Easter is approaching, but skeptic John Loftus doesn’t believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. What’s more, he thinks you’re delusional if you do. I happen to believe in the Resurrection, but I freely admit that I might be mistaken. I think Loftus is wrong, and his case against the Resurrection is statistically flawed; however, I don’t think he’s delusional. In today’s post, I’d like to summarize the key issues at stake here, before going on to explain why I think reasonable people might disagree on the weight of the evidence for the Resurrection.
The following quotes convey the tenor of Loftus’ views on the evidence for the Resurrection:
What we have at best are second-hand testimonies filtered through the gospel writers. With the possible exception of Paul who claimed to have experienced the resurrected Jesus in what is surely a visionary experience (so we read in Acts 26:19, cf. II Cor. 12:1-6; Rev. 1:10-3:21–although he didn’t actually see Jesus, Acts 9:4-8; 22:7-11; 26:13-14), everything we’re told comes from someone who was not an eyewitness. This is hearsay evidence, at best. [Here.]
The Jews of Jesus’ day believed in Yahweh and that he does miracles, and they knew their Old Testament prophecies, and yet the overwhelming numbers of them did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead by Yahweh. So Christianity didn’t take root in the Jewish homeland but had to reach out to the Greco-Roman world for converts. Why should we believe if they were there and didn’t? [Here.]
…[F]or [Christian apologist Mike] Licona to think he can defend the resurrection of Jesus historically is delusional on a grand scale.[Here.]
My natural explanation is that the early disciples were visionaries, that is, they believed God was speaking to them in dreams, trances, and thoughts that burst into their heads throughout the day. Having their hopes utterly dashed upon the crucifixion of Jesus they began having visions that Jesus arose from the dead. [Here.]
My natural explanation [additionally] requires … one liar for Jesus, and I think this liar is the author of Mark, the first gospel. He invented the empty tomb sequence. That’s it. [Here.]
Loftus is not a dogmatic skeptic; he allows that he can imagine evidence which would convince him that Christianity is true. However, it is his contention that the evidence of the New Testament falls far short of this standard. The problem, to put it briefly, is that evidence for the authenticity of a second-hand report of a miracle does not constitute evidence that the miraculous event described in the report actually occurred. This evidential gap is known as Lessing’s ugly broad ditch, after the 18th century German critic, Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781), who first pointed it out.
In this post, I will not be attempting to demonstrate that the Resurrection actually occurred. Rather, my aim will be to outline the process of reasoning whereby someone might conclude that it probably occurred, while acknowledging that he/she may be wrong. I’ll also endeavor to explain how another person, following the same procedure as the tentative believer, might arrive at a contrary conclusion, which would make it irrational for him/her to espouse a belief in the Resurrection.
The key facts required to establish the Resurrection
Before I begin, I’m going to make a short list of key facts, whose truth needs to be established by anyone mounting a serious case for the Resurrection.
Key facts:
1. The man known as Jesus Christ was a real person, who lived in 1st-century Palestine.
2. Jesus was crucified and died.
3. Jesus’ disciples collectively saw a non-ghostly apparition of Jesus, after his death.
N.B. By a “non-ghostly” apparition, I mean: a multi-sensory [i.e. visual, auditory and possibly tactile] apparition, which led the disciples to believe Jesus was alive again. I don’t mean that Jesus necessarily ate fish, or had a gaping hole in his side: many Biblical scholars now think that these details may have been added to the Gospels of Luke and John for polemical reasons. Are they right? I don’t know.
Readers will note that none of the key facts listed above makes any mention of the empty tomb. My reason for this omission is that St. Paul’s account in 1 Corinthians 15, which is the only eyewitness report, makes no explicit mention of Jesus’ empty tomb, although it seems to imply this fact when it says that Jesus was buried and raised. I won’t be relying on the Gospel accounts here, as they are probably not eyewitness accounts: most scholars date them to between 70 and 110 A.D. By the same token, I won’t be relying on the accounts of St. Paul’s encounter with Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles, which some scholars date as late as 110-140 A.D. St. Paul simply says of his experience: “last of all he appeared to me also.” That makes him an eyewitness.
It will be apparent to readers who are familiar with debates regarding the resurrection that my list of “key facts” is more modest than Dr. Willam Lane Craig’s list of minimal facts which he frequently invokes when he is debating the subject. Craig assumes that Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and that the following Sunday, his tomb was found empty by a group of women followers of Jesus. I make neither of these assumptions, although I happen to think he is right on both. For those who are inclined to doubt, Dr. Craig’s article, The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus, is well worth reading.
Two types of skepticism
I propose to distinguish between two kinds of skepticism: Type A and Type B. Type A skepticism casts doubt on people’s claims to have had an extraordinary experience, while Type B skepticism questions whether a miraculous explanation of this extraordinary experience is the best one. In the case of the Resurrection, Type A skepticism seeks to undermine one or more of the key facts listed above, whereas Type B skepticism doesn’t question the key facts, but looks for a non-miraculous explanation of those key facts.
Carl Sagan’s maxim that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs” is often quoted when the subject of miracles comes up. But we must be careful not to confuse extraordinary claims with extraordinary experiences: the former relate to objectively real occurrences, while the latter relate to subjective experiences. There is nothing improbable about someone’s having an extraordinary experience. People have bizarre experiences quite often: most of us have had one, or know someone who has had one. However, extraordinary occurrences are by definition rare: their prior probability is very, very low.
The distinction I have made above is a vital one. The key facts listed above imply that Jesus’ disciples had an extraordinary experience, but as we’ve seen, there’s nothing improbable about that.
On the other hand, the prior probability of an actual extraordinary occurrence (such as the Resurrection) is extremely low. So even if we can show that Jesus’ disciples had an extraordinary experience which persuaded them that he had risen again, one still needs to show that the posterior probability of all proposed non-miraculous explanations of this experience is less than the posterior probability of a miracle, given this extraordinary experience, before one is permitted to conclude that the miraculous explanation is warranted. And even then, one is still not home free, because it makes no sense to posit a miracle unless one has independent grounds for believing that there is a God, or at the very least, that there is a small but significant likelihood that God exists.
To sum up, in order for belief in Jesus’ Resurrection to be reasonable, what one has to show is that:
(i) the total probability of the various Type A skeptical explanations listed below is less than 50%; and
(ii) given the key facts listed above, and given also that there is a reasonable likelihood that a supernatural Deity exists Who is at least able to resurrect a dead human being, if He chooses to do so, then the total [posterior] probability of the various Type B skeptical explanations listed below is far less than the posterior probability that Jesus was miraculously raised.
What’s wrong with Loftus’ argument, in a nutshell
Basically, there are two errors in John Loftus’ case against the Resurrection: first, he overlooks the fact that the probabilities of the various Type B skeptical explanations are posterior probabilities, rather than prior probabilities; and second, he thinks that because the prior probability of a resurrection is very small, any Type A skeptical explanation whose prior probability is greater than that of the Resurrection of Jesus is a more likely explanation of whatever took place. The following excerpt from a 2012 post by Loftus illustrates these errors (emphases mine – VJT):
In what follows I’ll offer a very brief natural explanation of the claim that Jesus resurrected. Compare it with the claim he physically arose from the dead. You cannot say my natural explanation lacks plausibility because I already admit that it does. As I said, incredible things happen all of the time. What you need to say is that my natural explanation is MORE implausible than the claim that Jesus physically arose from the dead, and you simply cannot do that.
As it happens, I’d estimate the probability of Loftus’ preferred explanation for the Resurrection of Jesus to be about 10%. That’s much higher than the prior probability that God would resurrect a man from the dead, even if you assume that there is a God. However, I also believe that there’s a 2/3 3/5 probability (roughly) that Jesus’ disciples had an experience of what they thought was the risen Jesus. If they had such an experience, and if there is a God Who is capable of raising the dead, then I think it’s easy to show that the posterior probability of the Resurrection, in the light of these facts, is very high.
