been falsified 'colloquially' (such as being proven as not having occurred, hoaxes/fraud, more plausibly explained etc.) just not 'epistemically,' but didn't really respond to my follow up comments that whether or not more formal/strict standards apply in the hard sciences, in terms of general knowing the purpose of falsifiability is to recognize and avoid the scenario in which any circumstances are taken as confirming a conclusion. Demonstrated examples of 'colloquial' falsification more than accomplish that; so we can indeed say that some circumstances are far less compatible with a miracle conclusion, meaning that we can validly conclude other circumstances to be far more indicative of a miracle conclusion. Even if we identified some more abstract form of falsification beyond that, I'm not sure it would change those facts, would it?

In post #60 you suggested that divine intervention hypotheses can be 'deductively' falsified - just not 'inductively' - but (setting aside the more dubious latter part for now) I don't think the core of my response was addressed: That inasmuch as deductive falsification is even in view, the distinction seems to be an artefact of your focus on and my reply regarding the functionality of a miracle theory (its logical coherency or possibility), in contrast to a more practical focus on the relative probabilities of that and competing theories.

Here above we see a third distinction, that miracles may be falsified 'generically' or in terms of actual effect, just not in terms of divine (only divine?) hypotheses as to cause (except perhaps deductively and colloquially?)

If miracle claims can be falsified in terms of their empirical effect... and can be falsified in terms of logical deduction... and can be falsified colloquially on a similar level as other knowledge outside the hard sciences - and we haven't seen any substantial way in which they differ from other types of explanation - can we still say that they are not falsifiable? Granted, there'll always be some proponents who'll refuse to acknowledge any falsification of global floods or weeping statues or Fatima sun hijinks; that's true for every type of viewpoint. But unless I'm missing something it seems fairly clear including by your own suggestions that many if not most miracle claims are indeed falsifiable, in more or less every relevant sense short of absolute/logical impossibility.

[Don Mc]

My take is a little different. When Hume refers to "evidence" in the context of his anti-miracle argument, he means general background knowledge in terms of a frequency interpretation of probability of the event (which sounds like what you mean by the "normalizing" factor above?) – rather than specific facts relevant to the case at hand. That's why he asserts that his argument amounts to a "full proof...against the existence of any miracle." Essentially he weighs the background evidence against the "testimony" for the particular miracle. I don't recall him suggesting that testimonial evidence could ever warrant belief.

So a Christian defending the resurrection might appeal not only to the written "testimony" of the NT documents, but specifically to the set of facts behind the narratives: early witnesses to the empty tomb, the disciples' collective experiences of Jesus appearing to them, the rise of the early church in Jerusalem on the preaching of the resurrection and in the face of violent threats, failure of Jesus' enemies to produce his body (or even claim to know where it is or what happened to it), and the dramatic conversion of Saul of Tarsus.

By contrast, Hume merely presumes the previous number of confirmed resurrection events to be zero and dismisses the present case out of hand regardless of any other facts. This dismissal means that even the resurrection counts as just another check in the loss column for miracles. One of my objections to Hume's procedure, then, is that it appears to continually and artificially "dilute" the prior probability of miracles by rejecting case-specific evidence for miracles in favor of an already diluted prior based on a fairly subjective frequency interpretation of evidence.

This reminds me of a thread from 2017. (Which you might have seen/remember: What was your previous username, by the way? I feel like I would remember posts of this quality, but your name isn't familiar.)

I was around in 2017, but I've never been the most active participant here by any means and I don't recall having a hand in that particular discussion. Being not the most creative or private person in the world, I have gone by "Don B. McIntosh," "Don McIntosh," and "DBMJ." I changed the names only because I would forget my password after being away for a while, would get locked out of the system and have to start over.

Speaking of quality: using as a personal rule of thumb the principle that the best arguments take the most time, thought and effort to answer, your own posts are high quality indeed.

I think I've found the core problem of the most common argument made against miracles and the like. Stopping short of appealing to philosophical naturalism, the argument basically states that since the poster has seen no "confirmed" examples of paranormal events, the probability of such events must be considered to be zero - and therefore any more normal explanations will necessarily be more plausible.

The problem with the argument is that zero "confirmed" paranormal events may not be significantly different from one or two or even a dozen confirmed events, at least at any high level of significance: And by making that argument, in asserting their 'zero' figure to be significant, proponents are implicitly assuming answers to the relevant questions beforehand. Obviously if it's not a valid probabilistic argument, it then amounts to little more than an appeal to ignorance and personal incredulity of the various reported miracle observations we've all heard of.

