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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 46)

So then, what would count as replicating the evidence for Christ's resurrection? It's simple. The replication would be a new religious movement based on a "resurrection", which must match or exceed all of the essential components of the original evidence for Christ's resurrection. These components are merely what we've been discussing throughout this series of […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 45)

Is anyone still skeptical of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead? Well then, here is one more test, straight from a hallmark of the scientific method: If you think that the evidence for Christ's resurrection was naturalistically produced, then replicate the result. We have seen thus far that history, in its natural course, […]
2017-02-13

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 44)

Let us summarize the "skeptic's distribution" argument for Christ's resurrection. We have already seen that any kind of reasonable investigation into Jesus's resurrection accounts would conclusively demonstrate that Jesus did rise from the dead. The only possibility left for the skeptic is to turn to unreasonable hypotheses - that is, to crackpot theories like conspiracies. […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 43)

This is another Jupyter notebook. It contains python code that generates the probabilities of a "skeptic's distribution" generating a Jesus-level resurrection report. First, we import some modules: In [1]: import numpy as np import pandas as pd from scipy.stats import lognorm, genpareto We then write a function to simulate getting the maximum value out of n […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 42)

Next, consider the factor of 24 that we used, as the ratio between the level of evidence for Jesus's resurrection, and that of the runner-up. This, too, was a very conservative estimate, which favors the skeptic's case. You'll recall that the runners-up were Aristeas and Krishna, with Apollonius falling not too far behind. In previously […]
2017-01-23

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 41)

We have established that the resurrection has, at a minimum, even odds of having taken place. Let us retrace our steps and demonstrate that this is, in fact, the minimum. Looking back, we see that our first decision was to choose a power law distribution as the "skeptic's distribution". As we mentioned when we made […]

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 […]
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