A popular slogan among many contemporary atheists is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. The slogan itself goes back to the late astronomer Carl Sagan [1], though similar ideas were expressed by David Hume, who wrote “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.” [2] Indeed, so confident was David Hume about this principle that he said, humble man that he was, “I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument…which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.” [3]
So far, so good.
This principle has led many skeptics to push the bar of demonstration so unreasonably high that it cannot possibly be cleared by any amount of testimonial evidence. And atheists seldom attempt to define what precisely is meant by “extraordinary”, or what sort of evidence would be sufficient to demonstrate an extraordinary event. As such, it has become a lazy excuse of many atheists for not dealing with the evidence for miraculous events such as the resurrection, but instead to dismiss it by appeal to Sagan’s dictum or to David Hume’s treatise against miracles (which the skeptic has seldom read for himself).
That's true to a large extent, but the reader should remember that when you refute the lazy incorrect atheist for their employment of ECREE, you are NOT refuting the intellectually superior atheists, like me, who have responsibly and fairly defined ECREE. Your winning a debate against a lazy atheist is akin to me winning a debate against a snake-handling Pentecostal. Gee, is that progress or what?
In this article, I will argue that the dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the philosophy of David Hume that it encapsulates, are fundamentally wrong-headed.
Fallacy of guilty by association. First, lazy atheists are not authoritative sources for fair definitions of ECREE. Second, you condemn yourself by accusing ECREE of being wrong-headed, since you employ it against every miracle claim you evaluate. But the reason you overlooked that was because you chose to base ECREE in how lazy atheists define it. When it is defined fairly and objectively, it merely described how most people, including Christians react to extraordinary news the first time they hear it.
Signs and the Order of Nature
What is the stated purpose of miracles in religious contexts? According to Scripture, miracles function as signs that authenticate the message of the person performing them.
Do you seriously expect the atheist or skeptic to respect a 'scriptural' description of the purpose of a miracle? By appeal to "scripture", a smart guy like you surely realizes he is no longer foisting an intellectual obligation on skeptics, he is merely preaching to the choir.
For example, when Jesus is asked by disciples of John the Baptist whether He is the Messiah, or whether they should be waiting for another, Jesus replies, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me,” (Mt 11:4-6). In other words, Jesus’ miracles were signs that authenticated His message.
If the signs are intended to authenticate the message, then why shouldn't we infer from your belief that some Roman Catholic miracle claims are true, that that Roman Catholic message (i.e., Catholic theology) is true? And yet the bible is not consistent about the purpose of miracles, because in Deuteronomy 13:1-5 God admits that if a false prophet does a genuinely supernatural miracle, this is not to confirm his theology, this is God using the false prophet to "test Israel".
The gospel of John refers to Jesus’ miracles as “signs.”
Correct. And it also blindly leaps from Jesus performing a sign, to Jesus being the true messiah. John was apparently blind to the grim possibility that God will enable a false prophet's predictions to come true in a supernatural way because God is testing Israel.
Towards the conclusion of his gospel, John writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name,” (Jn 20:30-31).
If the purpose of miracles in religious contexts, therefore, is to function as signs, then they have to take place against the backdrop of a stable, uniform, natural order, since it is by contrast with a stable, uniform, natural order that miracles are able to serve as signs.
Fair enough.
Consider, for instance, the relevance of the abnormal character of the resurrection to the epistemic value of Jesus being raised from the dead. If people were routinely rising from the dead then the resurrection of Jesus would lose its epistemic value, since it would not be an event that could be distinguished from the way that nature normally operates. It is precisely because it is unique, and is an interruption of the regularities of nature that we can appeal to the resurrection as God’s vindication of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah and Savior of the world.
It doesn't matter if that is true, you are still leaping too quickly from "Jesus performed a genuinely supernatural miracle" over to "surely God approved of Jesus' theology", and in doing so you defy Deuteronomy 13:1-5. You also defy plenty of other bible passages indicating God allows the devil to perform genuinely supernatural feats for the purpose of deception.
Thus, since miraculous signs require that there be a stable natural order, the existence of such a stable natural order cannot be taken as an argument against the occurrence of miracles in religious contexts.
Then you'll be having lots of trouble with me. I'm not one of those skeptics who blindly follow Hume into his "miracles are impossible" errors. I allow for the possibility of miracles. The way I stab apologetics in the heart is by asking the apologist to produce the one miracle claim they feel is most impervious to a naturalistic interpretation. I issued that challenge to Craig Keener years ago, and for reasons that should be clear from my challenge, he did not dare respond. See here.
This point was first raised in response to David Hume by William Adams, who wrote that “An experienced uniformity in the course of nature hath always thought necessary to the belief and use of miracles. These are indeed relative ideas. There must be an ordinary regular course of nature, before there can be any thing extraordinary. A river must flow, before its stream can be interrupted.” [4] Philosopher Dr. Tim McGrew, of Western Michigan University, concurs: “The fact that in our ordinary experience dead men stay dead
Apparently Dr. McGrew has fallen into Humes error too: How does McGrew know that dead people staying dead is the "ordinary experience" of other people? Isn't that equally as fallacious as the atheist view that says nobody else has experienced a miracle?
cannot be a significant piece of evidence against the resurrection considered as a miraculous sign — that is, it will not do the work that Hume wants it to do in the very sort of religious context where he is most implacably skeptical.” [5]
Can Testimony Ever Be Sufficient to Establish a Miracle?