Well said. Or as Hume himself put it bluntly enough in the context of his critique of inductivism, "Your appeal to past experience decides nothing in the present case." All of that is why I keep underscoring the importance of new or at least "case-specific" evidence, rather than simply background evidence alone. Otherwise Hume's procedure would mean rejection of most any singular historical event, not just miracle testimony. There's only been one Resurrection of Jesus, yes, but also only one Hannibal's Crossing of the Alps, one Battle of Agincourt, one Protestant Reformation, one destruction of the World Trade Center, etc. The contextually specific and highly complex nature of historical events is such that they don't fit well into any particular reference class (other than maybe "historical events," lol) for determining their frequencies, and thus they are not defined well in terms of probabilities and laws of science.

I believe most historians would agree with the above in principle. But I also suppose it would be fair to point out that at least one serious historian-philosopher, Richard Carrier, believes not only that all of history should be reconstructed using Bayes' Theorem as the preeminent historiographic methodological tool, but that a frequentist interpretation of probability is the only way to assess the prior probabilities for historical events that are plugged into the theorem. Needless to say, he winds up with the same kind of skepticism as Hume, and never (to my knowledge) explains why Bayesian methods should be preferred if frequentism is the only way to derive the prior. I suspect the whole idea, as you suggest above, is to dress up a foregone conclusion in mathematical garb.

Seems to me that unless we have sufficiently accurate and detailed knowledge of a subject to show that there should be a significant difference between some and zero positive results, all such arguments are invalid. It's basically the same problem as with arguments from silence; in the case of say Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster we might reasonably expect that there should be solid evidence and hence absence of solid evidence (zero positive results) is evidence of absence, but in many other examples that's obviously not the case.

Agreed – although in the past I have used Bigfoot to argue that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, since no matter how much ground we cover Bigfoot could always be lurking just beyond the next hill...

[Don Mc]

Why suddenly take their testimony at face value if those guys were just so many religiously indoctrinated, ignorant, Iron Age simpletons?

I haven't suggested that description of them. In fact I've said that I would give more or less equal weight to the named, formal sworn testimonies of relevant professionals in the 21st century as in the 16th and by implication the 1st also, at least in terms of raw observation; the smaller knowledge pool of folk in earlier eras presumably would have fairly minimal impact there.

Fair enough. I may have read too much into your "Iron Age propaganda tracts" comment.

The key point about the antiquity of the gospel reports lies in the paucity of contextual information both generally, regarding the disciples, authors and Jesus specifically, and perhaps most importantly regarding the earliest decades of composition/transmission of the extant documents.

Here I have to disagree. The "contextual information" surrounding the Gospels is quite copious, if we take that to mean historical background information of the reports, filled in by not only the four evangelists in the Gospels themselves, but by Luke in the Acts, Paul's letters, other New Testament authors, early church fathers like Clement and Ignatius, the Jewish historian Josephus and – to a much lesser extent, yes – other early Roman historians and some Jewish rabbis.

As for the composition and dissemination of the extant documents, I think textual criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism have made great strides in tracing those developments, and the sheer volume of m.s.s. available so widely and so early lend further weight to arguments for an early and mostly consistent text.

And if they were so quick to believe miracles, why would they doubt the resurrection at all, and why would Jesus consistently rebuke them for their lack of faith and call them "slow to believe"? You mentioned cherry-picking earlier, but it seems like you may be doing a bit of that with the testimony of the disciples.

From all indications the disciples doubted the resurrection only because they didn't believe the Savior and Messiah who had frequently worked miracles among them could be killed in the first place. Even if their prior probability of the resurrection was not high, they still believed Jesus would continue working miracles – not just healing and prophesying, but overthrowing the Roman empire and establishing the kingdom of God in its place – so (apart from a brief period of disappointment following the crucifixion) their prior probability of miracles happening remained high.

That would be one explanation, true. But much of the behaviour reported of the disciples in the gospels reads like fable or parable, their doubts perhaps most obviously. The 'doubting Thomas' pericope is the least subtle; don't be like that guy, the reader is exhorted, blessed is he who believes without seeing! Likewise with other stories in which they are slow to believe, or their fleeing and denial of Christ challenging later Christians by contrast to stand firm in their faith, and so on. That doesn't prove those events didn't happen, but particularly in light of the authors' habits of creatively fixing facts to suit their needs it's a real possibility worth considering.

