 The egoistic alternative just sketched, which might be called “the divine punishment hypothesis”, also leads to the pattern of predictions derived from the empathy-altruism  hypothesis sketched in  Table 5,  and the results reported in  Table 6. The bottom line is that using the Sherlock Holmes standard that Batson favors, there is still a lot of work to do. There is a family of egoistic hypotheses invoking beliefs in supernatural punishments—or supernatural rewards—that still needs to be ruled out before we accept the “improbable hypothesis” as true.[24] 