Not if a) the bible has god warning people of divine wrath against heresy, and b) the unbeliever in question is so worried about imperfect people leading her into heresy and thus into hell that she refuses to allow any imperfect person to guide her thinking about biblical miracle claims. What are you gonna do now? Chortle that she "should" be willing to increase the risk of heresy by allowing imperfect and possibly heretical Christians to influence how she processes miracle claims? Until the day you show that biblical warnings of divine wrath against heresy are god's way of "just kidding", you cannot fault this unbeliever for noticing that most hell-bound heresy has come from imperfect Christians, and choosing to exclude imperfect people from those whom she will allow to teach her about "truth".
It may be admitted that miraculous events do require more evidence to establish them than do mundane events, since the prior probability (that is, their probability given the background information) is lower than for mundane events. I shall return later to why miraculous claims are rightly treated differently from mundane ones. However, I shall note here that any proposition with a non-zero prior probability can, in principle, be demonstrated with sufficient evidence. The eighteenth century British Bishop Thomas Sherlock wrote concerning the resurrection, “I do allow that this case, and others of like nature, require more evidence to give them credit than ordinary cases do. You may therefore require more evidence in these than in other cases; but it is absurd to say that such cases admit no evidence, when the things in question are quite manifestly objects of sense.” [6]
What you aren't telling the reader is why there are apparently no rules of historiography, evidence, hermeneutics or common sense that enable two equally mature educated adults to resolve their disagreement on which evidence to credit and which to disregard. The truth is that no such rules exist. If a skeptic says his standard of evidence for Jesus' resurrection-miracle is a personal vision straight from god, you could not possibly get near "showing" that his standard of evidence for theological claims is "too high". It is only rational for him to fear the bible-god's thunderings against Christians who teach heresy, and to therefore take extreme measures to ensure he doesn't end up in eternal misery, or that nasty surprise Jesus said would be endured in judgment by those who in this world called Jesus "Lord, Lord." Matthew 7:22-23. Of course, there is no god, spirit, devil or supernatural. But so long as you insist on using the bible, you become sandbagged by the bible's unrealistically conspiratorial views. If things really are as bad and deceptive as the bible says, you can hardly blame anybody for refusing to trust imperfect sinners on critical theological matters which allegedly have potential to land a person in eternal misery.
In 2000, philosopher John Earman, himself a religious agnostic, published a book by the provocative title Hume’s Abject Failure — The Argument Against Miracles. [7] Earman cites the nineteenth century philosopher and mathematician Charles Babbage, who wrote that “if independent witnesses can be found, who speak the truth more frequently than falsehood, it is ALWAYS possible to assign a number of independent witnesses, the improbability of the falsehood of whose concurring testimonies shall be greater than that of the improbability of the miracle itself,” [8]
What he didn't account for is that liars who want their lie to successfully deceive others, have just as much interest as honest authors in surrounding their main contentions with nuggets of historical truth. YOU will say if the parts of the author's testimony that can be checked turn out to be true, we should trust the parts of his testimony that cannot be checked. But I would more objectively insist that if the parts of the witnesses testimony that can be checked turn out to be true, that's not enough for us to decide whether he is including truthful details because he is generally honest, or if he is including truthful details to make his lie "ring true".
What do you suppose would happen to the American justice system if it adopted a new pattern jury instruction saying "If you find that the parts of the criminal Defendant's testimony that can be checked turn out to be true, you should believe as true also the parts of his or her testimony that cannot be checked"?
Thus, Hume’s so-called “everlasting check” fails, since a cumulative case can, in principle, be adequate to overcome the intrinsic improbability of a miracle, thereby being sufficient to warrant belief.
It doesn't matter if that is true, "sufficient to warrant belief" does not automatically necessitate "sufficient to condemn unbelief". And in my brand of skepticism, I don't say belief in Jesus' resurrection is unwarranted. I say instead that rejecting the resurrection testimony is warranted. Contrary to popular belief, your personal opinion on when evidence reaches a minimal state of quality/quantity so as to justify trust, does not impose any obligation upon another person to change their evidentiary standards and suddenly start agreeing with you on what evidence seems to be the most convincing.
Typically, when an atheist states that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, they have in mind a single spectacular piece of evidence that is sufficient to overcome the intrinsic improbability of the miracle itself. However, what can be accomplished by a single spectacular piece of evidence can, in principle, also be achieved by numerous pieces of less spectacular evidence, perhaps none of which individually is of particularly great weight but collectively is equivalent in weight to a single piece of spectacular evidence.
And what if the identity of the witnesses was equally as disputed among the common people as often as Christian scholars disagree with each other on the identities of the gospel authors? Or did I inspire you, just now, to write a book entitled "How To Know Whether An Unidentifiable Witness Is Telling the Truth?
