There is a much overlooked late-20th century polemical satire of Christian apologetics by the Russian writer Kirill Eskov called the Gospel of Afranius. Award-winning and popular in the slavic world, from Russia, Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine (even once having been reviewed in the science journal Nature), it has recently been given an English translation by the Ukrainian Bogdan Veklych (available as a free PDF). The gist of the work (presented as a kind of novel) is to challenge Christians who keep claiming there is no way to explain the facts of the Gospels but for admitting Jesus rose from the dead. Of course there are many conceits in such a stance (most people see that there are no facts in the Gospels: it’s all just made-up, a phenomenon requiring no miracle). But one can also challenge the claim even on its own premises: you can grant the total inerrancy of every Gospel detail and still explain everything without recourse to a single supernatural detail.

This is the “rationalizing” approach to counter-apologetics, most popular in the 19th century, and many examples of ways to effectively deploy it are amusingly (and most rewardingly) presented by Robert Price in his chapter “Explaining the Resurrection without Recourse to Miracle” in The End of Christianity (ed. John Loftus). The effort articulated in the Gospel of Afranius is the most elaborate of all, taking care to grant every premise of even the most fundamentalist apologist! It was inspired by the challenge of the infamous (and then-world-famous) Christian apologist Josh McDowell that no possible alternative account of the “facts” in the Gospels can be given but that the supernatural occurred. Much like the counter-challenge to produce a coherent account of the resurrection by including every detail of every Gospel (and omitting none!), a challenge I do not believe any Christian has ever succeeded at meeting, Eskov picked up the same challenge in reverse: let’s omit nothing and still explain everything.

Eskov accomplishes this by constructing essentially a conspiracy theory, much like that of Joseph Atwill but more comically credible, whereby everything convincing everyone Jesus rose from the dead (from the empty tomb to his resurrection appearances and even ascension) is a scam perpetrated by Roman authorities in an attempt to pacify the Jews with a non-militant, pro-collaborator messiah to obsess over. The theory does not require the scheme to have succeeded at its intended goal (the plan clearly failed; Judea remained stalwartly unimpressed by Christianity); it only requires a belief that it might have, strong enough to motivate its being attempted. The rest then follows. And indeed, Eskov is right: as ridiculous as his theory is in its complexity of detail, not a single element of it defies any law of nature, and it all pretty much floats on at least the foamy edge of contextual plausibility—certainly no less than “eldritch gods did it,” which is the challenge McDowell posed, and which Eskov fully meets.

I generally spend little time on these kinds of things (see my comments on an example similar to Eskov’s in my Response to Stephen Davis). I find the project too difficult to pull off well for too small a return on investment—mainly because there are much better explanations of the evidence far easier to defend, but also because understanding why such an elaborate construct refutes Christianity requires a highly abstract grasp of its underlying logic that escapes pretty much all Christians alive (which is why, generally, they are still Christians). If you argue “Maybe Klaatu and Gort did it in their spaceship in an elaborate attempt to bring about world peace thousands of years later,” a believer will not be able to get past the “that’s ridiculous” phase of objections, and remain baffled how you can fully grant their own objection and yet maintain their religion is nevertheless thereby refuted. The problem is their failure to grasp the logical significance of relative ridiculousness. They simply don’t comprehend that their explanation of the evidence is in fact far more ridiculous—and that is why scenarios like Eskov’s succeed. They don’t succeed because they are plausible. They aren’t. And they don’t succeed because they are empirically defensible. They aren’t that either. They succeed, in fact, precisely because they are neither plausible nor empirically defensible.

To wit:

• Logic 101: If your theory is even less plausible and empirically defensible than a theory that is already wholly implausible and empirically indefensible then your theory is thereby proved false.

There is no way around this. You’re cooked.

But that is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t get the logical point (watch Christian apologist Randal Rauser trip all over this very mistake). And part of that has to do with their delusional assumption that the supernatural is plausible—and indeed, not merely “the supernatural” (see Axiom and Complexity and Fallacy), but the absurdly convoluted worldview of Christianity itself (as well articulated by John Loftus in his chapter “Christianity Is Wildly Improbable,” also in The End of Christianity; see how Randal Rauser tripped all over this mistake too). I’ve shown this more than once now. While gods no one really believes in are irrelevant.

Here I will take a stab at explaining why this is, indeed, delusional.

