Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

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First point. Of course someone being supernaturally healed or rising from the dead is an improbable claim. However, the improbability of this event could be counter-balanced by examining the evidence and simply asking the question: what is the probability of this evidence being present had a miracle not occurred? As this probability number goes down, the probability of the event having a supernatural cause goes up. Notice that there is no requirement that the evidence be 'extraordinary'.

Hi Steve. My understanding of what you are saying is, if you have highly concrete evidence something extraordinary as already occurred, you should need less evidence for proving its mechanism because you already know it is possible. Please correct me if my understanding of your argument is incorrect.

In response, a few questions I think you should consider:
1) Do we have highly concrete evidence of miracles occurring?
2) When choosing between many different explanations for an event, how do we distinguish between them to find the most valid one? For example, let's assume something seemingly miraculous did occur. How do we know which deity was responsible for it? How do we know that any of the ancient gods people have believed in throughout time are responsible for it at all as opposed to an unknown god? How do we a god did it at all? The whole purpose of evidence is to distinguish between competing theories. When it comes to explaining natural events, science has blown religion out of the water as humanity has learned more about the world when it comes to presenting compelling theories about natural mechanisms. This is why science offers a favourable explanation to religion.

Another point is that if the atheist equates supernatural with extraordinary claims (citing a lack of evidence), this implies that ordinary claims are ones that have good evidence to support it. To follow that line of thinking through, what is the good evidence for atheism? In fact, since there is zero evidence for atheism, the presence of the NT evidence and the fact that most people in the world intuitively believes in the supernatural, isn't the atheist making the extraordinary claim? If you go with the BS that atheists make no claims, then I would make the more modest point that atheist's 'extraordinary' assessment of NT claims are unfounded.

You say 'zero evidence for atheism'. Atheism is just the lack of a belief. This is akin to, when investigating a murder, saying that their is zero evidence that a random bystander had nothing to do with the crime. It is a true statement, but how would one attempt to gather evidence for a non-happening? Zero evidence is the natural state for claiming that something didn't happen.