Your chosen word "overcome" falsifies your entire spiel: you speak as if what one should ultimately do with a given piece of evidence is governed by some established rule of evidence or historiography, meaning you think it can be made clear when a person's choice to disregard some bit of evidence has "violated" any such rule. Such a rule doesn't exist. Again, it's why equally educated adult jurors often become deadlocked, and disagree on which evidence should be credited or disregarded. No, a deadlock does not necessarily mean one of the jurors is being unreasonable. If you know of any rule that will enable reasonable people to agree on whether to credit or disregard some bit of testimony, why don't you notify the American Court system, so judges can incorporate it into their Rules of Evidence, and you rid the world of deadlocked juries forever?
The Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed, himself an outspoken atheist, has sought to meet the challenge of Earman and Babbage to Hume by arguing that the presumption of independence is often false. [9] For example, in the case of a stage illusion or trick, given that at least one person has been fooled, the probability that many other people will be fooled as well is significantly increased. Thus, successive pieces of evidence fail to add significant force to the case that a true miracle was observed. Tim McGrew responds to this point by noting that “The cumulative testimonial evidence might have a theoretical limit to its force, but it might not. Without further information about the specific case in question, we cannot say anything more. Everything depends on the details,” [10]. McGrew further observes concerning the claimed resurrection of Jesus, “The witnesses are not all confined to one vantage point, as they were in the case of the stage magician.
Does that help or hinder the case for Jesus, who often did "miracles" for "large crowds" (i.e., people who were confined to a single vantage point)?
Regardless, the NT often says resurrection witnesses were confined to a single vantage point. Matthew 28:16-17, Luke 24:31, 37, John 20:20, 26, 30, 21:5, 1st Cor. 15:6.
If they agree, it is much more difficult to find a single simple explanation for how they could all have been fooled.
Wow, I didn't know that you found it difficult to find a single explanation for how the attendees of a Benny Hinn Crusade could have all been fooled. The same with large groups being fooled by Peter Popoff and other faith-healers.
Their testimonies are not bare assertions that the event in question happened.
You are assuming it was a plural "they" who gave the testimony we read today. Not at all. Generously assuming for the sake of argument the NT provides 20 separate resurrection eyewitness reports, that still leaves 480 others (1st Cor. 15:6) whose testimony we don't have. Worse, Luke apparently didn't find that any preaching activity of the 82 apostles (12 + 70) was important enough to significantly document the way he does for Paul. We are going to be reasonable, despite possible trifles otherwise, to conclude that the reason we have nearly nothing from biblical history about the vast majority of the original witnesses is because they didn't do anything indicating they experienced a radical transformation.
They may include details that interlock with details in other testimonies in ways that increase their credibility.” [11]
The Problem of Defining “Extraordinary”
Tim McGrew has dubbed this slogan that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” the Argumentum Sagani in honor of Carl Sagan [12]. In his presentations on the subject, he parodies the argument as follows (though he notes that this parody is not original with him):
1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
2. The claim that a miracle has occurred is extraordinary.
Therefore,
3. Any evidence supporting it ought to be extraordinary as well.
4. I am not sure what I mean by “extraordinary.”
5. But whatever you come up with, it’s not going to work.
Therefore,
6. No one is justified in believing any miracle claim.
The problem with the word “extraordinary” here is that it is rarely clearly defined.
Which means the problems for you start when you encounter an intellectually superior atheist who DOES clearly define ECREE. To fairly and objectively define the "extraordinary" just take the phrase at issue:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
and replace "extraordinary" with its dictionary definition (I use Merrian-Webster), and we get:
Claims which go beyond what is usual, regular, or customary, or are exceptional to a very marked extent, require evidence which goes beyond what is usual, regular, or customary, or else is exceptional to a very marked extent.
Yes, what constitutes "beyond the usual" or "beyond the customary" involves inevitable subjectivity, but that only bolsters the skeptic's case, since the subjectivity, being necessary, cannot possibly be overcome, and presto, we land right back in typical daily reality...where equally educated adults often reach a point where their disagreement on what to do with a piece of evidence, is not governed by any "rule". Therefore, what the skeptic is doing with the evidence cannot "violate" any such rule, and therefore, any accusation that what the skeptic did with the evidence was "unreasonable" cannot be objectively grounded. It bears repeating: You apologists constantly pretend as if a careful application of the rules of historiography would bring to light which assessment of the evidence is "most probable" and which assessment is "less probable", when in fact no historian on the face of the earth will tell you the rules of historiography are capable of resolving disputes between laypeople anymore than such rules are capable of resolving disputes between historians.
The mantra that I would adopt instead is that all claims require sufficient evidence. What counts as sufficient evidence will depend upon the relevant prior probability.
Which doesn't mean much since historians, Christians and philosophers disagree with each other constantly on whether some bit of evidence is "sufficient" rendering reasonable the reader who concludes that at the end of the day, such disputes are much ado about nothing, otherwise, the experts would not maintain disagreement for so long. Lots of smart people know Bayesian probability theory, yet they also disagree with each other about what degree of probability such calculus yields for Jesus' resurrection.
