← Face B1: Logic Where It Reaches; Concordance Where It Doesn’t
Face B2: Minimum Necessary Miracles (Draft)
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.
In practice:
Your friend was supposed to meet you at seven. It’s seven-thirty and there’s no message.
Explanations: traffic, forgotten phone, running late on something — or they’re avoiding you.
Start with the explanation requiring the fewest additional assumptions. Traffic and a forgotten phone require almost nothing beyond what you already know about how the world works. “They’re avoiding you” requires a whole new story about your friend’s state of mind, a decision to stand you up without notice, and an account of why today is when that story begins. The minimum-miracle explanation is traffic. That’s where you start.
This isn’t naivety. You’re not forbidden from considering the more complex explanation if something makes the simple one untenable. You’re just starting where the evidence actually is rather than where anxiety wants to take you.
Formal Statement (Concordius Framework)
Minimum exogenous inputs (MDL / Occam factor). A miracle is an exogenous input — an element not derivable within the model, injected from outside its closure (the framework’s own object: an octave change requires a generator from outside the algebra). Let k(A) be the number of independent exogenous inputs an account A requires. Bayesian evidence penalizes each through the Occam factor: the marginal likelihood P(data | A) = ∫ P(data | θ, A) P(θ | A) dθ spreads prior mass over every free input, so each added miracle costs probability; equivalently, minimum description length minimizes (data-code + model-code) with model-code growing in k. The rule: prefer the account of minimum k — provisionally, and with the comparison explicit. Not “eliminate mystery” (both accounts may carry irreducible miracles; existence-from-non-existence is one neither removes) but “do not multiply it.” An explained miracle — the constitutive ⟨·,·⟩ named where a rival leaves a brute fact — is preferred at equal k, because it lowers the count of downstream exogenous inputs.
Tier: derivation — the MDL / Occam-factor penalty is theorem-grade; the framework’s from-outside-the-closure generator makes “miracle” precise rather than rhetorical.