When I read the account of doubting Thomas, I am struck by how drastic his demand really is: "unless I place my hands in the print of the nails…" Honestly I could see myself saying much the same thing in a similar situation:

"I'm going to need some serious, indisputable evidence that Jesus is actually alive if you're going to ask me to stake everything on him again. You might remember that the last time I did that all I got for it was a dead 'messiah' and a lot of embarrassment for running away in a panic. You guys keep saying you've seen him alive after he got himself crucified. Well, I haven't seen him alive, so I really have no idea what you may have seen – if you actually saw anything at all…"

And so forth. That kind of response seems entirely realistic in human terms, in other words. But what baffles me is why the evangelists would invent such accounts. Here they are supposedly attributing words to some of their best friends, not to mention their Master and Savior, which they never actually said – in the service of a set of sincerely and reverently held beliefs, including the belief that Jesus spoke the very words of God? And it hardly seems to suit the immediate needs of the church to depict Jesus shamefully crucified or his best disciples described as cowards and betrayers.

Take Jesus' prediction of the fall of Jerusalem, detailed in all three Synoptics. Either Jesus had foreknowledge of the event or the disciples deliberately worked a phony prediction into the narrative after the fact to bolster Jesus' divine/messianic status. The latter scenario would mean that they knew they were lying, that they were deliberately misrepresenting Jesus, and that the Olivet Discourse was tacked on to already circulating documents and oral tradition only after 70 AD. What would be the point of adding an ex post facto account of a "prediction" when it would be so obvious to the readership that no foreknowledge was necessary to make it?

I would say it's near certain the first gospel wasn't written by an apostle, but more likely than not that traditional attribution of the latter three is correct; especially John, though curiously the likely disciple/eyewitness account is the one which seems to have the least interest in mundane facts! But the potential accuracy of later attribution doesn't explain why the authors were unwilling to put their names to the words they wrote in the first place, and even if we can speculate some good reason as to why that might be (eg. fear of reprisals) it doesn't change the fact that even named, sworn testimony is far from conclusive and the gospels are a far, far cry from that!

Ehrman is no longer a believer, but he places the Gospels in the genre of "sacred history" along with the books of Joshua, Kings and Chronicles. For the purpose of sacred or theological history there was no need to call attention to the author, and possibly a deliberate intention to downplay the importance of the author altogether. That would be unheard of for a modern historian, of course, but ancient historians operated by a different set of cultural norms and expectations. If the "historian's fallacy" entails misjudging the appropriateness of past human actions based on present conventions, that would presumably include misjudging the actions of ancient writers of history.

He probably was tortured, humiliated and killed, a fact impossible to deny in the early years and therefore eventually incorporated into the absolute central doctrine, of Pauline theology at least (despite Jesus himself preaching little if anything along those lines). The inclusion of impossible-to-deny facts doesn't make the presence of far-fetched or just-a-little-too-convenient stories more plausible. The obvious purpose of the gospels - explicitly stated in John - was to promote belief in Jesus. Only Luke even pretends to be writing accurate history, yet plays fast and loose with the source material perhaps even more than 'Matthew' (albeit a bit more subtly in most cases!)

Impossible to deny? The Passion narrative is prominently figured in the Synoptics, while the week before Passover and the culminating event, the sacrifice of the "Lamb of God," takes up almost half of John. As the NT writers are not shy to mention, the passion is prefigured variously in the OT, especially in the Psalms and Isaiah's "Suffering Servant." The sacrificial atonement of Jesus is not some embarrassing, extraneous fact that the poor disciples could not manage to sweep under the rug, but lies at the heart of Christian theology from the Old Testament, through the Gospels and Acts, and then, yes, the more explicit and systematic writings of Paul.

In some cases I'd agree with you, but details like whether or not there were guards and an earthquake at the tomb (Matthew vs the rest), number of angels present (Matthew/Mark vs Luke/John) or whether the disciples went to Galilee (Luke vs the rest) are hardly minor discrepancies considering how much faith one would have to put in the reliability of these reports to consider the resurrection probable! In some cases those discrepancies seem to clearly line up with other themes/theological agendas of the authors (eg. Matthew's guards or Luke's "stay in Jerusalem" story); in others they may plausibly and innocently have arisen from variant tellings over the decades (eg. number of angels). But even the latter would obviously be enough to cast considerable doubt on the reliability of the report as a whole.