And, indeed, the only relevance that the fact that a given event is supernatural has epistemically is that it suppresses the prior. However, even prior probabilities that are extremely small (but non-zero) can, in principle, be overcome if adequate evidence is forthcoming.
I can grant that for the sake of argument, but that will never help you, as no such evidence has ever been "adequate", probably because, again, the rules of historiography are not nuanced enough to justify pretending that they can reveal which hypothesis has greater probability, at least not in situations where the evidence is both ancient and ambiguous and sourced in authors of disputed identities.
This failure on the part of atheists to define what they mean by “extraordinary” in this context leads to them setting the bar of evidence so unreasonably high that the burden of proof cannot possibly be met.
So quit playing in the sandbox and get out here in the trenches, where the atheists fairly define ECREE.
What is the problem with the word “extraordinary”?
Nothing, once it is replaced by its dictionary definition.
If by that word we simply mean an event that is highly improbable or unique, then any event can be defined with sufficient specificity to meet that criteria. For example, consider Joe’s marriage to Sally. Joe being married to someone with the specific traits and characteristics of Sally is enormously improbable — especially when one considers the numerous other couples who had to meet, and the specific sperm cells that had to meet specific egg cells, all the way back to the dawn of humanity, in order for Joe and Sally to both be living at the same time. And yet Joe would be able to offer sufficient evidence that he is in fact married to Sally – adequate evidence to overcome a low prior probability.
That's nothing new. I already admit that ECREE includes subjective elements. One them is the point at which a person "should" classify a claim as "extraordinary". Your problem is not with the atheist but with ECREE being a mere rule of thumb and thus offering something less than absolute certainty.
Is the fact that Joe married Sally an extraordinary event? Well, it depends on what you mean by “extraordinary.”
Exactly. I don't find two particular people getting married to each other to be "extraordinary" because under that logic, every interaction of persons and objects would qualify as extraordinary, and if we are to have a sensible disussion, we have to come to terms on what kinds of events are non-extraordinary.
The point I am trying to make here is that you cannot simply define an extraordinary event as an occurrence that is highly improbable or unique (i.e. that it is something that lies outside of what normally happens), since that takes us into the realm where we can show that lots of events are very improbable or unique, if they are defined with enough specificity.
That's not a flaw in ECREE, that merely ECREE's unavoidable subjectivity.
Instead, the argument here is going to need to be more sophisticated. So, let me try to steel man the atheist’s argument and formalize why we tend to treat the resurrection differently from how we would treat the case of Joe marrying Sally.
Your geekiness is blinding me. We treat Jesus resurrection differently from daily marriages for the same reason we treat alien abduction stories differently from claims about heavy traffic.
Why Do We Treat a Miracle Claim as Different from a Mundane Claim?
Why, then, do we treat a miracle claim, like “Jesus rose from the dead”, differently from how we might treat a more mundane claim, like “Joe married Sally”?
Because we rightly fear that if we start believing Jesus rose from the dead, we may end up in a "cult" promoting "heresy", and we are aware that the bible-god strongly condemns heretics. Once again, unles you claim those parts of the bible are "just kidding" you cannot blame an unbeliever for taking exteme measures to make sure she doesn't make her eternal resting place more miserable than it needs to be. One such measure is consistent with the NT; not letting anybody teach her anything about the NT except the Christian teacher who possesses the same level of infallibility as the original apostles allegedly did after Acts 2. Sure, you will balk because you know you cannot satisfy that high standard. But inability to meet the standard doesn't mean the standard is too high. It may just as easily imply that your evidence is insufficient to demonstrate which viewpoint is most reasonable.
Clearly, it is not that the former is more improbable than the latter, or that the former is a very unique or an unprecedented event, since mundane claims, like “Joe married Sally”, can be defined with enough specificity to make them highly improbable, unique and unprecedented events as well. Obviously, the very same problem would be encountered if Joe had married any other woman, and so this consideration may be ‘cancelled out’. This is equally true of a lottery. The lottery being won by any given individual is extremely improbable. But since this is equally true of all participants in the lottery, we can ‘cancel’ that consideration. On the other hand, suppose that someone wins the lottery who happens to be the spouse or son or a close friend of the person running the lottery. In that case, we get more suspicious because that can be thought of as more probable on an alternative hypothesis than that of chance coincidence. Notice here that we do not get suspicious simply because something extremely improbable has happened — because this individual winning the lottery is no more improbable than any other individual selected at random winning it. Rather, we get suspicious because we consider that this particular individual winning the lottery is more expected (more probable) if something suspicious has happened than it is on the hypothesis of chance.
What you carefully avoided saying was "we get suspicious because for a relative of a Lottery-office worker to win the Lottery increases the likelihood that there was collusion." But you didn't want to say that because you think Matthew and John were close with Jesus, and your logic could then be used by a skeptic to justify the theory that these close associates, like Benny Hinn and his body guards, agreed to deceive others.
