---
title: 'Archibald Alexander and Sherlock Holmes'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2025-12-19
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2025-archibald-alexander-and-sherlock-holmes
---

# Archibald Alexander and Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes once said, “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

In similar fashion many decades earlier, **Archibald Alexander** spoke of how to evaluate evidence, even of the miraculous. “There are many cases which might be proposed, in which, of two events, one of which must be true, that which is miraculous is more probable than the one which is merely natural. I will mention only one at present. Man was either immediately created by God, or he proceeded from some natural cause. Need I ask, which of these is most probable? and yet the first is miraculous; the second not. The plain truth is, that in all cases, the fact which has most evidence is most probable, whether it be miraculous or natural. And when all evidence, relating to a proposition, is before the mind, THAT IS TRUE, WHICH IS EASIEST TO BE BELIEVED; because it is easier to believe with evidence, than against it.

We are willing, therefore, that this maxim, as now stated, should be the ground of our decision, and we pledge ourselves to prove, (that the falsehood of the miracles of the Gospel, would be more improbable, and consequently more incredible, than the truth of the facts recorded in them.” — [**Archibald Alexander**](/authors/archibald-alexander), *A Brief Outline of the Evidences of the Christian Religion* (1825, 1832), p. 87