That's one way to view it, sure. Another is to find it rather remarkable that despite their many and even substantial disagreements, all four Gospel writers have it that Jesus: claimed to be the Son of God, worked miracles of healing and exorcism, predicted his own death and resurrection, was crucified, was buried in a tomb, was raised from the dead three days later, and then appeared to his disciples following his resurrection. In other words, they agree on what is definitive for the Christian faith and only disagree elsewhere. Christianity holds there there is but one Son of God and Savior, Jesus Christ. How many angels there are, or even how many might have been at the tomb of Jesus when the women arrived Sunday morning for that matter, is but marginally relevant in comparison.

According to Acts the disciples waited seven weeks before beginning to preach the resurrection. Why wait, with such an important message to share? Seems like that'd be enough time for a body - even assuming it was in their opponents' possession - to decay beyond recognition, wouldn't it? (Hat tip to Tired of the Nonsense for that.) As I noted, plenty of other movements such as Islam, Mormonism, Heaven's Gate etc. have been undeterred by opposition, persecution or even death - willingly self-inflicted in the latter case - but while that might attest to the sincerity of the principles or beliefs they hold, it hardly constitutes evidence for their truth.

Perhaps not, but martyrdom as direct evidence of truth is not exactly my argument. The reason martyrdom is evidence in the particular case of Jesus' disciples is that the claim was not just falsifiable in principle, but falsifiable by them. They had access to all the relevant sites, facts and witnesses. I would suggest that the Heaven's Gate followers, to the contrary, would not have subjected themselves to their fate had they known (or had the means to confirm) that the spaceship was not coming for them.

Let's say the disciples waited for seven weeks to make sure that Jesus' body had sufficiently decayed to disallow any positive identification. At no point does anyone – friend of foe of the emerging church – suggest that the Jews, or the Romans, or the disciples themselves or anyone else, found a body purported to be that of Jesus. More importantly, the disciples would know that Jesus was dead. That fact would have killed the movement right along with Jesus, on the relatively uncontroversial premise that twelve men would not place themselves and their families in harm's way to preach a message they knew to be false.

Now suppose the disciples waited for some other reason (besides the risen Jesus instructing them to, or their determination to consciously start a Jesus movement on a false assertion). It's hard to imagine that the disciples would suddenly and collectively change their minds and decide that Jesus was alive rather than dead, then go off and preach the resurrection to a physically hostile audience without making a quick check of the tomb first. Now had there been a body inside the tomb, even if unrecognizable, it seems absurd to suppose that the disciples would conclude that Jesus had resurrected on the grounds that the resurrection could not be falsified without a positive i.d. of Jesus. I'm confident that at least one of them would have thought to stop and ask how or why the body of someone other than Jesus had made its way into the tomb in his place.

Had there been an unidentifiable body found outside the tomb, on the other hand, well, that's not saying much since every dead body in history other than that of Jesus had been buried or disposed of somewhere besides the tomb of Jesus (in that case it would be the conspiracy theory rather than the resurrection that is not falsifiable). But had the identifiable body of Jesus been found instead, that again would have stopped the movement in its tracks.

[Don Mc]

Feeling a bit disadvantaged, I took the liberty of reading the text in question. Fortunately it was (much!) shorter than I expected. This is really the only part that matters:

there must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, because otherwise the event wouldn't count as a ‘miracle’. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, we have here a direct and full proof against the existence of any miracle.

He's saying any event worthy of being considered as a miracle will necessarily (by definition, basically) have uniform experience against it, and anything with uniform experience against it has proof against it.

Where I think you are getting things wrong is that you seem to think that what qualifies as "uniform experience" actually matters. He provides numerous examples of what he considers "uniform experience" for illustration purposes, which you contest; but it's rather irrelevant to contest them as you do, because the logic of the core argument works by any consistent definition of "uniform experience" (which is actually the whole point). If you want to tear his argument down you'll have to show he's equivocating between two different meanings of "uniform experience" or you'll have to attack elsewhere.

Here's a formal version of the argument. Have at it.

1) Any supposed miracle will have uniform experience against it.
2) Any supposed event with uniform experience against it will have full proof against it.
C) Any supposed miracle will have full proof against it.

Well if that's Hume's argument it's even weaker than I thought. That is, if he's saying in premise 1 that miracles have uniform experience against them because no one has ever witnessed or will ever witness a miracle, then he's simply arguing in a circle.

