Yes.

For one thing, it’s already “literally” true. Because the simplest machine for computing the outcome of a system is the system itself. Thus the system is itself a computer “computing” its outcome. It just doesn’t have underlying microcircuits and stuff (a conceit ironically refuted by your very point, as positing a whole other complex layer of reality to explain this one is going in the wrong direction in terms of information/probability theory).

For another thing, Kolmogorov complexity translates information states into probability metrics. So really, it’s just the same thing, using different words to describe it. One of the functions of language is efficiency: to take a massively complex idea (like the position and mass and chemical properties of every single atom comprising an apple) and reference it with a simple string of code (you just say “apple”). That this is just efficiency-making does not remove the fact that a vast ton of informational content is being referred to with those five letters.

And in terms of probability theory, these metrics cancel out. Any P(h|b) / P(~h|b) will contain things in “b” like “the exact precise arrangement of atoms of everything that exists” that cancel out arithmetically (since all those things are the same whether h or ~h, so the 10^umptillion in the numerator is canceled and thus eliminated by the 10^umptillion in the denominator), leaving only “what would be different” between h and ~h, which is informationally a great deal simpler (it can even be as simple as 1 or 2 bits of information, if h is “the apple will spin leftward” and ~h is “the apple will spin rightward or not spin at all”).

This translates to an easy way to arithmetically validate Ockham’s Razor.

I discuss all of this in my book Proving History. But I avoid the technicals of information theory because they are interesting philosophically but not of use to historians who need far simpler heuristics.

Yes.

See Theism & Atheism: Miracles.

And for a deeper dive see:

Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and Defining the Supernatural.

Oh! Thank you. Posting that here in full is very helpful. And indeed is what I recall having read.

I managed to get my hands on Dundes’s essay. By way of complementing your answer, here’s some extracts from his first few paragraphs:

Lord Raglan in his fascinating delineation of the hero pattern was perfectly willing to take three examples from the Old Testament—Joseph, Moses, and Elijah—but he does not so much as mention Jesus, despite the fact that the life of Jesus is demonstrably as similar to Raglan’s twenty-two incident hero pattern as the lives of the three Old Testament heroes he does cite.

Perhaps one reason for the neglect of the New Testament by folklorists is a combination of prejudice and self-interest. … Raglan, for example, was anxious to show that the lives of traditional heroes were “folklore” rather than history. Thus it was perfectly all right to argue that Old Testament or Jewish heroes were folkloristic rather than historical. But heaven forbid that a proper member of the British House of Lords should apply this line of reasoning to the life of Jesus! Moses might be folklore but Jesus was history or, to put it another way, Moses was “false” while Jesus was “true.” Raglan even went so far as to remark that “the compilers of the ‘historical’ books of the Old Testament were not historians writing for students, but theologians writing for the faithful” (Raglan 1956:112), an observation, which, of course, could be equally well applied to the New Testament!

This may be a somewhat exaggerated statement of Lord Raglan’s position; but since he does not discuss Jesus, it would appear reasonable to assume that he felt Christ was fact while Moses was fiction. (In 1958 Lord Raglan told Professor Albert B. Friedman that of course he had thought of Jesus in connection with the hero pattern, but that he had no wish to risk upsetting anyone and therefore he elected to avoid even so much as mentioning the issue—personal communication from Professor Friedman, April, 1977.)

I think that’s discussed in Dundes (as I cite). I don’t recall if we “know” the answer, as it is conspicuously left unmentioned, but I seem to recall (?) the suspicion is that that would be damagingly unpopular to propose in their day and thus was better left unsaid to avoid their overall discovery and its thesis being dismissed as heretical or anti-Christian. It was a “third rail” in scholarship that if anyone touched they at once became pariahs, infidels, and thus socially inconvenienced in any way possible. It was best to just avoid it.

There isn’t really much that is original in the Gospel Jesus. Much of it is actually just a strange mixture of Hillelite and Shamaite Phariseeism, with a little Essenism and Cynic philosophy thrown in. I give a bibliography in Elements 32 and 33, Ch. 5 of On the Historicity of Jesus.

And no, Jesus did not change it to a positive formulation. That’s a common apologetic myth. But actually there are plenty of pre-Christian examples of positive formulations; and there is actually no logical difference between the positive and negative formulations. It is a common mistake people make to forget that every assertion entails a denial; and every denial, an assertion, and thus one can always be translated into the other. “All crows are black” simply entails “no crows are not black” and vice versa. Hence “do not punch people if you don’t like being punched” simply realizes “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”; there is no difference. See my discussion with examples in Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider.

the golden rule said you weren’t to do to people what you didn’t want done to you. Jesus changed this to an active attitude where you must do to others what you would like to be done to you, in the example of the “good Samaritan” this change is clear.