Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Intelligent Design logic entailments for resurrection explanations

One might worry that just as I accuse ID of being a fancy version of some type of argument from ignorance (where ID advocates readily rely on identifying a knowledge gap that science could potentially fill in later,) then it might also be possible that the inference to the resurrection is also an argument from ignorance--something that could be filled in naturally with ad hoc explanation or perhaps later historical discovery. It turns out this is a correct insight.

If one holds that there was some guy (say, Jesus) who died, and then he was alive again, there are several logical possibilities, though some of them admittedly have very remote probability or believability. For example, I am aware of no one saying that (1) alien beings from the Andromeda galaxy resurrected Jesus. Nor that (2) a very rare breed of bacteria just happened to have repaired his bodily systems. But many in history have claimed that (3) God resurrected Jesus. Or consider (4) [insert another logically compatible explanation here].

It might very well be that explanations 1-3 are wrong, and that some explanation (4) is the case. But of all the options I've seen, it appears to me that (3) is the best. Naturally there are a host of 4's given by all sorts of people. But (3) has seemed best to me up to this moment, but I have friends who think that (3) is every bit as crazy as (1) and (2).

Here is the point: for any spatial-temporal event, there are an infinity of ways to account for that event. Short of well-grounded quantified models (i.e. science) one must often go with what one takes to be the best explanation, all things considered. (Even that will vary with the education of the person who decides.)

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