Type A skeptical hypotheses regarding the Resurrection
The following is a fairly exhaustive list of skeptical hypotheses that might be forward, if one wishes to contest the “key facts” listed above.
1. Jesus didn’t exist: he was a fictional person.
2. Jesus existed, but he didn’t die on the cross: either (i) he fell into a swoon on the cross, or (ii) it was actually a look-alike who was crucified in his place.
3(a) The fraud hypothesis: Jesus’ disciples didn’t really see an apparition of Jesus; their story that they had seen him was a total lie. For thirty years, they got away with their lie and attracted quite a following, prior to their execution during the reign of the Emperor Nero. (James the Apostle died somewhat earlier, in 44 A.D.)
3(b) Jesus’ disciples saw what they thought was Jesus’ ghost, but much later on, Christians claimed that the disciples had actually seen (and touched) Jesus’ risen body – either (i) because of deliberate fraud on the part of some individual (possibly St. Mark, in John Loftus’ opinion) who first spread the story of an empty tomb, or (ii) because Jesus’ body had already been stolen by persons unknown, which led Christians to believe Jesus’ body had been raised, or (iii) because the body had disappeared as a result of some natural event (e.g. a local earthquake that swallowed it up), or (iv) because a later generation of Christians (living after the fall of Jerusalem) was no longer able to locate Jesus’ body (or his tomb), which led them to speculate that Jesus had in fact been resurrected from the dead.
3(c) Jesus’ disciples initially thought they had seen Jesus’ ghost, but shortly afterwards, they came to believe that what they had seen was a non-ghostly apparition of Jesus’ resurrected body – either (i) because of the unexpected discovery that Jesus’ tomb was empty or (ii) because of the mis-identification of Jesus’ tomb with another empty tomb nearby.
3(d) Jesus’ disciples experienced individual (rather than collective) non-ghostly apparitions of Jesus, on separate occasions, which convinced each of them that he had risen, and which made them willing to be martyred for their faith in that fact.
[UPDATE: New hypothesis added.]
3(e) Jesus’ disciples experienced a collective non-ghostly apparition of Jesus, which they all saw, but only one of the disciples (probably Peter) actually heard the voice of Jesus. It may have been because Peter was able to talk to Jesus that they were convinced that he was not a ghost; alternatively, it may have been because Jesus was not only visible and audible (to Peter) but also radiant in appearance that the apostles concluded he had risen from the dead.
Type B skeptical hypotheses
Supposing that one grants the key facts listed above, I can think of only two skeptical hypotheses by which one might seek to explain away the disciples’ non-ghostly post-mortem apparition of Jesus, without having recourse to a miracle. Either it was a purely subjective experience (i.e. a collective hallucination), or it was an illusion, created by mind control techniques.
4. Jesus’ disciples had an apparition of Jesus after his death which was so vivid that they came to believe that what they had seen was no ghost, but a resurrected human being. In reality, however, their experience was a collective hallucination, caused by either (i) the grief they were experiencing in the wake of Jesus’ death or (ii) Jesus hypnotizing them before he died and implanting the idea that he would rise on the third day.
5. Jesus’ disciples had a collective non-ghostly apparition of Jesus after his death, but in reality, either (i) aliens or (ii) supernatural beings (demons) were controlling their minds and making them see things that weren’t objectively real.
The Resurrection: Varieties of skepticism
Broadly speaking, there are resurrection-skeptics who believe in a God Who is capable of working miracles, and then there are resurrection-skeptics who have no particular religious beliefs.
Resurrection-skeptics who believe in a God Who can work miracles disagree with the claim that the total probability of the various Type A skeptical explanations listed above is less than 50%. For their part, Jews have traditionally favored explanation 3(a) [fraud], while Muslims favor explanation 2(ii) [a look-alike died in Jesus’ place]. Personally, I find the Muslim explanation wildly implausible: try as I might, I simply cannot imagine anyone volunteering to die in Jesus’ place, and managing to fool the Romans, the Jews, and (presumably) Jesus’ family and friends into believing that he was Jesus. The mind boggles. The fraud hypothesis was put forward by the Jews back in the first century. In the second century, St. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 160 A.D.) records a Jewish skeptic asserting that Jesus’ disciples “stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross, and now deceive men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven” (chapter 108). I have to say that I regard this explanation as a much more sensible one. If I had nothing but the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection available to me, I might be persuaded by it, but for my part, I find it impossible to read the letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians without becoming convinced of their author’s obvious sincerity. The man wasn’t lying when he said that Jesus appeared to him.
Non-religious skeptics who deny the Resurrection fall into different categories: there are both Type A skeptics and Type B skeptics. Among the Type A skeptics, there are a few Jesus-mythers (G.A. Wells, Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Richard Carrier) favor hypothesis 1, while swoon-theorists such as Barbara Thiering and the authors of the best-seller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, favor hypothesis 2(i). However, most skeptics tend to either favor the Type A hypothesis 3(b) [the disciples saw a ghostly apparition; later Christians made up the resurrection – this is Loftus’ proposal] or the Type B hypothesis 4 [Jesus’ disciples had a collective hallucination, which was so vivid that it caused them to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead]. Hypothesis 3(c) has few proponents, and I don’t know anyone who advocates hypotheses 3(d) or 5.
My personal evaluation of skeptical explanations for the Resurrection
Reasonable people may disagree in their estimates of the probabilities for the various skeptical hypotheses listed above. However, my own estimates of the probabilities of these hypotheses are as follows:
Type A skeptical hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1 – Jesus never existed. Probability: 1%.
Pro: There’s no contemporaneous pagan or Jewish attestation for the amazing miracles Jesus supposedly worked (healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the 5,000), which is puzzling. Also, certain aspects of Jesus’ life (e.g. the virgin birth, dying & rising again) are said to have mythological parallels.
Con: No reputable New Testament historian doubts the existence of Jesus. Professor Graeme Clarke of the Australian National University has publicly declared: “Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ – the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.” Indeed, there is pretty good attestation for Jesus’ existence from Josephus (Antiquities, book XX) and Tacitus. Miracle-workers were a dime a dozen in the Roman Empire; one living in far-away Palestine wouldn’t have attracted any comment. The mythological parallels with Jesus’ life are grossly exaggerated. In any case, the question of whether Jesus existed and whether most of the stories about him are true are distinct questions. Perhaps there was a small kernel of truth behind the stories: Jesus healed some sick people.
Hypothesis 2 – Jesus didn’t actually die from crucifixion. Either (i) he fell into a swoon on the cross, or (ii) a look-alike was crucified in his place. Probability: 1%.
Pro: (i) Some individuals were known to survive as long as three days on the cross. Jesus’ death after just a few hours sounds suspicious. (ii) Some of Jesus’ disciples appear not to have recognized him, when they saw him after he was supposedly crucified.
Con: (i) Jesus was flogged, and pierced in the side, if we can believe St. John’s account. That would have hastened his death. But even if Jesus had survived crucifixion, he would have been severely weakened by the experience, and his subsequent apparition to his disciples would have alarmed rather than energized them. (ii) What sane person would volunteer to take Jesus’ place on the cross? Also, wouldn’t someone standing by the foot of the cross have noticed that it wasn’t Jesus hanging on the cross? Finally, the appearance of a risen Jesus who didn’t bear any of the marks of crucifixion would surely have made the disciples wonder if he really was the same person as the man who died on the cross.
Hypothesis 3(a) – fraud. Probability: 10%.
Pro: The perils of being a Christian apostle in the first century have been greatly exaggerated. The apostles Peter and Paul, and James brother of the Lord, lived for 30 years before being martyred, and even the apostle James lived for 11 years. During that time, the apostles would have been highly respected figures. Maybe they were motivated by a desire for fame and/or money. And maybe the apostles were killed for political rather than religious reasons, or for religious reasons that were not specifically related to their having seen the risen Jesus. We don’t know for sure that they were martyred for their belief in Jesus’ Resurrection.