The logic of the overall argument is valid, though, and if that's what you mean by "the core logic works," then I agree. But even on a charitable reading the truth of the first premise is far from evident, so the argument lacks soundness. In that sense it "works" no better than the following equally valid argument:

All men are invisible.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is invisible.

If Hume is saying only that miracles have uniform experience against them prior to the present miracle claim, on the other hand, then there could be experience of it rather than against it – namely experience of the miracle that is presently claimed.

Consider how the same logic would apply to a scientific discovery (the discovery of Neptune in 1846, for example, or the implication of relativity that time can slow down). By definition the thing discovered had not, like a miracle on Hume's definition, been directly apprehended by anyone prior to the discovery; in other words just prior to the discovery there is uniform experience against it. For reference, let's call your argument above H1, and the argument directly below H2:

i) Any scientific discovery will have uniform experience against it.
ii) Any event with uniform experience against it will have full proof against it (restated from your 2 above).
iii) Any scientific discovery will have full proof against it (from i & ii).

Now if we add the following argument, call it H2.1, we wind up with a reductio:

iv) Scientific discoveries are empirically confirmed.
v) Empirically confirmed ideas do not have full proof against them.
vi) Scientific discoveries do not have full proof against them (from iv & v).
vii) Any scientific discovery will both have, and not have, full proof against it (from iii and vi).
C) Argument H2 is unsound.

And since argument H1 mirrors H2 in all logically relevant respects, argument H1 is also unsound.

[Mithrae]

I have gone by "Don B. McIntosh," "Don McIntosh,"

Ah yes, that rings a bell!

The key point about the antiquity of the gospel reports lies in the paucity of contextual information both generally, regarding the disciples, authors and Jesus specifically, and perhaps most importantly regarding the earliest decades of composition/transmission of the extant documents.

Here I have to disagree. The "contextual information" surrounding the Gospels is quite copious, if we take that to mean historical background information of the reports, filled in by not only the four evangelists in the Gospels themselves, but by Luke in the Acts, Paul's letters, other New Testament authors, early church fathers like Clement and Ignatius, the Jewish historian Josephus and – to a much lesser extent, yes – other early Roman historians and some Jewish rabbis.

As for the composition and dissemination of the extant documents, I think textual criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism have made great strides in tracing those developments, and the sheer volume of m.s.s. available so widely and so early lend further weight to arguments for an early and mostly consistent text.

We've got some information - not always especially reliable or detailed - about John the Baptist, about Jesus, his brother James, his followers Cephas, John and James, his executors Annas, Caiaphas and Pilate... and that's about it, as far as I know. I suppose you could throw in Paul and his alleged mentor Gamaliel too, despite no direct connection to the Jesus story. But the other ten of the thirteen apostles are little more than names, a couple of whom are useful props in one or two gospel stories and one of which became wrongly associated with our extant first gospel. The all-important 'Joseph of Arimathea' who supposedly seized custody of Jesus' body and provided the much vaunted tomb appears out of nowhere and disappears just as mysteriously. There's no reason to imagine that 'Matthew's' story about Herod the Great trying to kill baby Jesus is true, nor Luke's story about Herod Antipas' involvement in his trial, and the story of the census looks like total nonsense (though it's hard to imagine why Luke would come up with such a feeble tale). The only direct reference to Jesus himself outside of Christian literature is an obviously tampered with passage in Josephus; his brother James, implied by both Paul and Acts to be the leader of the movement after Jesus' death, seems to have been downplayed by Christians themselves in favour of Cephas, John and Paul, though at least a passing reference to James' death in Josephus provides some solid evidence as to his fate. Even in the case of Cephas and John we're talking about merest scraps of information, often on the level of second- or third-hand rumour: Cephas might have gone to Caesarea, Antioch and eventually Rome, possibly with Mark as an interpreter and eventually being killed there; John perhaps ended up in Ephesus, opposing Cerinthus and writing some or all of the NT's Johannine literature?

This paucity of information isn't a problem unique to Christian origins (though the two wars in Judea may well have resulted in some lost information) it's just the reality of much of history and ancient history in particular.

As for textual criticism, its conclusions tend to weigh very heavily against trusting anything the gospels say on face value; that's the reason why we can pretty sure that 'Matthew' and Luke were shameless propagandists changing and editing information at will to suit their agendas, and have some reason to suspect that gJohn may be a composite work with several layers of redaction and editing. Some scholars even point to the chiastic structure of Mark and frequent parallels to stories from the Tanakh to conclude that it too is as historically unreliable as the other three. I'm not entirely persuaded by all those claims myself, but it seems very strange to appeal to textual criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism as a defense for the reliability of the gospel stories!

