I agree, many “ignore” decisions are based on perfectly defensible priors. I think this technique is only useful in certain circumstances.
If you care enough about the Resurrection that you want to be sure you have it exactly right (and many atheists don’t care that much, and I don’t blame them) then you need to spend some time looking for alternate explanations like Richard Carrier’s.
It would be nice if there were some way to confirm Carrier’s hypothesis in the same way Marinatos confirmed his Atlantis hypothesis, but I can’t think of one. So you may end with a probability of epsilon for miracle, 70% for hallucination/mistake/lie, and 30% for Carrier. You now know more about the Resurrection than you did before, even though “hallucination/mistake/lie” is still your best guess (and you will know even more if you can break hallucination/mistake/lie down into the actual motivations or mechanisms behind lying or hallucinating in that situation).
I think this especially matters in cases where you have some reason to doubt the hallucination/mistake/lie hypothesis. If you personally knew St. Peter, and you couldn’t possibly imagine him ever lying about anything, then restricting yourself to the dichotomy “Peter is a liar” or “Jesus rose from the dead” will tie you into epistemic knots. Under those circumstances, you’d be really happy you’d taken the extra few minutes to find Carrier’s theory.
One thing I didn’t make clear in the article and which you’ve caught is that the clever explanation isn’t always or even usually better than the simple explanation. Sometimes people are just liars or mistaken, and to always use the clever explanation is as dangerous or worse than always using the simple explanation.
Ultimately this technique is about not prematurely stopping your search. If someone says “I saw Jesus three days after he was crucified”, there’s an overwhelming urge to ignore him, since your brain may leap to equate that with the absurd claim that he rose from the dead. But if you can tease apart those claims, you have another alternative. That alternative may be wrong, and you may end up rejecting it, but if you’re unhappy with the previous dichotomy you ought to at least make sure you know it’s there.
I agree, many “ignore” decisions are based on perfectly defensible priors. I think this technique is only useful in certain circumstances.
If you care enough about the Resurrection that you want to be sure you have it exactly right (and many atheists don’t care that much, and I don’t blame them) then you need to spend some time looking for alternate explanations like Richard Carrier’s.
It would be nice if there were some way to confirm Carrier’s hypothesis in the same way Marinatos confirmed his Atlantis hypothesis, but I can’t think of one. So you may end with a probability of epsilon for miracle, 70% for hallucination/mistake/lie, and 30% for Carrier. You now know more about the Resurrection than you did before, even though “hallucination/mistake/lie” is still your best guess (and you will know even more if you can break hallucination/mistake/lie down into the actual motivations or mechanisms behind lying or hallucinating in that situation).
I think this especially matters in cases where you have some reason to doubt the hallucination/mistake/lie hypothesis. If you personally knew St. Peter, and you couldn’t possibly imagine him ever lying about anything, then restricting yourself to the dichotomy “Peter is a liar” or “Jesus rose from the dead” will tie you into epistemic knots. Under those circumstances, you’d be really happy you’d taken the extra few minutes to find Carrier’s theory.
One thing I didn’t make clear in the article and which you’ve caught is that the clever explanation isn’t always or even usually better than the simple explanation. Sometimes people are just liars or mistaken, and to always use the clever explanation is as dangerous or worse than always using the simple explanation.
Ultimately this technique is about not prematurely stopping your search. If someone says “I saw Jesus three days after he was crucified”, there’s an overwhelming urge to ignore him, since your brain may leap to equate that with the absurd claim that he rose from the dead. But if you can tease apart those claims, you have another alternative. That alternative may be wrong, and you may end up rejecting it, but if you’re unhappy with the previous dichotomy you ought to at least make sure you know it’s there.