Con: The fact remains that some apostles were put to death, and as far as we can tell it was for their testimony to the Resurrection. St. Clement of Rome, in his (first and only) Epistle to the Corinthians (Chapter 5), written c. 80–98, reminds his readers of Saints Peter and Paul’s martyrdom: “Through jealousy and envy the greatest and most just pillars of the Church were persecuted, and came even unto death. Let us place before our eyes the good Apostles. Peter, through unjust envy, endured not one or two but many labours, and at last, having delivered his testimony, departed unto the place of glory due to him. Through envy Paul, too, showed by example the prize that is given to patience: seven times was he cast into chains; he was banished; he was stoned; having become a herald, both in the East and in the West, he obtained the noble renown due to his faith; and having preached righteousness to the whole world, and having come to the extremity of the West, and having borne witness before rulers, he departed at length out of the world, and went to the holy place, having become the greatest example of patience.” Additionally, there is no doubting St. Paul’s obvious sincerity when he writes in 2 Corinthians 11:24-27:
Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.
There is little doubt among scholars that Paul is the author of this letter.
Hypothesis 3(b) – the disciples saw what they thought was Jesus’ ghost. Probability: 10%.
Pro: St. Paul writes that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” and it seems that his own experience of Jesus was just a vision. He never claims to have touched Jesus.
Con: St. Paul speaks of Jesus as the first person to be raised from the dead: he is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” If being raised simply means “being seen in a vision after one’s death,” this would make no sense. Post-mortem visions were common in the ancient world. Jesus wasn’t the first to be seen in this way. Nor would it account for St. Paul’s assertion that the resurrection of other human beings would not take place until the end of the world – “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” If a post-mortem appearance by a ghost counts as a resurrection, then many people are raised shortly after their death, and will not have to wait until the Last Day.
Hypothesis 3(c) – the discovery of the empty tomb tricked the disciples into thinking their visions of Jesus’ ghost were really visions of a resurrected Jesus. Probability: 10-15%.
Pro: It’s easy to imagine that people who’d had a post-mortem vision of Jesus might think it was something more than that, if they subsequently found his tomb empty. They might think he really had risen from the dead, after all.
Con: Despite its ingenuity, this hypothesis is at odds with all of the accounts of the Resurrection. In the Gospel narratives, the discovery of the empty tomb occurs before the appearances of Jesus, while in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, there’s no explicit mention of the tomb being found empty, and no suggestion that its discovery led to a belief in the Resurrection.
Hypothesis 3(d) – the disciples saw the risen Jesus individually, but never collectively. Probability: 3%.
Pro: It’s easy to imagine that over the course of time, the apostles’ individual post-mortem apparitions of Jesus were conflated into one big apparition, especially when many of them were being martyred for their faith in the Resurrection.
Con: The hypothesis assumes that the apostles (including St. Paul) were passionately sincere about their belief that Jesus had appeared to each of them, but that during their lifetimes, they did nothing to stop a lie being propagated: that they had seen him together. St. Paul himself propagates this statement in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says that Jesus appeared “to the Twelve”: are we to presume he was lying?
[UPDATE]
Hypothesis 3(e) – the disciples saw the risen Jesus collectively, but only Peter [and maybe James] were able to talk to Jesus and hear him speak. That may have been what convinced the others that Jesus was not a ghost; alternatively, it may have been because Jesus looked radiant. Probability: 10%.
Pro: There have been apparitions in which all of the seers experienced a vision, but only one seer was able to talk to the person seen – e.g. Fatima, where only Lucia was able to talk to Our Lady. (Jacinta heard her, while Francisco saw her but did not hear her, and did not see her lips move.) The hypothesis would also explain the pre-eminence of Peter [and James] in the early Church, since those who could actually hear the risen Jesus’ message would have been accorded special status.
Con: Seeing and hearing alone would not make a vision non-ghostly. Think of the Biblical story of Saul and the witch of Endor. The ghostly apparition frightened the witch, and even though Saul was able to communicate with the spirit of Samuel, that did not stop him from thinking it was a ghost. Appearing radiant doesn’t seem to have been enough either; in the Biblical story of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17, Mark 9) it is interesting to note that even though Moses and Elijah were visible, radiant and heard conversing with Jesus, the apostles did not conclude that Moses and Elijah were risen from the dead. On the contrary, the early Christians expressly affirmed that Jesus was the first individual to have risen from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20). [Please note that it does not matter for our purposes if the Transfiguration actually occurred; what matters is what the episode shows about Jewish belief in the resurrection in the 1st century A.D. Evidently, being radiant, visible and audible did not equate to being resurrected.] Finally, it is worth pointing out that St. Paul also claimed to have spoken to the risen Jesus – see Galatians 1:12, 2:2.
Total probability of Type A skeptical hypotheses: 35-40%. 45-50%.
Type B skeptical hypotheses:
Let me begin by saying that if one has prior reasons for believing that the existence of God is astronomically unlikely, then the evidence for the Resurrection won’t be powerful enough to overcome that degree of skepticism. (John Loftus is one such skeptic.) If, on the other hand, one believes that the existence of God is likely (as I do), or even rather unlikely but not astronomically unlikely (let’s say that there’s a one-in-a-million chance that God exists), then the arguments below will possess some evidential force. I have explained elsewhere why I believe that scientific knowledge presupposes the existence of God, so I won’t say anything more about the subject here. I would also like to commend, in passing, Professor Paul Herrick’s 2009 essay, Job Opening: Creator of the Universe—A Reply to Keith Parsons.
Hypothesis 4 – collective hallucination. Posterior Probability: Astronomically low (less than 10^-33).
Pro: Collective visions have been known to occur in which the seers claim to have seen and heard much the same thing (e.g. the Catholic visions at Fatima and Medjugorje). And if we look at the history of Mormonism, we find that three witnesses testified that they had seen an angel hand Joseph Smith some golden plates.
Con: There has been no authenticated psychological study of a collective vision where the seers all saw and heard pretty much the same thing. It stands to reason that after having had the experience of seeing Jesus alive again after his death, the apostles would have cross-checked their reports, to see if they were in agreement about what they saw, before accepting the veracity of such an extraordinary miracle as a resurrection from the dead. If we very generously calculate the odds of one of Jesus’ apostles having a non-ghostly apparition of Jesus on some occasion as 10^-3, the odds of all eleven of them (Judas was dead) seeing and hearing substantially the same thing at the same time are: (10^-3)^11, or 10^-33. [See here for a more detailed explanation by Drs. Tim and Lydia McGrew.] And for a longer message delivered by the risen Jesus, (10^-3)^11 would be far too generous.
Re Catholic visions: it turns out that the Medjugorje seers didn’t all hear the same thing: they got different messages. Additionally, there is good reason to suppose that they were lying, on at least some occasions (see also here). The Fatima seers, on the other hand, were undoubtedly sincere, but only two of them heard Our Lady and saw her lips move; the other visionary, Francisco, didn’t hear her and didn’t see her lips move. Of the two seers who heard Our Lady, Jacinta never spoke to her and was never directly addressed by Our Lady; only Lucia spoke to Our Lady. The parallel with the Resurrection is therefore a poor one. [See also my post, Fatima: miracle, meteorological effect, UFO, optical illusion or mass hallucination?]
Re Mormon visions: each of the three witnesses who saw the angel hand Smith the golden plates had experienced visions on previous occasions. Also, the angel who handed Smith the plates did not speak, whereas Jesus’ disciples spoke with him on multiple occasions. Not a very good parallel.
Hypothesis 5 – alien or demonic mind control. Posterior Probability: Far less likely than the Resurrection.
Pro: An advanced race of aliens could easily trick us into believing in a resurrection-style miracle, if they wanted to. And if demons are real, then they could, too.
Con: The key word here is “if.” While this hypothesis is possible, we have absolutely no reason to believe that aliens or demons would bother to trick people in this way. The straightforward interpretation of the events – namely, that they actually happened – is far more likely.
That leaves us with the hypothesis of a miracle.