The Essential Problem

I have twice written on Crank Bayesians, each time mentioning one of the most common crank abuses of Bayes’ Theorem: foisting bogus priors. Prior probabilities can’t be just “whatever” you feel they should be. They are constrained by your background knowledge of the known (not speculated) frequencies of the things you are hypothesizing (precedent cannot be ignored, nor fabricated), as well as the needless complexity of what you are hypothesizing (Ockham’s Razor). This is what David Hume was trying to get at in his essay on miracles, but he stumbled only in not yet knowing his peer Thomas Bayes was nailing down the formal logic he would need to get it right, allowing Christians to forever straw-man his case, rather than (as any honest critical thinker would do) steel-man it.

In my latest discussion of this kind of crankery I reproduced the following slide from one of my old lectures:

Each numbered line contains the explanation for any story of the miraculous or bizarre that is inherently more likely than the one following. In the lower numbers, this relative frequency advantage is empirically documented: when we can properly investigate, almost always, the explanation turns out to be §1; the next most common explanation we find to be true is §2; and next after that is §3. Everything below that has never once been credibly documented, and therefore has a frequency vastly lower than those three. And yet even then there are relative degrees of expected frequency: §4 rests on known background facts (aliens are plausible in general, just not plausibly around here; Clarke’s Third Law is a fact; etc.), whereas everything below it does not, and therefore it enjoys a provably higher prior probability; §5 has a little of that same advantage, albeit less, and therefore we can expect on present knowledge it will turn out to be the case less often still.

By contrast, we have no background knowledge supporting the existence of §6 at all, so it is up to that point always going to be the least likely explanation of anything; and due to the Conjunction Fallacy, anything below that must necessarily be less probable still, because each distinguishes an increasingly specific subset of condition §6 (and in respect to prior probability, there is no way to get a subset of events to be even as, much less more probable than their superset). To say §7 did it is to allow a wide range but still specific subset of magical agents explain things; whereas to say §8 did it is to get even more narrow than that in the subset of magical agents you are allowing to be responsible; while §9 is getting even narrower, because now you aren’t saying “just any” gods did it, but a hyper-specific and particular god. Option §9 is therefore literally the least probable explanation of anything (even more than this analysis entails).

As I explained last time:

As I represent in the above table, that miracle claims are baloney (lies, distortions, exaggerations, mistakes, or not even originally intended to be taken as fact) is the most common cause found for them by far, and thus starts with a near 100% prior probability. That some known natural phenomenon really is the cause (and thus witnesses simply in their ignorance mistook something as miraculous), is the next most common cause found, and thus the next most likely. And that’s by thousands of times; because it is extremely rare that it has turned out to be some unknown natural phenomenon later discovered to be natural (like ball lightning or neurotypical hallucination).

And that’s surely hundreds of times more likely than “aliens did it” or that some technological Cartesian demon is responsible (which to date has never been found as the actual cause of any reported miracle). And that’s surely more likely than any kind of sorcery. Which has to be more likely than “gods did it” (since “gods” entails more, and far more fabulous, assumptions and thus must occupy a much smaller piece of the “magic” probability space). And that there are various minor fallible gods is more likely than that there is one even more fabulous God (per the specified complexity required); and that there is only one peculiarly specific God is even less probable still (per the conjunction fallacy). Epistemically, Christians are pretty well screwed here. Which is why they need to lie about all this.

As Wikipedia defines, “A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy by powerful and sinister groups…when other explanations are more probable.” God, angels, Jesus (and demons and Satan) are most definitely a powerful and sinister group. And other explanations of how the facts came about are indeed more probable than these secret superbeings conspiring to effect them.

The Most Improbable Conspiracy Theory

In essence all supernaturalist theories are conspiracy theories, only wherein the conspirators are gods and angels and other superbeings—including, even, Satan, demons, and their secret devilish cabals, because they conveniently also further the conspiracy by suddenly keeping quiet about it and hiding even their own existence in opposition, however inconsistently Christians believe they do. Which is what makes the Christian conspiracy so much less likely than any other: you have to posit additional entities, wholly bizarre entities, for which there is no evidence, nor evidence of their even having any cosmic plausibility, much less having the strange and hyper-specific motives required.