This is a good parallel for how the skeptic thinks about a miracle report such as the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead.
No it isn't. We can easily verify that others have won lotteries. We have never verified that anybody ever rose from the dead. The problem of improbability in jesus rising from the dead is orders of magnitude larger than the problem of improbability of somebody somewhere winning a lottery.
Just like the hypothesis of fraud picks out the lottery example for special suspicion, so in this case, the skeptic argues, the hypothesis of hallucination or deceit picks out the resurrection reports for special suspicion.
Put me down for "vision later embellished into physical sightings of a bodily risen Jesus".
But note that this is not based on a purely inductive approach that argues that the event of the resurrection or of the suspicious lottery win is improbable by itself (because of the problem I raised above). Instead, the argument ought to be something to the effect that in the past we have found such claims to be more explicable by way of alternative hypotheses, so most likely this one is too. This then moves us into a discussion of alternative explanations of the evidence under consideration and whether those explanations are reasonable.
Correct, except that by the word "moves" you fallaciously assume that upon arriving at that point, the skeptic is under some type of compulsion to provide the alternative theory or admit unreasonableness. He isn't. I can be reasonable to deny the hypothesis that space aliens created the Bermuda Triangle, even if I don't know how to explain the allegation that ships and planes disappear in that area than in any other.
Further Problems With Inductive Assessments of the Prior Probability of Miracles
Another point that is worth bearing in mind is that it, if the prior probability of miraculous events is judged in purely inductive terms, Christians and skeptics are likely going to disagree about the priors anyway. The atheist presumably would take every miraculous report from the Old and New Testaments as another example of a failed miracle report, adding it to his case against miracles, whereas the Christian beliefs that those miracles in fact took place. Thus, simply putting the resurrection into the reference class of “alleged miracles” and then asking for a purely inductive prior probability of its occurrence is quite unhelpful. In fact, the atheist’s attribution of those miracle accounts to naturalistic causes is itself in significant measure a consequence of his non-empirical metaphysical judgments.
Should I believe god is protecting me, while I write this, from going to hell? If not, what would God rather have me do, and does the NT support the modern Christian desire to engage in scholarly questions of sources and methodology? Or are you slightly worreid that the detailed trifling detailed way modern day apologists obey Jude 3 was never intended by the NT authors? When you read the NT, do you come away with the feeling that God wants unbelievers to purchase apologetics books and comprehensively examine the arguments therein? No, you don't.
It is hardly as though there are millions upon millions of other cases where a miracle was reported and the skeptic, having thoroughly investigated each claim, has found compelling empirical evidence for their falsity. This is why the appeal of David Hume to the uniform testimony of mankind against miracles is wrong-headed.
It's also wrongheaded to go chasing after a miracle-claim that has a demonstrable history of enticing the investigators into adopting a heretical form of Christianity.
Indeed, there are many miracle reports in existence. Craig Keener has documented many examples in his two volume set on miracles [13].
He has also refused my challenge to give me the evidence for the one he thinks most impervious to falsification.
Thus, as far as that is concerned, Hume is simply wrong. Human experience is not at all uniform on this matter.
Now YOU are making the same mistake. You don't know that human experience "is not at all uniform on this matter". All you know is that many people claim miracle-experiences. Which of them are being truthful, deceptive or mistaken, you really can't say.
And you neglect to mention the benefits of miracle apathy: how many Christian churches, which you think are "heretical", did an unbeliever safely steer clear of, by not caring about Jesus' resurrection? Is it morally good or morally bad when an unbeliever refuses to attend a heretical church?
You will likely respond "but look at the benefits the unbeliever lost by being disinterested in miracles!"
Unfortunately for you, you will never be demonstrating that theological benefits, because the Christian churches disagree with each other on what the relevant NT passages mean. The only "benefit" to miracle-investigation is you might end up adopting certain beliefs that open the door for for you to join some church, which in this world is a source of social stability.
In fact, Hume’s whole argument here is circular, since in order to argue that the uniform experience of man precludes miraculous events, he has to dismiss the numerous reports of such miracles as false – the very point he is endeavoring to establish.
No, he only has to show that his belief that they are false, is reasonable. He doesn't have to show that they are actually false. No historian would say that claims based on nothing but testimony can be positively falsified by outsiders. When we assert some miracle claim is false, that's a probability judgment, not an absolute claim.
In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, what is the relevant background information, which will inform our assessment of the prior probability?
How many times have you seen the tooth-fairy leave money under somebody's pillow? If never, does that establish a prior probability?
We have strong independent reason to think God exists
No, the strongest rebuttals to theism are a) the arguments that god-talk is ultimately meaningless, b) godtalk is essentially ad hoc by necessity, and c) there is no "rule" requiring people to "care" about higher authorities who have a consistent track record of refusing to respond to their most devoted followers.
and that He sometimes performs miracles.
So provide me all the evidence in favor of the one miracle you think most clearly resists all purely naturalistic interpretations, and lets get started.