That would be one explanation, true. But much of the behaviour reported of the disciples in the gospels reads like fable or parable, their doubts perhaps most obviously. The 'doubting Thomas' pericope is the least subtle; don't be like that guy, the reader is exhorted, blessed is he who believes without seeing! Likewise with other stories in which they are slow to believe, or their fleeing and denial of Christ challenging later Christians by contrast to stand firm in their faith, and so on. That doesn't prove those events didn't happen, but particularly in light of the authors' habits of creatively fixing facts to suit their needs it's a real possibility worth considering.

When I read the account of doubting Thomas, I am struck by how drastic his demand really is: "unless I place my hands in the print of the nails…" Honestly I could see myself saying much the same thing in a similar situation:

"I'm going to need some serious, indisputable evidence that Jesus is actually alive if you're going to ask me to stake everything on him again. You might remember that the last time I did that all I got for it was a dead 'messiah' and a lot of embarrassment for running away in a panic. You guys keep saying you've seen him alive after he got himself crucified. Well, I haven't seen him alive, so I really have no idea what you may have seen – if you actually saw anything at all…"

And so forth. That kind of response seems entirely realistic in human terms, in other words. But what baffles me is why the evangelists would invent such accounts. Here they are supposedly attributing words to some of their best friends, not to mention their Master and Savior, which they never actually said – in the service of a set of sincerely and reverently held beliefs, including the belief that Jesus spoke the very words of God?

Do you honestly think that the manner of speech and dialogue presented in the fourth gospel reflects that of a wandering Galilean preacher? Really? The gospel pretty much screams its theological rather than historical intent right from its opening chapter. The sayings of Jesus in Mark and Q look plausible, and quite consistent with each other, whereas John is not only radically different in style from those but utterly implausible on its own with its long, convoluted monologues and heavily-directed, occasionally nonsensical dialogues. It may be baffling why John would do so, but that he did invent words to put in his mentor's mouth seems quite obvious (except of course on the possibility that it wasn't written by him at all). Given the incongruence and weirdness of supposing that Jesus imparted the Holy Spirit (v22) without noticing that at least one apostle was absent, the 'doubting Thomas' pericope may be a later addition, perhaps (in an extremely speculative vein) intended to downplay/sideline the set of traditions represented in or which eventually produced the Gospel of Thomas.

Take Jesus' prediction of the fall of Jerusalem, detailed in all three Synoptics. Either Jesus had foreknowledge of the event or the disciples deliberately worked a phony prediction into the narrative after the fact to bolster Jesus' divine/messianic status. The latter scenario would mean that they knew they were lying, that they were deliberately misrepresenting Jesus, and that the Olivet Discourse was tacked on to already circulating documents and oral tradition only after 70 AD. What would be the point of adding an ex post facto account of a "prediction" when it would be so obvious to the readership that no foreknowledge was necessary to make it?

It should be quite obvious to the readership that Luke removed all reference to the eschatological "abomination of desolation" from that prediction and instead inserted an indefinite 'times of the gentiles.' Conversely it should be obvious to the readership that 'Matthew' added a point of emphasis to the abomination, explicitly directing the reader to Daniel, invented a brand new prophecy for Jesus' imminent return (10:23) and changed the wording of Mark 9:1 to be unambiguously eschatological in Matt. 16:28. But how many Christians even allow themselves to be consciously aware of (let alone actually accepting) those facts? Those two authors obviously were deliberately misrepresenting Jesus; I think you're overestimating how critically people would be reading those documents, as the video I posted says The appendix to the fourth gospel even goes so far as to suggest that Jesus never really predicted his imminent return at all, that it was all just an off-the-cuff expression of whimsy misunderstood by those dim-witted disciples!

