NaClhv

Theology, philosophy, math, science, and random other things
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (frozen copy)

This was the state of the "Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection" post, as of Easter 2018, in the "second draft" form. Some of the formatting has been lost in the blog migration, particularly in the Jupyter notebooks, but the content has been retained. This post will remain unchanged, while the other post […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection

This is still a work in progress. It will change as I continue to add and edit the content. I consider this to be in its "third draft" form. It will take some more time to complete, and it may be messy in the meantime. A version of this post as it appeared on Easter […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 51)

At long last, we can summarize this entire series. First, we calculated the prior odds for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This prior cannot be zero. That would violate one of the fundamental tenets of Bayesian thinking, and it is not empirically justified, since we have not observed an infinite number of people who did […]

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 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
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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. […]
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