However, God doesn’t appear to perform those miracles particularly frequently, so they do fall into a reference class that is rather special on the basis of considerations such as God’s wanting to reserve them for special occasions so that they can be recognized as a sign against the background of a regular natural order.
And here you completely forget that your bible says god may sometimes do a real miracle at the hands of a false prophet merely to "test Israel". Does Deuteronomy 13 "apply to us today"? what dispensationalism materials does god want me to study, and how long will he expect me to study before he expects me to correctly discern which camp is right about how the OT "applies to us today"? If you don't know, you forfeit the right to balk if I answer that question for myself in a way you don't like. If then I decide God will give me 25 years to study that convoluted mess of theological nothingness call "dispensationalism", you are deprived of any justification for screaming "behold now is the day of salvation!". I can thus justify rejecting the gospel for the next 25 years.
However, this implies a much higher prior than the prior assigned by the skeptic, even before we factor in other considerations that could raise the prior probability in Jesus’ particular case. It is to these other considerations that I now turn.
The Relevance of Religio-Historical Context to Estimating the Prior
For the reasons expressed above, I think that a purely inductive or frequentist approach to estimating the prior probability of the resurrection of Jesus is mistaken.
Why? What "rule" does the frequentist violate?
The prior probability, I would suggest, can instead be raised by (a) pointing to the independent evidence from natural theology that God exists (if there is independent demonstration that there is a God who could perform the miracle, then this increases the prior probability of Him actually performing a miracle at least somewhat);
Fat chance. godtalk is meaingless and is the most extreme example of the ad hoc fallacy.
and (b) fleshing out, to borrow a phrase from William Lane Craig, the religio-historical context of the resurrection.
So in the religio-historical context of modern Roman Catholic miracles, the miracles operate as they did for Jesus in the first-century: They do not merely prove the supernatural realm exists, they also "confirm the message". You will balk like crazy because you know you'll lose hard if you simply agree that genuinely supernatural miracles among Catholics today is divine conformation that their theology is approved by God. But from a purely objective standpoint, I don't think you can convincingly argue that God intends modern-day miracles to do anything less than what you think 1st century miracles were supposed to do: "confirm the message".
By elaborating this religio-historical context, one can show that God plausibly might have motivation for raising Jesus of Nazareth specifically from the dead.
But Jesus' family didn't think his miracles were real (Mark 3:21, 6:1-4, John 7:5), which argues that the miracles likely weren't real, which suggests God would not raise Jesus from the dead, because God would not want to premise His second covenant upon the words and works of somebody incapable of doing miracles.
William Lane Craig notes, “A miracle without a context is inherently ambiguous.
That doesn't mean God wouldn't do a miracle outside of a context. Maybe god operates in a way that creates intolerable ambiguities for Christian apologists.
But if a purported miracle occurs in a significant religio-historical context, then the chances of its being a genuine miracle are increased.
But only if you assume God is the sort of God who cares about establishing a religio-historical context.
And under your reasoning as adopted from W.L.Craig, supra, the medieval Christian miracle stories are flooded with religio-historical context, therefore the chances of those being genuine miracles are increased. So, Mr. McLatchie, how many medieval Christian miracle stories do you believe are true?
For example, if the miracles occur at a momentous time (say, a man’s leprosy vanishing when Jesus speaks the words, ‘Be clean!’) and do not recur regularly in history, and if the miracles are numerous and various, then the chances of their being the result of some unknown natural causes are reduced. In Jesus’ case, moreover, his miracles and resurrection ostensibly took place in the context of and as the climax to his own unparalleled life and teachings and produced so profound an effect on his followers that they worshiped him as Lord.” [14]
Now you are preaching to the choir with your presupposition that such gospel details are true, when in fact there are objective justifications to hold that the gospels at best are mere legends and embellishments around several nuggets of historical truth. If in this article I don't supply examples, it is because the greater purpose is to provide point-to-point rebuttal. How much or how little I "should" support my own claims in this context is nobody's preorgative but mine. Otherwise, I'd have to write 90,000 pages of detail to make sure I satisfy all internet fuckups who think god imparted to them the spiritual gift of nitpicking.
How can this religio-historical context be elaborated in an objective way?
You will never show that unbelievers ever "should" care.
I would point here to instances in the gospels of what I call Messianic convergence. That is, instances in the gospel accounts where an episode in Jesus’ life intersects in some striking way with the Old Testament Scriptures but which also enjoys strong historical support. This is best explained by giving examples, so I will give a few here.
The evidence is compelling that Jesus died on the Day of Passover, the 15th of Nisan. I won’t get into the details here of how we know the gospels are historically reliable on this detail, since I only wish to illustrate the principle. Given the theological theme in the New Testament of Jesus being the fulfillment of the Passover lamb (e.g. 1 Cor 5:7), this is quite striking. This is not by any means a conclusive proof that Christianity is true, but that striking correspondence does seem to be somewhat more probable on the hypothesis that Christianity is true than on the falsehood of that hypothesis, and may therefore be counted as evidence (not proof) that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. I suggest that a Bayes factor of 10 (meaning it is 10 times more likely on the hypothesis of Christianity than on its falsehood), though admittedly somewhat subjective, is a fairly conservative estimate.