Resurrection hypothesis – Jesus was miraculously raised from the dead. Posterior Probability: Well in excess of 10^-11. Arguably close to 1.
Rationale: The number of human individuals who have ever lived is around 10^11, and well over 90% of these have lived during the past 2,000 years. Given the existence of a supernatural Creator Who can raise the dead, then in the absence of any other information, the prior probability of any individual being raised from the dead is 1 in 10^11, by Laplace’s Sunrise argument. Given the evidence listed in the key facts above (a death, and a post-mortem apparition with many witnesses substantially agreeing about what they saw and heard), the posterior probability of a resurrection is much higher. But even if it were only 10^-11, that’s still much higher than 10^-33, as in hypothesis 4.
Conclusion
Since my estimate of the total probability of the various Type A skeptical explanations is less than 50%, and since the posterior probability of the Resurrection is much greater than that of the various Type B explanations, belief in the Resurrection is rational, from my perspective.
Based on the evidence, I estimate that there’s about a 60-65% 55-60% chance that Jesus rose from the dead. That means I accept that there’s a 35-40% 45-50% chance that my Christian faith is wrong.
However, I can understand why someone might rate the probabilities of hypotheses 3(a), 3(b) and 3(c) at 20% each, instead of 10%. For such a person, belief in the Resurrection would be irrational, since the total probability of the Type A skeptical hypotheses would exceed 50%.
Summing up: a strong case can be made for the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection. However, a responsible historian would not be justified in asserting that Jesus’ Resurrection is historically certain. As we’ve seen, such a conclusion depends, at the very least, on the claim that there is a significant likelihood that there exists a supernatural Being Who is capable of working miracles, which is something the historian cannot prove. In addition, estimates of the probabilities of rival hypotheses will vary from person to person, and there seems to be no way of deciding whose estimate is the most rational one.
What do readers think? How would you estimate the likelihood of the Resurrection?
Recommended Reading
“Did Jesus Rise From The Dead?” Online debate: Jonathan McLatchie (a Christian apologist) vs Michael Alter (a Jewish writer who is currently studying the Torah with Orthodox Jews, as well as with non-Orthodox Jews). Originally aired on the show, Unbelievable, hosted by Justin Brierley, on March 26th 2016.
The Resurrection: A Critical Inquiry by Michael Alter. Xlibris, 2015. Meticulously researched, by all accounts. (I haven’t read it yet.) Probably the best skeptical book on the Resurrection available.
The Resurrection of Jesus by Dr. William Lane Craig.
The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus by Dr. William Lane Craig.
The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Drs. Tim and Lydia McGrew.
The odds form of Bayes’s Theorem [Updated] by Dr. Lydia McGrew. Extra Thoughts, January 6, 2011.
My Rebuttal to the McGrews – Rewritten by Jeffrey Amos Heavener. May 13, 2011.
Alternate Critical Theories to the Resurrection by Dr. John Weldon. The John Ankerberg Show, 2004.
Origen, Contra Celsum, Book II. Chapters 57-70 provide an excellent historical summary of pagan arguments against the Resurrection of Jesus in the late second century, and Origen’s rebuttal of those arguments in the mid-third century.
Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims by Vincent Torley. Uncommon Descent post, March 15, 2015.
Cavin and Colombetti, miracle-debunkers, or: Can a Transcendent Designer manipulate the cosmos? by Vincent Torley. Uncommon Descent post, December 1, 2013.
Hyper-skepticism and “My way or the highway”: Feser’s extraordinary post by Vincent Torley. Uncommon Descent post, July 29, 2014.
Is the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Better Than Mohammed’s Miracles? by John Loftus. Debunking Christianity, March 6, 2012.
Oprah Winfrey’s Half-Sister and The Odds of The Resurrection of Jesus by John Loftus. Debunking Christianity, January 21, 2012.
A New Explanation of the Resurrection of Jesus: The Result of Mourning by Gerd Lüdemann, Emeritus Professor of the History and Literature of Early Christianity, Georg-August-University of Göttingen. April 2012.
Michael Licona’s Book is Delusional on a Grand Scale by John Loftus. Debunking Christianity, July 22, 2011.
Dr. John Dickson To Me: “You are the ‘Donald Trump’ of pop-atheism” by John Loftus. Debunking Christianity, April 2, 2017.
This sounds like Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith. I’m curious to hear the resident theists’ results.
Gregory,
You can’t spell Jimmy Akin’s surname (hint: it’s not Aiken), you are evidently unaware of the fact that I managed to visit 34 U.S. states during a 3-month Greyhound bus tour of the U.S.A in 1994-95, and that I spent a day in Seattle (luckily, it didn’t rain, and no, I didn’t visit the DI), you describe Barr and Beckwith as “solid men” despite the fact that they get even the basics of ID wrong, and you seem to think that Feser trounced me in a debate over ID, despite the fact that I produced two articles exposing the flaws in his own arguments. You obsess about the fact that I spell Intelligent Design with capital letters. Finally, when pressed, you complain about the ‘smell’ you get from the IDist camp.
Do the words “alternative facts” mean anything to you?
I’ll conclude my remarks on ID here, as I’d like to get back to the topic of the Resurrection.
Erik,
You write:
I’m quite happy to go with Leslie Orgel’s (or Paul Davies’) definition of specified complexity. I define functional as follows: something that performs a useful task, where “useful” might mean: useful to the individual entity, or to some other individual. “Irreducible complexity” is defined by Behe here: http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~rogers/evidevolcrs/ircomp/ . Note that Behe expressly allows that natural selection is capable of producing irreducible complexity by “an indirect, circuitous route.” The question is: how likely is it to do so? I happen to think Behe is wrong in his probability assessments, but the general approach which he describes would be a good one, if it worked. Whatever the problem with ID is, it’s not definitions. Many scientific terms are somewhat fuzzily defined when a new science is in its infancy.
GlenDavidson,
Thank you for your post. You describe how scientists would identify design on a new planet:
I like the idea that an intelligent designer would use designs from other lineages. Dawkins says something similar. Just a quick question: what do you think of paleontologist Simon Conway Morris’s book, The Runes of Convergence? Morris is not an ID theorist, but he believes that the biological space of possibilities was designed to make evolution possible.
http://www.testoffaith.com/resources/resource.aspx?id=351
http://biologos.org/blogs/jim-stump-faith-and-science-seeking-understanding/book-review-simon-conway-morris-the-runes-of-evolution-how-the-universe-became-self-aware
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/simon-conway-morriss-new-book-on-evolutionary-convergence-does-it-give-evidence-for-god/
“What points to design of the organism?” Surely you jest. Richard Dawkins was prepared to entertain the possibility of directed panspermia in his interview with Ben Stein:
http://www.c4id.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=253:richard-dawkins-endorses-intelligent-design&catid=1:latest&Itemid=28
The following passage, which describes the complexity of a typical eukaryotic cell, is taken from pages 208-209 (“The Cell As An Automated City”) of The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems by William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells (Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Dallas, 2008). The authors gratefully acknowledge that the passage in their book is adapted from Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by biologist Michael Denton (Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1985), pp. 328-329.
Now, I’m open to the possibility that all this may have evolved naturally, but you’ve got to admit: it sure looks like design. And I think a scientist would be crazy not to entertain seriously the possibility that the first cell (and maybe the first eukaryote) was designed.
Maybe there is. You tell me. I’ll let you have the last word.
Hi davemullenix,
Haven’t heard from you in a while. How are things?
I’ve already discussed Josephus’ account of a man who survived crucifixion (see my quote from David Strauss above), so I’ll move on to your Resurrection hypothesis:
Surely Joseph could have piped up and said: “The tomb’s empty because I removed the body. Ask Pilate where it is now.”
