Explaining away and symbolic details in the Gospels

Why should we be cautious about adopting symbolic explanations of details in a biblical narrative? After all, the details could be both literal and symbolic, couldn't they? Here I discuss the probabilistic phenomenon of "explaining away." Two explanatory theories can compete for the force of evidence even if those theories are, strictly speaking, logically compatible. That's why you would be a bit offended if you were just telling about what happened and your friend or spouse started theorizing all sorts of symbolic reasons for the details of your story. The idea of a theological meaning for an apparently literal detail is an extra hypothesis, which means that we need extra evidence before we accept it.

Originally uploaded to YouTube 5/29/21