BillTre said:
This is a poor guide for making these kind of choices.
Throughout history, based on this kind of judgement, a lot of people have thought very complex natural events somehow require a supernatural (or at least explained by science not known to us) kind of explanation.
I actually don't follow your logic, BT. But, I'd like to clarify my own here too.
You say in your earlier post that you'd be inclined to believe in some form of deception in cases of highly weird phenomena, due to the probability of it being true over a supernatural cause. Now, you never define what that probability is like, but never mind that. You basically rely on probabilities for your decision-making.
Yet, when I say that would use probability to favor a supernatural cause of something over a naturalistic one when the naturalistic one is so improbable and filled with extremely convoluted and ad hoc features as to be a non-starter, you say this form of reasoning is "poor."
To be fair, it's not entirely how I'd make my decisions on belief in the supernatural. It's not just the improbability of a naturalistic cause, but also how well the evidence positively affirms the supernatural case. This is precisely how professional academics (in philosophy, history, mathematics, etc.) handle these things.
John Earman's work (previously mentioned) on miracles, Bayesian statistics and probability sets the framework for how to mathematically evaluate miracles. This is hardly "poor" decision making. One is entirely rational to follow this approach.
Another standard approach is the use of abductive reasoning (a.k.a., inference to the best explanation) - one of the three known forms of logical reasoning (induction and deduction being the other two). One might look at the Richard Gallagher-"Julia" case, for example, that I referenced on the previous page and reasonably/logically conclude that the best fit explanation is that Julia was really demon possessed. All other explanations could be so convoluted, ad hoc, and improbable as to be dismissed. This would also be fine as a form of accepted reasoning. It's done all the time by scholars!
Whether one is using a Bayesian probability approach or abduction to evaluate miracle claims, these are standard professional academic methods of reasoning.