The other problem, as I see it, with this hypothesis is that the discovery of an empty tomb does not generally trigger belief in the resurrection of the deceased person. What it normally triggers is the belief that the body of the deceased has been stolen – which is precisely what the Gospel of John records (John 20:1-2, 11-15). I suppose that if Jesus had predicted his own resurrection, one could imagine that triggering apparitions – but the Gospels uniformly depict the disciples as dullards, who did not understand Scriptural prophecies of Jesus’ resurrection, and who had a hard time accepting that Jesus was alive again.
I suppose I’d give your hypothesis about a 1% chance of being true.
And that’s what I mean by useless. It looks like Sam Harris’ definition of morality. That’s not a good camp to be in.
You have no clue about the essence of operational definitions. No term in the definition should be fatally vague. The definition should by itself build enough context so as to contain a recipe to its usage. This is not the case with ID terminology. That’s why no meaningful scientist took these notions up. Those who mistakenly took them up found nothing useful to do with them, such as calculate something.
If the definition is scientifically useful, then a scientist can do something with it. No scientist ever has. Therefore the problems started with definitions. All that Behe and Dembski ever achieved was to propose useless notions. They imagined the notions mean something, but they don’t.
I’m curious to hear why you think the test actually tests something meaningful. To me it looks akin to FMM’s tests and exercises.
IDists have a supernatural ability for pulling probabilities out their supernatural rear ends
What does he think of it? Certainly not that it points to designed life. Why are you even bothering with this sort of response?
A lot of handwaving. I do like his interest in the topic, but his whole line seems to be “look at this, wow, must have something to do with God.” Not convincing, and not the slightest bit a meaningful response to what I wrote.
Way to ignore what I wrote and to pound the drum for complexity again. You don’t in the slightest come up with anything that points to design.
So?
Yeah, it’s really horrible and misleading. How tendentious can you get? There’s a whole lot of misrepresentation in there, like the repeated use of “technology” (which has certainly not been shown to be such), and “technologies” at one point, an entirely misleading depiction of control–“everything is precisely choreographed”–utter nonsense, it’s stochastic–a huge number of technological terms used as propaganda to force the conclusion desired, and it totally ignores the limited legacy of inherited information available to the cell. It is dishonest to the hilt.
A description of the cell misrepresenting it as designed technology at every turn does make it seem designed. Unlike the actual cell.
They certainly have, and it led nowhere. Evolutionary insights, by contrast, have led to a great number of discoveries.
Glen Davidson
Hi Patrick,
I’d like to respond to your comments.
I believe I provided links here and here explaining my reasons for believing in God, in my OP.
Why would there be? As I wrote in the OP, Palestine was a far-flung corner of the Roman Empire, and miracle workers were a dime a dozen. Why would you make up a crucifixion story about someone you loved and admired greatly?
Bart Ehrman is an atheist, and he has declared: “…[A]s a historian I think evidence matters. And the past matters. And for anyone to whom both evidence and the past matter, a dispassionate consideration of the case makes it quite plain: Jesus did exist.” Ehrman also trounced mythicist Robert Price in a recent debate on the historicity of Jesus.
You’re talking about the excerpt in Book XVIII of Josephus’ Antiquities, which has been tampered with. I’m talking about the excerpt in Book XX, which is widely recognized as incontrovertibly genuine. Read more about it in this article here by Tim O’Neill, an atheist amateur historian who does an excellent job of slaying the Jesus mythicists. See also his more recent article here.
I don’t make that claim. I’m saying that even if they do exist, they have more important things to bother about than controlling the minds of a race of beings inhabiting the third rock from a type G-2 star 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. What would their motivation be for messing with our minds like that?
I admitted in my OP that other people might rate the probabilities differently, and that if they did so, belief in the Resurrection might not be rational for them – especially if they estimated that the total probability of the Type A hypotheses exceeded 50%. Heck, the title of my OP even reads: “Evidence for the Resurrection: Why reasonable people might differ, and why believers aren’t crazy.” I can’t be fairer than that.
(1) There were fewer witnesses to the Mormon revelations. (2) Only three of them claimed to see anything supernatural, and even they didn’t hear any messages. (3) These three witnesses had had visions previously, so they appear to have been suggestible. (4) Many of the witnesses had family connections to Joseph Smith, so they might reasonably be suspected of bias.
A belated welcome, roding. You should be able to comment without delay now.
(1) Fewer witness according to a couple of hearsay reports. (2) Why is hearing a message probative? And what is your source for what the witnesses to the Resurrection heard? (3) What do you know about whether the witnesses to the Resurrection had seen prior visions? (4) Like James, for example? Do you know the family connections of other witnesses to the Resurrection? You’re looking for differences, and picking anything you can find. Some of these aren’t necessarily differences at all, just that we have more information about the Mormon witnesses, and you assume facts about the Christian witnesses that aren’t in evidence. You may not realize how much privilege you grant your own religion in these discussions.
Oh, Vincent, stay happy diddling with the ‘skeptics’ then. “One of these days, sometime soon…” Patrick & keiths are surely going to turn the other cheek! (Honey, I can’t come to sleep yet, I’m writing another 10 page ‘thread’ in response to someone on the internet who is wrong!!) You are acting as an isolated unrepentant Expelled Syndrome patient, starving for help in the middle of ‘not going to happen here.’
“I produced two articles exposing…”. Yes, exposing yourself as an incapable defender of IDism or ‘Intelligent Design’ or the DI’s ‘intelligent design theory’. You got it *ALL* from them; almost everything you know and think on this topic. And even though you’ve publically divorced them, your thinking still differs very little from the DI’s ‘honourable nonsense.’
The “people that should be supporting me, but don’t” fit that IDists often have towards more understanding fellow theists is one of the great ironies of the IDM.
If the only place you can produce a ‘winning argument’ (to a group of crazy IDism cheerleaders!) about ID is at the bloviated IDist blog ‘Uncommon Descent,’ sorry, it is not a world of reality you are living in to think your ideas should be taken seriously by Feser, Beckwith or any serious Catholic or Abrahamic theist.
And it’s obvious to everyone that your articles smell too long! ; )
It does not! The implementations are what are important, not what the implementations do. And the implementation is utterly unlike what designers we are familiar with strive for. You refuse to acknowledge this simple fact.
Sure, when you talk about robots, it sure does look like design. But perhaps you should reconsider your calling if that’s the best you can muster.
Vincent,
Your view of God is inconsistent, to put it mildly.
First, you say that
Yet here you are arguing that he can’t be bothered to supply the evidence needed to get open-minded people to believe in him, even though that’s essential to their salvation. It doesn’t add up.
Second, you believe in a God who allowed himself to be tortured to death like a common criminal, yet here you argue that God would not “stoop so low” as to give us the evidence we need. Again, it doesn’t add up.
Third, you believe in a God who is fair, yet here you say
So God is allowing younger people to be lost simply because they had the bad luck to be born later rather than sooner. That’s not fair. It doesn’t add up.
Obvious answer: All of those problems vanish when you accept that God doesn’t exist. He can’t love us or be fair to us if he doesn’t exist in the first place.
You must be tired of making excuses for God. I certainly got tired of it by the time I was on the verge of deconverting.
The world makes sense when you’re an atheist, and it’s such a relief when you no longer have to fight the truth, day after day, simply to hang on to your faith.
Gregory,
I looked in vain for a single fact in your latest response. What I found instead was a load of hot air. Too bad.
Erik,
You write:
Are you a scientist, then? If so, what is your specialty? If not, why should I take your word over a biochemist’s? I’ve seen many criticisms of Behe (some more telling than others), but I think most of the critics understood his definitions well enough. And Leslie Orgel and Paul Davies, whom I quoted, were trained scientists.
By the way, you’re simply mistaken in claiming that all good scientific definitions are operational. That’s the sort of thing I might have expected to hear from the Carnap Circle in the late 1920s. Lots of scientific definitions are non-operational, and far vaguer than those used by the ID movement. “Gender,” “dark energy,” “meme,” “culture,” “theory of mind,” “fitness landscape” and “gene” are just a few examples that spring to mind. Over the course of time, definitions get refined. That’s the way science progresses.
