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Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 50)

We will consider some more miracles from other religions, but the conclusions here are not difficult to reach. A full-blown analysis is not necessary, as none of them reach anywhere near the level of evidence in Jesus's resurrection. We can just draw parallels to our previous analysis. So, for example, there's a story of Ichadon, […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 49)

Let us now consider some miraculous stories from the works of Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish historian who was active in the latter half of the first century. His works include The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. They deal with the contemporary and the ancient history of the Jews, from the perspective of the […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 48)

The following are the accounts of the healing miracles of the Roman emperor Vespasian. Vespasian himself healed two persons, one having a withered hand, the other being blind, who had come to him because of a vision seen in dreams; he cured the one by stepping on his hand and the other by spitting upon […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 47)

A common argument from skeptics is that we cannot accept the miraculous stories about Jesus while simultaneously rejecting them for all non-Christian miracle-workers in world history. But that is nonsense. Of course we can discriminate between these stories. It just comes down to discerning which ones have enough evidence. So, for instance, we've already shown […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 40)

In the previous post, we demonstrated that the likelihood for Christ's resurrection came down to the number of "outliers" we can find in world history - where "outliers" are the other, non-Christian "resurrection" reports with at least a "some people say..." level of evidence behind them. The more such low-evidence cases we find, the more […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 39)

This is a jupyter notebook. It contains the python code which generates the relationship between the number of "outliers" (as previously defined) and the probability of naturalistically generating a Jesus-level resurrection report. resurrection_calculation First, we import some modules: In [1]: %matplotlib inline import numpy as np import pandas as pd from scipy.stats import genpareto Next, we […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 38)

So then, here is the summary of the basic idea: We assume that the "skeptic's distribution" will take the form of a generalized Pareto distribution. We will determine the shape parameter of the distribution by looking at how many "outliers" it has. A person's resurrection report is considered an "outlier" if it has at least 20% […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 34)

Can we quantitatively tackle things like conspiracy theories? What do we do about the interdependency of evidence? One can already imagine the objections to any such attempt. Every assumption would be questioned, and every ridiculous possibility brought up demanding a full numerical treatment. Even if a traditional conspiracy were to be fully debunked in a […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 30)

Let us recall our purpose in collecting these non-Christian stories about a "resurrection": we wanted to verify our Bayes' factor for the evidence of Christ's resurrection. My claim is that it's at least 1e54. The first part of our plan was to find the non-Christian resurrection story with the most evidence behind it. If we […]
2016-10-24

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 29)

So, let us summarized these non-Christian accounts of a resurrection. For each supposedly "resurrected" person, the following table shows the level of evidence associated with their resurrection account, expressed as a fraction of the evidence we have for Christ's resurrection: Name of the person The level of evidence Apollonius of Tyana 1/30th Zalmoxis 1/60th Aristeas 1/24th Mithra […]

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