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2016-12-12

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 35)

Recall that we're constructing a "skeptic's distribution" - the probability distribution of generating a resurrection report with a certain level of evidence. We will construct it from historical, empirical data. This allows us to bypass the mess of trying to compute everything from first principles, and ensures that the this is the correct distribution - […]

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 […]
2016-11-28

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 33)

So the diversity of the individuals involved in Christ's resurrection testimonies already make a high degree of interdependence unlikely. One could hardly find a less likely group of people to enter into a world-spanning conspiracy. You would expect disparate parts of such a group to be constantly at odds with each other, destroying the conspiracy almost […]
2016-11-21

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 32)

So, could the resurrection testimonies really have a near-total dependency among them? Could they have been generated by a conspiracy of some sort? There are a multitude of reasons to think they were not. First, there is the story of apostle Paul - one of the named witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15, and someone who […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 31)

Let us examine this general class of theories, that postulate a near-total interdependence in the evidence against them. What kind of theories are they? What are their properties? Is it fair to characterize them as "crackpot" theories? Now, note that such theories requires a conspiracy of some kind, almost by definition. Near-total interdependence means that […]

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 […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 28)

(Continued from the previous post) Miscellaneous thoughts Here's a few more assorted thoughts: I still think that you're too afraid of large odds. For example, my gut feeling is that 99.99% is far too small a limit on how certain we can be in history. I mean, we can make meaningful, almost empirical statements about […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 27)

(Continued from the previous post) Planning out the stages of the whole argument So, all that gives us that Bayes' factor of 1e54. Now, as I've said I'm okay with its large magnitude, under the specification that this is for a certain model evaluated under some well-justified degree of independence. Given its large value, Jesus […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 26)

(Continued from the previous post) The "license plate effect", and its applicability to my calculations Now, I acknowledge that your "license plate effect" is in fact real - that 1e8 can be split between the "license plate effect" and the remaining "human honesty factor". But for the examples that I provided, I disagree that the […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 25)

And now, time for a short interlude in this series. I've been in communication with Aron Wall of Undivided Looking. It's a great blog that people should check out, which covers much of the same subject matters as my blog. I've asked him for feedback on my series, and he graciously replied back with a […]
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