GlenDavidson,
You question whether Simon Conway Morris actually thinks that evolutionary convergence “points to designed life.” You might like to have a look at this 2012 post by Jerry Coyne, which quotes from some of Morris’s writings and shows how he influenced Ken Miller and Karl Giberson, as well as the following article in The New Republic by Coyne. You may disagree with Morris’ conclusions, of course, but that is what he thinks.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/paleobiologist-simon-conway-morris-gives-evidence-for-god-from-evolution/
https://newrepublic.com/article/63388/seeing-and-believing
I gave a description of the cell as a city which you described as “tendentious.” Look, I’m going to have to call you out here, as I know you’re not a biologist. The metaphor of the cell as a city is widely used in science textbooks (just Google it), and if you don’t like the word “choreographed,” then just have a look at this short video, titled “The Central Dogma,” which was produced by the RIKEN Omics Science Center for the exhibition titled ‘Beyond DNA’ held at National Science Museum of Japan.
I defy you to take a look at that, and then tell me there’s no case for design. “Choreographed?” You bet.
Hi keiths,
You write:
Obviously, if I thought belief in the Resurrection was essential to salvation, it wouldn’t add up. But no less a person than the Pope thinks that even atheists may be saved. In other words, God makes allowances for what we don’t know, and judges us on the basis of what we have done with what we knew.
God has given us plenty of evidence of His existence (see the video I linked to above), and He has implanted in us a sense of right and wrong. It is up to Him to decide whether and to whom He should give any supernatural revelations of Himself. Our job is to use our reason to assess the evidence on the basis of what we have heard. If reason tells us that a revelation is creditworthy, then we are rationally justified in believing it. I have tried to explain why I think the Resurrection falls into that category.
Do ever bother to think about what the other person has written, or is it always just some mindless twaddle answering whatever strawman you prefer at a given time? This has nothing to do with the evidence of evolution in the highly derivative manner that evolutionary theory predicts and whose evidence we see in life, you’re just throwing in another ID bluff.
Did I complain about the metaphor of the city? Of course not, you’re just flailing. I complained about the egregious misrepresentations of life’s parts as “technology” and being described in technologic terms. Save your whine about what I didn’t do for your own time, and quit with the strawmen.
Yes, the clip is clearly designed and choreographed. The difference between you and me is that I know how fictional that lego-set version of cell dynamics actually is, and how the stochastic elements were left out for the sake of clarity and brevity. I’m not much faulting those who made it, although they really didn’t need to be quite as fictive as they were, rather I am faulting you for never getting past the idiotic caricatures and lack of understanding of the IDists. These depictions are not even close to how things really occur inside of the cells, and you barely understand that fact at all, let alone do you recognize what the differences actually are.
Stop pretending that highly tendentious crap from IDists is anything remotely like an honest depiction of what a cell is like, and start to address your lack of understanding of how fictionalized even good animations of cellular activity actually are. How you can link to what I understand is highly unrepresentative of the stochastic processes occurring in the cell and pretend that I’m dumb enough to fall for it just because you are, I can’t understand. Why don’t you actually credit those who understand these things better than you do with the understanding we claim (I’m not a biologist, however I’ve had a number of courses in it, and clearly understand it a lot better than you do), rather than trying to teach us by using the disingenuous BS of the DI, or pretending that the slick choreography of a fictionalized animation is what happens within a cell?
Your ignorance is showing, badly.
Glen Davidson
“Yes, the clip is clearly designed and choreographed. The difference between you and me is that I know how fictional that lego-set version of cell dynamics actually is, and how the stochastic elements were left out for the sake of clarity and brevity.”
I had a girlfriend who did research at UNC imaging how actin moves on microtubules. You know those neat animations where the clean, tidy, primary-colored actin takes regular, smooth steps with its little ‘feet’, left-right-left-right, chugging along on the filament? That bears basically no relation to what it looks like in reality. It’s a simplified teaching tool, but it’s misleading, especially to people who don’t know much biology. In reality, it looks like a jumbled piece of crap jittering back and forth on a tubular looking other piece of crap, and it has a weak ‘ratchet’ effect, so for every 10 steps backwards it manages about 11 forward, on average, and is inefficient as all hell, and you have to do painstaking research to even figure out that on average it goes in one direction over long time intervals, most of the time. But, yeah, if you look at the pretty, colorful, clean, oversimplified animation, it sure looks like a tidy little machine chugging along in an orderly way, like a robot in a factory. In reality it looks like some messy gunk jerking back and forth on some other gunk.
I’m linguist. Linguists do definitions. All scientists do that – organize data by defined categories. Everything they get out of the data depends on the definitions they’ve come up with. You’re a philosopher. I always understood that philosophers also do definitions in order to explore what can be said of reality, but you seem to be a rather loud exception to this.
Specialty is irrelevant. Understanding the nature of science is relevant. You as a philosopher should be especially aware of this.
We all understand those definitions. And everybody relevant understands that these ID notions are bunkum.
If you are truly interested in understanding ID, then Joe Felsenstein and Tom English have, simply out of scientific meanness, carefully documented exactly how useless Dembski’s concepts are and why they fail. Among the discoveries are Dembski’s impermissible changes to his definitions. Start here http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-aplogetics-math-at-college-level/
Why am I even responding? You have ceased given answers to the actual issue a while ago. Probably because you have not looked into it and never will. You like denial better.
And where did I claim that? There are theoretical and operational definitions, but the sad thing is that ID complexity, Dembski’s CSI and the like must have operational definitions, because otherwise you cannot put them into equations. Without operational definitions ID has no claim to being an actual science.
You’ve begun asking everybody’s credentials now. This thoroughly undermines your agenda, because the usual claim over at UD is that everybody can detect design in some obvious cases. If everybody can detect it, then credentials should be irrelevant. And the meaning of “intelligent design” and “complex specified information” should be self-evident. But over decades it has become only clearer that ID theory was a pseudo-science, partly due to lack of operational definitions.
You need to read more, then.
There is literally no evidence for the resurrection story. None. Apologetics are not evidence.
There are many reasons to argue online, even against ridiculous claims. The fact that some people like to argue doesn’t lend any support to those claims.
Now that’s just unnecessarily rude to Loftus.
The test is a good way to identify where someone is applying double standards and thereby begin eliminating confirmation bias.
So true. Regardless of the position taken.
Those are remarkably unconvincing if one is not already a theist. “Rules presuppose a rule-maker”? Surely you see how weak that is. “An infinite regress of explanations is impossible”? That doesn’t get you to a god, let alone the Christian god. You bring no new evidence or reason to the table.
Historians writing at the time make no mention of Jesus or his followers.
Listen to yourself. You can’t even ask the question without assuming your conclusion. There are many myths of gods that die and are reborn. Anyone creating a religion around that time would know them and, as in this case, incorporate them.
You have not eliminated this possibility, so you should take it into account in your “calculations”.
That doesn’t answer my question.
That reads much more like wishful thinking than actual scholarship. Do you have a reference to any credible historian who accepts this view?
Unlike a god? More special pleading. You should really take the Outsider Test for Faith with an open mind.
My point is that your numbers are based on literally nothing. You just made them up. There is no rational justification for any of them. You could have saved a lot of time by simply saying “I believe in the resurrection.”
There are no known witnesses to anything Jesus supposedly did, including exist.
That’s three more than we have evidence for in the case of Jesus.
Unlike the unevidenced witnesses to Jesus? More special pleading.
Just like the New Testament historians who are so certain Jesus existed despite the complete and utter lack of evidence.
You are so caught up in your own faith that it’s affecting your judgement. It’s more important to you than your rationality.
The EF is the equivalent of guilty until proven innocent. Design did it, unless you can prove otherwise.
If we would just enforce consistency, the wrongness and cost of such fallacies would be driven home. Sure, you get the EF, but you’re going to be guilty unless you can prove your innocence when and if you’re ever accused.
But a reasonable consistency is the hobgoblin of empirical minds. Just demonize it as “materialism” or whatever, and you can have your double standards.
