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Feature 11 — Minimum Necessary Miracles
Constitute the Reconciling operation — the specific mechanisms that mediate between reality and the evaluating mind.
When comparing accounts, prefer the one requiring fewer unexplained events.
This does not mean eliminating mystery — both accounts may require mysteries. But unnecessary mysteries mark against the account that requires them. The simpler explanation is preferred provisionally, always with one eye on what would force revision.
The principle is familiar in science — Occam’s razor, parsimony, inference to the best explanation — but its application is broader than science typically acknowledges. When comparing metaphysical accounts, theological accounts, accounts of why things are the way they are, the same logic applies: prefer the account that leaves fewer things unexplained without explanation.
This is not a claim that simpler is always truer. It is a probability claim: given two accounts explaining the same observations, the one requiring fewer ad hoc additions is more likely to be right. The unexplained event is a cost — a place where the account asserts rather than explains. Accounts with fewer such costs are, all else equal, stronger.
The corollary: when both accounts require miracles, they are not equally strong merely because both require one. The questions are: which miracle is more credibly placed? Which is more consistent with everything else that can be independently verified? An explained miracle — one that falls out of the account naturally — is strictly preferable to one that is asserted because it must be.
For those acquainted with the Concordius framework:
Both the materialist account and the consciousness-first account require a miracle: existence from non-existence. Neither eliminates it. The Concordius account names what was acting — the constitutive inner product ⟨·,·⟩, the Father — where the materialist account leaves the miracle as a brute unaddressed fact. An explained miracle is strictly preferable. Applied at scale: the Urantia cosmology requires accepting a contingent account of superuniverses, an ascension career, and a Lucifer rebellion — additional unexplained elements relative to a minimal account. But it also explains things the minimal account does not: why consciousness is primary (Paper 2), why there are three generations of particles (Paper 7), why the Fermi paradox has the form it does. The question is not whether the Urantia account has costs — it does. The question is whether those costs are less than the explanatory gains. Feature 11 is the method by which this is evaluated: case by case, explicitly, without pretending either account has no cost.
(Part of Reasonablenessism — the method. See Overview for the full feature index.)
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