Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

[robvalue]

Everyone can have whatever personal standard of evidence they want for any given belief. They don't have to justify it to anyone.

However, if they are interested in whether their standards are sensible and/or consistent, then justification and discussion is important.

If you believe events occurred that have never been shown to be even possible so far based on textual account(s), then to be consistent, you should also believe any such events, based on textual account(s). This would, for one thing, involve believing every religion to be "true" based on its holy text as well as believing every crazy person who writes anything down. The fact that people can justify to themselves believing one set of accounts but disregarding all the others as obviously wrong is where the special pleading comes in. But again, each person is free to believe as they wish, and if they don't care that their standards are inconsistent, then that is up to them. What this really shows is that the person doesn't believe solely on the strength of those textual accounts, but has other reasons. If they're not prepared to discuss those reasons, then there's not much more that can be done.

(If you think establishing the "reliability" of the authors is at all relevant, that's a common mistake. Being reliable regarding mundane details do not make anyone reliable regarding extraordinary, unprecedented events and their correct classification. All you can conclude, at best, is that they are attempting to tell the truth.)

It is far more consistent not to believe any accounts of events not yet confirmed to be possible, until supporting evidence is presented. Considering this will probably imply an overhaul of scientific theory, the evidence required is going to have to be verifiable and repeatable to scientific standards. And that's just to establish that such a thing is possible. That still doesn't prove it did happen exactly as described in an account, that is still just an anecdote on its own. Whether the anecdote would then be sufficient to believe the claim, on a personal level, depends on various factors. Scientifically however, anecdotes are entirely useless.