Glen Davidson
‘Stop talking about IDT, I want to talk about the Resurrection’ – vjtorley
“Everybody knows” – Leonard Cohen
Yeah, that’s a fair assessment, of the meanness and also the correctness. vjtorley seemingly cannot to save his life reject the Discovery Institute’s IDism. He seems to think Catholics should be on his side and reject Joe Felsenstein’s scientific knowledge for amateur trash because the Wizards of Oz (Chapman, Gelder, Meyer, West?) whispered from a distance in his green gullible ear (just like it did Ken Ham’s); he was being called to become an IDist activist, a revolutionary, in swing with the people in the Discovery Institute (and then façade ditch with an incomplete argument the Institute that ‘made it all possible’ for him to speak how he’s speaking; like an IDist).
So now what vjtorley posts (new category: Vincent-IDism, because nobody else holds it but himself) is simple evangelical apologetics among skeptics as demonstrated again in this thread. He appears to have no inkling where else to ask or go to be healed from IDist Expelled Syndrome. And no idea there even might be something else possible to do after ditching not just the DI, but also IDism because he delusionally thinks Catholic = IDist. But it’s obvious Vincent is wrong. Frown. (And he won’t go there because it’s too ideologically touchy for him.)
But hey, consolation is that did an Aussi-style tour of ‘America’ decades ago and even now still knows the ‘smell’ of the USA – might have met a ‘creationist’ or two – so that counts for something, even in anti-religious Skeptic-land. =P Wink, it means he picked up some super ‘Marican powers that he could use to peddle IDism over 20 years later! And apparently not feel bad about his copy-catting.
Of course, Vincent, solid men (whom you would otherwise respect) who reject IDism can *only* misunderstand ID … according to Expelled Syndrome IDist logic. That is the very reason they don’t accept IDism, right, it’s because they don’t ‘understand’ it!? And yet they believe in the Resurrection.
So the only people you possibly have left available to convince are ‘skeptics’, is that the situation? It boggles the mind how you are so stuck in this ideology and don’t seem to recognise it, Vincent, and that is why I keep on with you about it.
The yellow-brick road to Oz actually leads to ignominious irrelevance by peddling IDism, IDT, ID, etc. Maybe Dembski’s retirement from ID will make people suffering from Expelled Syndrome to come to their senses.
Erik,
You’re a linguist. You “do” definitions. I’m a philosopher, but I also have a background in science. My first degree was a science degree, my M.A. in philosophy was on the topic of scientific laws, and my Ph.D. was on animal minds (I had to read hundreds of scientific papers for that). So with all due respect, I think I’m a little more familiar with science than you are.
I’ve also learned that it’s unwise to generalize across different branches of science. Physics, biology, psychology and archaeology, for instance, are all very different in their methodologies, and in the sharpness of their definitions. Not all of them have laws and equations.
You seem to have confused two quite distinct issues: whether ID is capable of putting forward definitions that can be used in equations, and whether ID is capable of defining scientific criteria for an object’s being designed.
The definition of specified complexity put forward by Dembski in his 2005 paper turned out not to be the kind of definition that you could plug into an equation. I think it’s fair to say that Joe Felsenstein showed that, in his 2007 article, Has Natural Selection Been Refuted? The Arguments of William Dembski. But if you look at Dembski & Marks’ 2009 article, Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success as well as their 2010 paper, The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search, you’ll find that the authors refer to a different kind of information, active information, when they’re deriving LCOI. Active information is defined in a much more rigorous fashion than specified complexity – or for that matter, FCSI.
What’s interesting is that Felsenstein, in his 2014 refutation of these papers, doesn’t go after the definitions used by Dembski and Marks. He writes, “People like to argue about how one ought to define information, but I’m going to ignore most of those arguments, because I think that there is a simpler problem that undercuts the Dembski-Marks argument.” Although he suspects that “active information” will end up “not being a helpful concept,” that’s not what concerns him. What concerns him is Dembski’s very bad modeling of “real biology” and of fitness surfaces (especially his “white noise” fitness function). I think I can see where Dembski is coming from: as a philosopher, he thinks it’s fair to ask why our universe doesn’t have horrible fitness functions like that, and his answer is that it was intelligently designed to automatically generate smooth fitness functions. But that’s a cosmological argument for ID rather than a biological argument, and I think biologists are right not to worry about that question.
The second issue I mentioned above is whether ID is capable of defining scientific criteria for an object’s being designed. Rather than going round in circles, I’d like to focus on just one example: Dr. Douglas Axe’s estimate that only 1 in 10^77 sequences of 150 amino acids is capable of folding into a functional protein. (All living things require at least some 150-aa proteins.) Rumraket has debunked Dr. Axe’s figure. But what’s interesting is that Rumraket himself admitted that if Axe’s figure were correct and if it could be extrapolated to peptides and smaller proteins, then the origin of life would be very unlikely. Indeed, I think he’s even said (although I can’t find the quote) that he’d accept the case for ID if Axe’s figures were correct. If he said that, I think he’s absolutely right. The intuition here is simple enough.
Life is not just any old arrangement of matter. It’s a pretty remarkable arrangement. We’re not talking Texas sharpshooter fallacy here. Life is special. Leslie Orgel realized that, and Paul Davies did too. If the odds of life originating in our cosmos turned out to be astronomically low, then it would be rational to take Intelligent Design seriously as an explanation of its origin. (You might consider other possibilities too – e.g. the multiverse, although that solution runs into problems of its own.) In this case, you don’t need an operational definition to appreciate the appeal of Intelligent Design. It’s enough to know that life is functional and highly specified, and that its emergence is astronomically improbable, within our cosmos.
I hope that answers your questions. And now I think I really have said enough on the topic of Intelligent Design, on this thread.
Gregory,
You claim that I delusionally think Catholic = IDist. I do not think any such thing. I happen to believe that Intelligent Design is compatible with Catholicism, but so are Young-Earth Creationism, Old-Earth Creationism, and Theistic Evolution (which many people now prefer to call Evolutionary Creationism) – provided that it excludes the human soul.
By the way, Gregory, did you notice I capitalized all of these positions, and not just ID?
One final thought: isn’t it strange that you can be a Young-Earth Creationist, and Gregory won’t challenge your orthodoxy or your right to hold your beliefs and be left alone, but if you happen to believe in even a front-loading Designer of life, suddenly you’re a pawn of Evangelical Protestantism and an enemy of science and the Church. Bizarre.
vjtorley,
I think the design argument has merit but I do agree with the criticism that it does not explain how the design was implement so it is limited as a scientific explanation. Is there a case for the design argument in philosophy? How would you merge it into Aquinas 5 ways?
With all due respect, if it takes someone familiar with science to do ID and no person with the requisite qualifications has ever managed to do it (except by way of proving it to be a pseudoscience), then ID has no chance. And, with all due respect, I immediately saw this coming upon my first encounters with ID while you, familiar with science, are still stuck with it, even after they have expelled you.
Besides, the ID claim to fame is that design is “obvious to any unbiased observer” and “humans are pretty good at detecting design with a little practice” with things they know are designed, such as cars. There’s nothing specially biological about cars, is there? Design was supposed to be ubiquitous. ID theory was supposed to be applicable to anthropology, forensic sciences, cryptanalysis… Whatever happened to that?
Are you saying that nobody knew that origin of life was unlikely? This is not even anything meaningful to calculate. The question that ID is supposed to be answering is: Was it designed? Given the ability only to do false calculations we can be sure that we cannot expect a correct or likely answer from the ID camp.
Sure. But as someone familiar with science you should know that this is not presenting any scientific food for thought or substance for analysis. A scientific problem would be something like: What is remarkable about it? How to define/investigate/isolate it? Is it merely the arrangement (i.e. put the building blocks together and it becomes alive) or more than the arrangement (i.e. no matter how correctly we put the building blocks together, it still takes something else to make it alive)?
I hope you see how you ignored all the relevant points. Thanks for discussion anyway.