But you don't know whether the gospels are reportng the date of Jesus' death accurately, and other Christian apologists like Mike Licona are apparently convinced that the gospel authors felt free to narrate facts in a manner other than as they actually happened. Sorry, but if it be reasonable to date the gospels roughly around 70 a.d., that gives their authors 35 years to contemplate the theological implications of Jesus' death, and the temptation to portray Jesus falsely as if he knew he was supposed to die, must have been irresistible for gospel authors who think Jesus is this wonderfully exalted being.
This argument may be developed as a cumulative case. In previous articles (e.g. here), I have discussed the undesigned coincidence that corroborates John’s statement that Jesus entered Jerusalem five days before Passover, on the week leading up to His death, which would correspond to the 10th day of the month of Nisan (Jn 12:12).
Why would it matter if it was a historical fact? Even assuming Christianity is true, that does nothing to smooth over the real world experience of many Christians that God seems to be so apathetic that they have trouble distinguishing him from a non-existent god. An intelligent mammal is always stupid to just keep pestering some higher-order being after it becomes clear that the higher-order being is either not home, or is not interested. Yes, there comes a point when "God's delays are not God's denials" has worn too thin and has lost its force. But to answer more directly, a skeptic could be just as reasonable as you, to explain this as Jesus recognizing at some point he would be executed, and so he engaged in actions that he thought consistent with his interpretation of OT passages he viewed as messianic. Then the gospel authors came along later and realized the benefit of subtlety: stories that have Jesus exactly mirroring messianic expectations would appear equally as transparently fabricated as stories about how the child Jesus manifested both childish and divine traits, but stories that have Jesus "fulfilling" some messianic expectation more indirectly would be slightly more believable. And let's not forget that Jesus was also a mystic, which explains why there is so much fortune cookie bullshit to gospel theology.
It turns out that the instructions given in Exodus 12 regarding the Passover stipulated that on the 10th of Nisan the Jews were to select their Passover lamb and bring it into their homes (verse 3). Isn’t it striking, then, that Jesus’ death on the Day of Passover just so happened to be the same year that Jesus entered Jerusalem on the 10th day of Nisan?
No, the gospel authors are simply employing fiction to do what they do best, and make Jesus appear to be a fulfillment of several OT themes.
Now, we need to be careful here since it may be pointed out that this coincidence is not wholly independent of the previous one, since Jesus coming into Jerusalem on Nisan 10 would not matter at all if it weren’t for the fact that he then died subsequently at least around that time. If we take his entry into Jerusalem on Nisan 10 to be significant, we must be assuming that he died right around that time, which means that that one entails the other. The question we can ask, however, is how much additional evidence it provides that Jesus also entered Jerusalem on Nisan 10. Another factor for us to consider is that Passover is a particularly likely time for a Jew to enter Jerusalem and also a time when he could count on ministering to a large crowd of people who had made their pilgrimage to Judea for the feast. Even with a Bayes Factor of 2 (meaning that it is twice as likely on the hypothesis than on its falsehood), however, the overall cumulative Bayes factor doubles.
But in the real world 'god' appears absolutely uninterested in us. That is going to justify unbelievers to remain unbelievers, even if you can find 10 ancient authors to corroborate Jesus dying on Nisan 10.
Another example is the fact that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy of Micah 5:2. I realize that this proposition is controversial. However, I will not argue the case (which I think can be made strongly) for Jesus being born in Bethlehem in this article. Here, I only intend to show how in principle such evidences can be relevant to the prior probability of Jesus’ resurrection. To be conservative, I will assign a Bayes factor for Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem to 1000. This is a generous Bayes factor, since clearly much, much less than 1 out of every 1000 individuals that have been born since the time of Micah has been born in Bethlehem, and the probability of Jesus in fact being born in Bethlehem, on the hypothesis that He is indeed the Messiah (based on the prophecy of Micah 5:2), is very high (approaching 1).
You are correct to say it is controversial. Jesus never became a ruler, whic means you run back to your ad hoc fallacies, deny the plain meaning of "ruler in Israel", and assign it a mystical or "secondary" meaning to avoid admitting that Jesus didn't fulfill Micah 5:2.
Another example is the fact that Christianity became the dominant international religion that it became.
Which would never have happened without Constantine making Christianity the official Roman Empire religion, and in the process criminalizing the pagan religions.
The Old Testament predicted that the Messiah would be the light to the gentiles, that God’s salvation might reach to the ends of the world (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6). Jesus Himself, during His ministry, said, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come,” (Mt 24:14).
I take that to be Matthew putting phrases in Jesus' mouth which Jesus never said. That hypothesis does not break any "rule", except perhaps the "rule" of bible inerrancy.
This entails that it is quite probable that, on the hypothesis that Jesus really is the Messiah, Christianity would bring people of all nations to a recognition of the God of Israel. However, this seems to be really quite improbable on the falsehood of that hypothesis. Until 313 A.D. (when the Edict of Milan, under the Emperor Constantine, guaranteed religious freedom and made Christianity legal), Christians endured intense persecution under multiple Roman Emperors.
