Christian podcaster Jason Rennie, in an interview with John Loftus, gives an example that he hopes will stretch the natural vs. supernatural distinction to the breaking point. Just how long will atheists cling to the natural explanation?

It’s all the fault of Elvis

He proposes a deliberately ridiculous natural explanation for the gospel story: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “Act of God” into insurance law. He asks whether this is more improbable than the gospels being true. It’s natural, but does that mean that it beats the supernatural explanation?

Rennie touches on an important point—the distinction between the rule of thumb “a plausible natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation” and “any natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation.”

The first statement is enough for me. We don’t always have natural explanations—science has many unanswered questions, for example—but where we do, the natural explanations that dismiss the supernatural explanations are all plausible. There’s no need to support a crazy natural explanation simply because it’s natural. We have quite plausible natural alternatives to the gospel story and needn’t imagine time-traveling clones of Elvis.

But ignore that for now. Let’s actually compare these two alternatives.

Introducing the “Like what?” test

Consider the pieces of this proposal one at a time—first, the clone of Elvis. With the “Like what?” test, we ask, “So you propose a clone of Elvis? Like what? What precedents do we have that would make such a thing possible?”

In this case, we have quite a lot of precedent. We’ve already cloned two dozen species of animals.

Next: insurance salesmen eager to improve their business. There’s no problem finding precedents to this.

Time travel? This one is quite far-fetched, but it’s simply technology, and we understand technology. We’ve seen almost unbelievable progress in technology in the last 200 years. No one today can even sketch out how time travel might work—indeed, it may be impossible—but 10,000 more years of technology might well deliver this.

Note that this isn’t about time traveling wizards. We have no precedent for that. Everything here is natural.

How crazy is the Elvis story, anyway?

In summary, the explanation has:

• A clone of Elvis, like clones of sheep and dogs that we’ve already made.
• Cost-cutting insurance salesmen, like insurance executives today.
• Time travel, like the technology today that would seem miraculous to people just 50 years ago.

That hardly means that this ridiculous explanation is the best one—while it’s possible, it fails because of Occam’s Razor. It brings no evidence to support it over likelier explanations. But we have precedents for all major components of the story.

Consider the other explanation in play

Now apply the “Like what?” test to the supernatural explanation, that the Jesus miracles happened pretty much as claimed in the Bible. Like what?

Here, we have no universally-accepted supernatural explanations. Christians don’t accept the supernatural stories of Hinduism, Muslims don’t accept those of Christianity, not everyone accepts ghosts or other paranormal phenomena, and so on.

The only prior examples on which there is universal agreement is that there are false supernatural claims. Consider supernatural claims about the sun, for example: the Greeks explained it as Apollo in his chariot, the Mesoamericans said that Quetzalcoatl created the current sun (the previous four having been destroyed by disasters), and the Salish said that the raven brought the sun to mankind. All nonsense, we agree.

Present a universally-accepted prior example of the supernatural—like clones, salesmen, and technology in the Elvis story—and the gospel story has some standing. As it is, it doesn’t even leave the gate. The Christian position is trounced even by this deliberately ridiculous example.

Any sufficiently advanced technology 
is indistinguishable from magic
— Arthur C. Clarke

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/15/12.)

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