Jesus may well have predicted the temple's destruction. I interpret Matthew's adamant insistence that the time was now as strongly implying that it was written c.69-73, the only real timeframe where the temple's destruction could fit in with Daniel's 70th seven - and by implication Mark might have been written even before the war began. There's nothing really new or special to be found in Mark 13, just vague warnings and a rehashing of predictions already found in the Tanakh. Daniel predicted that "the people of the prince to come" would destroy the city and the sanctuary in the same passage that a desolating abomination is introduced, and as I suggested earlier it seems entirely plausible that Jesus - perhaps hearing stories like the failed revolt of Judas the Galilean in his childhood - feared and even expected Jewish nationalism and messianic fervour to eventually provoke a greater conflict with Rome which would result in the prophecy's fulfillment. That would actually bring a lot of meaning to his teachings about a 'kingdom of God' rather than kingdom of men, rejection of material ambitions, opposition to ritual purity and Sabbath laws which surrounded and supported the temple cult, and teaching that love - for everyone and accessible by everyone, anywhere - was the real metric of divine service and favour.

If Jesus really believed that nationalism, a material focus on God's supposed throne in Jerusalem, and over-zealous messianic aspirations were going to result in the destruction of his people and their culture... do you think he might be willing to get himself deliberately martyred in order to fulfill the prophecies in a different way beforehand, in the hopes of saving at least some of his countrymen from their folly? Something to think about - I'll leave it at that for now

[FarWanderer3]

Feeling a bit disadvantaged, I took the liberty of reading the text in question. Fortunately it was (much!) shorter than I expected. This is really the only part that matters:

there must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, because otherwise the event wouldn't count as a ‘miracle’. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, we have here a direct and full proof against the existence of any miracle.

He's saying any event worthy of being considered as a miracle will necessarily (by definition, basically) have uniform experience against it, and anything with uniform experience against it has proof against it.

Where I think you are getting things wrong is that you seem to think that what qualifies as "uniform experience" actually matters. He provides numerous examples of what he considers "uniform experience" for illustration purposes, which you contest; but it's rather irrelevant to contest them as you do, because the logic of the core argument works by any consistent definition of "uniform experience" (which is actually the whole point). If you want to tear his argument down you'll have to show he's equivocating between two different meanings of "uniform experience" or you'll have to attack elsewhere.

Here's a formal version of the argument. Have at it.

1) Any supposed miracle will have uniform experience against it.
2) Any supposed event with uniform experience against it will have full proof against it.
C) Any supposed miracle will have full proof against it.

Well if that's Hume's argument it's even weaker than I thought. That is, if he's saying in premise 1 that miracles have uniform experience against them because no one has ever witnessed or will ever witness a miracle, then he's simply arguing in a circle.

The logic of the overall argument is valid, though, and if that's what you mean by "the core logic works," then I agree. But even on a charitable reading the truth of the first premise is far from evident,

The first premise is supposed to be true by definition, or at least by a logically equivalent conclusion derived from the definition. It is not a question of whether it is "evident" or not, because its criteria for being true has nothing to do with evidence, just logic and definitions. Miracles are supposed to be unique events, hence the premise.

If Hume is saying only that miracles have uniform experience against them prior to the present miracle claim, on the other hand, then there could be experience of it rather than against it – namely experience of the miracle that is presently claimed.

Prior and after (again, miracles are supposed to be unique events). As for the experience itself, it is what's in question, so to claim it as evidence for itself is circular.

Consider how the same logic would apply to a scientific discovery (the discovery of Neptune in 1846, for example, or the implication of relativity that time can slow down). By definition the thing discovered had not, like a miracle on Hume's definition, been directly apprehended by anyone prior to the discovery; in other words just prior to the discovery there is uniform experience against it. For reference, let's call your argument above H1, and the argument directly below H2:

i) Any scientific discovery will have uniform experience against it.

Opposite the P1 I provided above, this one is false by definition. No one would call it a scientific discovery in the first place if it weren't something that were continually verifiable.

[FarWanderer3]

I'm still not following you - what do you mean by 'other' observations? Observations of other corpses? That would be like saying that observations of a million other feathers falling lazily to the ground can falsify the claim of one feather falling at the same speed as a lead ball.

Let's back up. I realize the source of confusion.
If there's is an event with the effect of a resurrection, the effect is falsifiable. Assuming that the effect is confirmed, a hypothesis that the resurrection was the result of divine intervention is unfalsifiable.

When I said "generic" resurrection I was referring to the effect only. And when I said "divine" resurrection I was referring to the cause only.

Backing up a bit might be helpful; sometimes I feel a bit bogged down in the back-and-forth of so many post segments. So just trying to get my bearings here... to begin with, I'm not sure if or where you've shown yet that a divine intervention hypothesis is substantially different from any other hypothesis of comparable specificity?