Vincent, you have my sympathy.
W
It works just as well when you omit all of the intermediate words.
Bill, you are frustrating. Several people take the time and trouble to explain a statistical point to you, and rather than withdraw your prior confused remarks (with thanks), you just go on to your next conundrum. I’d expect that people would stop bothering to try to communicate with you at some point.
You obviously are interested only in what supports your faith. “Discussions” of scientific matters are just sham.
ETA: I see you have now thanked Jock. Good on you. You might also note that all the prior remarks you made, based on your confusion on this matter should now be dismissed.
Looks like John Loftus has responded to the OP on his own blog: http://www.debunking-christianity.com/2017/04/dr-vincent-torley-argues-theres-about.html
Here’s John commenting on Vince’s probabilities:
“Say we’re 63% sure a piece of candy is not going to poison us to death. Would we eat it?
Say we’re 63% sure someone loves us romantically? Would we act upon those probabilities and marry that person?
Say we’re 63% sure our airplane is flight-worthy? Would we act upon those probabilities and fly it?”
I certainly wouldn’t board an airplane if there’s only a 63% chance it’s going to reach the destination. In fact even 99% or 99.999% would not cut it either (the latter would mean at least one plane a day somewhere in the world wouldn’t make it).
And I’m not certainly not taking on a belief system where there’s a one in three chance I may be wrong. It’s not unreasonable to ask for more certainty before making such a radical commitment.
Hi Patrick,
You write:
Sorry, but you’re flat-out wrong on this one. Please see here.
You’re referring to atheist Tim O’Neill’s defense of the historicity of the passage in Book XX of Josephus’ Antiquities. If you’d like to see what real historians think, then here’s Wikipedia:
“Modern scholarship has largely acknowledged the authenticity of the reference in Book 20, Chapter 9, 1 of the Antiquities to “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James”[12] and considers it as having the highest level of authenticity among the references of Josephus to Christianity.[13][1][2][14][15][16].”
The last reference lists sample quotes from previous references: Van Voorst (ISBN 0-8028-4368-9 page 83) states that the overwhelming majority of scholars consider both the reference to “the brother of Jesus called Christ” and the entire passage that includes it as authentic.” Bauckham (ISBN 90-04-11550-1 pages 199–203) states: “the vast majority have considered it to be authentic”. Meir (ISBN 978-0-8254-3260-6 pages 108–109) agrees with Feldman that few have questioned the authenticity of the James passage. Setzer (ISBN 0-8006-2680-X pages 108–109) also states that few have questioned its authenticity.
Wikipedia continues:
“Almost all modern scholars consider the reference in Book 18, Chapter 5, 2 of the Antiquities to the imprisonment and death of John the Baptist also to be authentic and not a Christian interpolation.[17][18][19].”
If that won’t satisfy you, nothing will.
My numbers are meant to represent the probabilities which I think a disinterested historian would attach to the various Type A skeptical hypotheses. (When it comes to Type B hypotheses, we are going outside the field of history and into psychology.) For instance, I think that if you asked a typical New Testament historian to put a figure on the likelihood that Jesus didn’t exist, they’d say, “About 1%, if that.”
I’ve quoted atheist historians like Bart Ehrman, and I’ve quoted the consensus of contemporary historians in the field. Josephus was an eyewitness to the killing of James the brother of Jesus. So that makes James (a known figure) an eyewitness to Jesus’ existence. No historian contests the existence of St. Peter, who would have been another eyewitness to Jesus. We also know the names of most of the 12 apostles.
I think you need to pick a more defensible Type A skeptical hypothesis than Jesus-mythicism.
roding,
Hahaha. That’s funny. But, at least to me, the 63% “calculation” is even funnier. (Did he remember to cancel all the nines?)
Loftus seems almost in love with Vincent. (Probably because he doesn’t feel threatened in the least.) And, quite pertinently, Loftus notes, “I wonder how familiar Torley is with Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard? He considered basing one’s faith on historical probabilities to be antithetical to the kind of ultimate commitment to action his god demanded.”
That’s actually in the Bible, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” In contrast, ID teaches probabilities to people. The flip side of probability is uncertainty.
roding,
I don’t know, I think I’d be rather impressed with a 65% certainty of someone being raised from the dead. To be sure, it’s a weird proposition, as how does one come up with a likelihood of an amazing miracle at all, let alone juxtapose it against the 1/3 or so chance that it didn’t happen?
Nonetheless, if I really thought VJT were right about the probability I’d have to reconsider a whole lot of logical possibilities that I think are very nearly practical impossibilities. A good chance that something happened that overturns what we know is no trivial matter.
If only it were true, and not built on a host of unknowns.
Glen Davidson
Hah. Good point. I’m out 100%—I mean, unless somebody is offering a free dinner.
Free dinner would do it, but a free lunch would defeat ID, at least for Dembski.
Glen Davidson
And don’t forget about Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns! X>{
Hi roding,
Thank you for drawing readers’ attention to John Loftus’ response to my post. Readers are also welcome to peruse my responses to John Loftus, especially this one.
walto,
What a bullshit comment, Walto. I spent 2 weeks commenting with you on the second law and we mostly agreed where keiths was an outlier. How was this religiously motivated?
When we are talking religion, it’s simple: You either (α) know for sure what you’re talking about or (β) you are just guessing. The believer is supposed to proclaim his/her faith, but if the faith has β quality, then nobody has any reason to listen. Reasoning in theology is necessarily deductive and theology consists of things applicable to deductive reasoning. Probabilities won’t wash.
walto,
What is the process to dismiss comments?
That fails the Pascal test. Faith doesn’t require risking your life. If there were a 33 percent chance of a good afterlife, little investment required, we would, most of us, take it. (Supposing dead people visited us and confirmed it.)
The probability argument is just inherently stupid. It’s as stupid as the Star Trek episodes where Data the android calculates the probability of something happening. It’s a stupid as Durston or Hoyle calculating the probability of a junkyard 747. It’s IDiotic.
Maybe I need to shop around for better odds. Maybe the scientologists can offer me a 70% probability. I heard the JWs are having a special this week and can categorically assure me of a 73% probability, because the return of Jesus is imminent (again).
Yes, agree probabilities are idiotic. I have still absolutely no idea how Vince calculates his probabilities, seems he just pulls them from thin air. I have though a 100% certainty that my husband exists and that my computer in front of me is real. Why should I expect anything less from a deity who by all accounts is desperate to get my attention?
“Intelligent Design is compatible with Catholicism”
Catholics believed in lowercase ‘intelligent design’ (design argument) long before the ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ arrived that you are hocking like a snake oil salesman in the Discovery Institute neo-creationist tradition. You are in that snake oil tradition still, Vincent.
“suddenly you’re a pawn of Evangelical Protestantism”
No, you just prefer evangelical Protestant neo-creationism to anti-ID responsible science, philosophy, theology discourse by fellow Catholics. You and Denyse O’Leary are among the fellow confused, stubborn, righteous IDism ‘Revolutionaries!’ You’re going to vindicate the “Newton of Information” and THE BRIDGE between “science and theology” = Discovery Institute ideology.
“you can be a Young-Earth Creationist, and Gregory won’t challenge your orthodoxy”
What utter nonsense! YECism is garbage ideology, you’re not a YECist. So, stop trying to hide the bullshit ‘philosophy of science’ (from Meyer, Wells, Dembski, et al.) you swallowed that is actually proven double-talking swill. You’re still drinking IDism, Vincent, that’s the main problem here. And you simply are not ready to walk away from it as a good Catholic, as others have done before.
Here ya go skeptic-tamer Torley; learn a lesson from some more evangelical Protestants who know collectively much more than you about IDism (not to mention the Christian biologists you’ve been pining for) in a warmer climate than this one: https://discourse.biologos.org/t/intelligent-design-makes-more-sense-than-biologos/
ETA: Fixed clipped paragraph, thanks AF – bumped to #101
Gregory,
Are you smoking something, Gregory?