This is unlike aliens, for example, which meet the second condition but not the first or third: there is no evidence of a secret invading alien race of lizard people; but that there could be such a species somewhere in the universe is in fact empirically plausible. Even if their being anywhere around here is not so plausible, and their wanting to meddle with our history in any of the ways we’d have to allege even less plausible than that, the possibility at least has a factual plausibility—statistically, aliens must exist somewhere in the universe (which may be a problem for religion, and thus need to be denied by the religious, but not on any factual basis: see Aliens and Religion: Where Two Worlds Collide). But such theories have this remotest plausibility in precisely the way invisible interdimensional superbeings—angels, gods, devils, and the like—do not. There is a scientific basis for aliens being likely somewhere. There is no basis for divine beings being likely anywhere. Meddling supernatural beings, therefore, are simply less plausible than aliens. So if you agree meddling aliens are wildly implausible, you logically must agree meddling supernatural beings are even more so.

So here we are.

You can propose a conspiracy of Roman officials, which requires inventing complex and convenient motives and abilities—including as needed to keep their conspiracy’s existence and operations a secret—but apart from that you already have all the material elements: there is extensive empirical evidence that those officials in general existed, the tools and techniques and materials they’d use existed, their overarching goals and desires existed, their basic functional knowledge existed. It’s totally plausible—but for the complex of motives that would even compel them to do this and succeed.

Or you can propose a conspiracy of supernatural magical agents, which also requires inventing complex and convenient motives and abilities—just as complex if not more so, in fact, than you’d need for the Romans. For example, the Romans would need secrecy, and to manipulate the Jews with that secrecy rather than just persuade them, whereas God and his angels don’t really have these needs, so we have to invent some, which entails even more inventing than we’d need to do for the Romans. But on top of that, we also have to invent all the material elements: there is no evidence that any of these “cosmic” officials even exist (we are just inventing the angels, gods, magical agents), or that the tools and techniques and materials they’d have to use exist (we are just inventing all their magical powers and mechanisms, as well as all their pertinent knowledge and skills), or that their bizarrely convoluted plans would exist (for instance, why a secret hidden resurrection rather than a glorious one visible to the whole city; why plan centuries in advance to wait three days after the hero’s death before raising them from the dead; why arrange for it to be so poorly recorded; why whisk him away afterward so no one later can confirm it; etc.).

The Christian explanation of the evidence is an elaborate—and, frankly, ridiculous—conspiracy theory. It is even more ridiculous than Eskov’s. Eskov at least recruits solely persons, desires, and means that provably existed in that time and place. The only convoluted speculations he has to add pertain solely to all the particular motives needed to have produced the plot. But the Christian is already committed to the same absurdity, having to speculate an even more head-scratching array of particular motives needed to produce the bizarre result. And yes, on the Christian’s own theory, the result truly is bizarre. Whereas Eskov’s plot is required, as it is the only way we know the Romans could produce the outcome, nothing that happens in the Gospel narratives is required on any supposition of magical agents being involved.

For example, rather than Jesus just rising in glory before the whole city, the conspiring supernatural agents contrive an inexplicably complicated plot whereby he has to stay in the grave until the third day, he has to “vanish” from his grave (no one sees him rising), he has to reappear later on random isolated occasions in inconsistent ways (sometimes his own best friends don’t even recognize him; sometimes he appears solely as a talking celestial spotlight; sometimes he inexplicably has mortal wounds despite supposedly having been magically restored to life; and so on), and he has to do that only a little while and then vanish for good after, never again to be available to demonstrate his restored body (for no explicable reason), angels have to come down to open the tomb for some reason (a tomb that is by that point already empty), the “risen” Jesus even in one account bothers to have a month-long house-party with his followers, yet for some inexplicable reason no one else is able to notice this or enjoy the same demonstration of his survival. And on and on.

Sure, you can invent a dozen reasons to explain each one of these strange things, things no invincible superbeings would need resort to. But that you nevertheless have to do this is what makes your conspiracy theory, a conspiracy of hidden superbeings you can’t even prove exist at all, even more ridiculous than Eskov’s. At least Eskov’s conspiracy theory requires nothing but agents that provably existed, using nothing but powers and abilities they provably had. And his theory explains all those weird things inherently, because they reflect the limitations of pre-modern humans running the required con—an explanatory advantage the Christian theory wholly lacks. On their theory, there is no plausible reason even for the hypothesized magical agents to arrange the narrative we have; and any convenient, fabricated reasons we invent for them to run so elaborate a scheme only make your theory less and less plausible—which means, more and more absurd. Vastly more absurd than Eskov’s.

And that is why Eskov’s wholly ridiculous theory disproves Christianity. And there is no way to escape the logic of this conclusion. Other than to not understand it.