Divine intervention can literally explain any event. It's the least specific (i.e. restricted) explanation you could possibly have for anything. There are no "comparables".

In post #48 you said that divine intervention hypotheses can and often have been falsified 'colloquially'

All I really meant was that some people would say "Oh this falsifies the miracle claim", and that such a statement is meaningful. Strictly speaking, they would be wrong, or at least what they mean by the 'miracle' is just in reference to the outcome (I have been using "effect" until now, but I actually think "outcome" is better).

When you falsify the outcome of a supposed event, for the mechanism ("cause") you are making any explanation unnecessary in the first place. This is not the same as showing the supposed mechanism to be false, but some people will not recognize/appreciate this distinction and will conflate. That's all there is to it.

It's the difference between observing an apple move towards the earth, and explaining that apple's motion by a theoretical force called "gravity". If it later turns out there never was an apple, would that falsify gravity? Of course not. It would only "falsify" it in the sense that it would prove that no gravity was necessarily involved in the event.

(such as being proven as not having occurred, hoaxes/fraud, more plausibly explained etc.) just not 'epistemically,'

Proving hoax/fraud is just a variation of showing that the supposed outcome did not actually occur. "More plausibly explained", on the other hand, is entirely different and certainly NOT what I meant; it is erroneous/circular because it implies there was any plausibility to the miracle explanation in the first place. Of course people might believe the new "more plausible" explanation "falsifies" the miracle explanation, but this is only true given certain assumptions (which are in my opinion and strictly speaking, erroneous).

in terms of general knowing the purpose of falsifiability is to recognize and avoid the scenario in which any circumstances are taken as confirming a conclusion.

Yes I agree. It's just important to remember that the outcome being falsifiable does not necessarily imply that the proposed mechanism is.

In post #60 you suggested that divine intervention hypotheses can be 'deductively' falsified - just not 'inductively' - but (setting aside the more dubious latter part for now) I don't think the core of my response was addressed: That inasmuch as deductive falsification is even in view, the distinction seems to be an artefact of your focus on and my reply regarding the functionality of a miracle theory (its logical coherency or possibility), in contrast to a more practical focus on the relative probabilities of that and competing theories.

Your argument went something like this:

1) "Miracle" is a good explanation unless idolatry occurs
2) Idolatry occurs
C) "Miracle" is not a good explanation

Therefore "Miracle" is "falsifiable".

The problem is that if no idolatry occurs, then you could observe the whole universe in both space and time and not be able to falsify the "miracle" explanation, even if it is, in fact, false. For example, you could replace "idolatry occurs" with any event, such as "Donald Trump does a backflip" or "Bertrand Russell's teapot exists" and claim that you proved the miracle to be falsifiable. Surely you see how arbitrary and silly such an argument is? You're just having idolatry occur in this hypothetical universe to meet the "observation" criteria I had set, when in fact there is no necessity for it to occur at all. At best you could call it "maybe falsifiable", as weird as that sounds. Scientific theories do not work this way; if a theory is false you would necessarily be able to verify its falsehood by observing the whole universe.

I called it "deductive" falsification because all it amounts to word games on your part. You can "falsify" literally anything in some hypothetical world if you insert a falsification criteria into its definition and then have that criteria met in that hypothetical world; and that's exactly what you did.

But this was not my best objection to your example. The best one was to simply point out that your (1) is itself what's unfalsifiable. For this reason, if you are confused, you can just forget I said anything about "deductive falsifiability".

As for the whole functionality vs. probability thing, there just isn't anything to say except that your presumptions about my thinking are incorrect.

Here above we see a third distinction, that miracles may be falsified 'generically' or in terms of actual effect, just not in terms of divine (only divine?) hypotheses as to cause (except perhaps deductively and colloquially?)

This is the important distinction you have been failing to make all along. You keep saying "proving X is a hoax proves that X is falsifiable". The problem is that the first "X" and the second "X" aren't actually the same thing. Classic equivocation fallacy.

As I said above, it's the difference between observing an apple move towards the earth, and explaining that apple's motion by a theoretical force called "gravity".

If miracle claims can be falsified in terms of their empirical effect... and can be falsified in terms of logical deduction... and can be falsified colloquially on a similar level as other knowledge outside the hard sciences - and we haven't seen any substantial way in which they differ from other types of explanation - can we still say that they are not falsifiable?

Of course. The empirical effect (outcome) was never what was being referred to, logical deduction was just word games, and colloquial usage is just a matter of philosophical laziness.