I think you’ve rather missed the point. I’m not saying that the Unicorn Hypothesis proves the Gospel Hypothesis, nor even that they’re necessarily all that similar (apart from suffering similar Razor cuts).

The main point of this post is simply the issue that is the primary topic of discussion within the post: whether we are “justified” in reaching conclusions whose sole virtue is that they have been contrived to “predict” the exact same consequences as some other hypothesis. There may be many such contrived hypotheses, and they may all differ from one another in various greater or lesser degrees, but their differences do not mean we cannot address the issue of whether or not they truly justify the conclusions they purport to support.

Think about the GH for a moment – my intense distaste for it aside – its depth of scope and definition at least theoretically allows for a decent subset of nuanced consequences in more than one area of reality – you have lists of things we’d expect to see in several different areas of reality were the subject of your GH to exist in actuality.

Then what are these things that we are expected to see, and how are they out of accord with what we expect to see under the MH?

I do have a quibble over Occam’s Razor, and it’s simply what is noted briefly in this post: that even though OR provides efficiency and parsimony, there will never be any guarantee that it identifies the truthful explanation. This discussion tends to move toward probability theory, so to use that terminology, even though OR may provided the expected value, there’s no reason it implies the most probable outcome in a the entire field of possibility. We know as a fact that reality is sometimes more complex than our intuitions predict.

The only consequence we can reliably deduce is that if the subjects of your UH exist, we should see tensions and crises.

Not so. The Unicorn Hypothesis uncannily predicts New World Order conspiracy theories.

The existence of such conspiracy theories is a different consequence to the existence of tensions and crises, hence by counterexample the latter cannot be the only consequence.

What we’ve achieved, in other words, is a pair of hypotheses which both produce exactly the same consequences.

No, what we’ve achieved is another silly, impertinent scenario, if nothing else, simply because a single sample is seldom sufficient. Here, you offer two hypotheses each with a single consequence that both permit. So, of course I agree with you that “there’s no reasonable basis for concluding, even provisionally, that we’re being secretly controlled by a one-horned oligarchy.”

Your UH differs very, very significantly from your GH. Think about the GH for a moment – my intense distaste for it aside – its depth of scope and definition at least theoretically allows for a decent subset of nuanced consequences in more than one area of reality – you have lists of things we’d expect to see in several different areas of reality were the subject of your GH to exist in actuality. OTOH, think about this UH for moment. The only consequence we can reliably deduce is that if the subjects of your UH exist, we should see tensions and crises. Problem is, the singular prediction of the UH is an absurdly high-order abstraction, nothing near the nuanced, myriad abstractions of your GH in predictive or explanatory power.

Under the circumstances, it would be as reasonable to believe in unicorn overlords as to believe in the existence of an all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful Creator Who loved us enough to become one of us, dwell among us, and die for us so that He and we might enjoy a genuine, eternal, personal relationship together—even if we could rationalize our way into thinking that such a deity would produce the exact same consequences as would result from the Myth Hypothesis being true.

I disagree, for all the reasons I just described.

Such trivialities have not stopped generations of theologians. I will still give it a shot.

I accept that challenge, and will try to respond after work!

I myself can’t offhand think of any, any more than I can for the GH vs. the MH.

I challenge any reader to think up one that’s sustainable!