Not really. If the NT is reliable, the Romans would have known that what Christians believe has more to do with the hope of the hopeless and less to do with any serious threat to Rome.
Under the circumstances, the odds of Christianity prevailing and becoming an international religion seemed vanishingly small, and yet it did.
No it didn't. No version of Christianity today represents the version Jesus taught in Matthew. With few exceptions, all of modern Christianity espouses Paul, and for that reason, do not constitute Christianity.
Again, then, we have a significantly top-heavy likelihood ratio where Christianity’s spread across the world is much, much more expected on the hypothesis of its truth than on its falsehood. I suggest that a Bayes Factor of 1000 is reasonable for this one.
All you need to account for Christianity's spread is a death-cult that aggressively seeks proselytes between the 1st and 4th centuries when joining a new cult came with the obvious benefits of humanitarian aid to those in need.
If my assigned estimated Bayes Factors for the above four examples are reasonable, then our cumulative Bayes Factor is already 20,000,000 (meaning, our evidence is 20 million times more likely if Jesus is the Messiah than if He isn’t). There is admittedly a certain degree of subjectivity involved in assigning those Bayes factors, but I have tried to be reasonable and conservative, and I am only attempting to show how the argument may be probabilistically modeled given certain sets of assumptions. Those were only four examples, and there are many more that I could provide. Cumulatively, I would argue, this sort of evidence leads one to think that God may plausibly have motivation for raising Jesus of Nazareth specifically from the dead as God’s vindication of Jesus’ claims, message, and teaching (certainly more so than if He were some obscure miscellaneous Joe Blow). This argument can be developed still further (for more examples, see my earlier article here).
If Jesus' miracles vindicated his message, why are you so slow to conclude that the miracles done in Roman Catholicism vindicate Catholic theology? Does the bible say that miracles in the latter days will have a different purpose than they had for Jesus?
Another consideration here is that the Old Testament predicts that the Messiah would be raised from the dead (Isa 53:10),
Which view cannot be documented from anything in pre-Christian Judaism.
and Jesus Himself claimed numerous times that His resurrection from the dead would be God’s vindication of His radical Messianic claims. For example, there is strong historical support for the veracity of Jesus’ statement in John 2:19 that He would “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (speaking of His body), though again I will not get into the details of the supporting evidence here.
It doesn't matter if Jesus said it. his audience thought he was talking about the Temple building (v. 20). Then the author cuts in and insists that Jesus was speaking about the "temple" of his body (v. 21). The author is doing what most Christian scholars think John is doing: he is putting new spins on the words of the historical Christ to make it seem like Jesus spoke in some type of code that only the enlightened few could recognize.
Since that is itself a prediction that He would be raised from the dead,
No, it is John taking a statement Jesus made about the Temple building and falsely reinterpreting it.
it may be taken as historical that Jesus really did predict ahead of time not only His impending violent death, but also His resurrection. This and other predictions of Jesus’ resurrection in the gospels can also be historically confirmed to be authentic, but we need not get into the details here.
it wouldn't matter if you did, nothing in the bible can get rid of the sad reality that even for many sincere Christians, god's "hiddenness" of silence is intolerably consistent and leaves them unable to distinguish a dead god from a living god who avoid interacting with his followers.
If Jesus really did predict ahead of time not only His impending violent death but also His resurrection from the dead, this also gives us reason to suspect that God may plausibly have motivation for raising Jesus of Nazareth specifically from the dead.
And it also doesn't matter, since the "god" you are trying to get people to serve, has a very bad real-world track record of giving any appearance that he gives a shit what happens.
Overcoming the Subjectivity of Prior Assignment
One may challenge the appropriateness of a Bayesian approach to miracles on the basis that the assignment of the prior probability of a miraculous event is quite subjective.
That's right. Christian scholars disagree on the degree to which any resurrection testimony in the NT comes from eyewitnesses. Alleged eyewitness Matthew's use of Mark is reasonably viewed as reducing the likelihood that Matthew was an eyewitness, even if you can trifle that any eyewitness may possibly find a non-eyewitness's version more preferable to his own. it isn't like the debate must be concluded as soon as you have invented a possible trifle that keeps your faith from being 100% irrational. Whether skepticism toward Jesus can be reasonable arises from grounds independent of whether your trust in Jesus can be reasonable. Again, it is not true that in every disagreement, at least one person has to be unreasonable.
However, this obstacle can be overcome by back-solving for how low of a prior the pertinent evidence could overcome. For example, in their chapter in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Tim and Lydia McGrew argue for a Bayes factor of the evidence pertaining to the resurrection of 1044, “a weight of evidence that would be sufficient to overcome a prior probability (or rather improbability) of 10-40 for R and leave us with a posterior probability in excess of 0.9999.” [15]
Will God protect me from going to hell while I check out the McGrew's calculations? Or should I scrap the effort at better understanding and "get saved" ASAP because I never know when I will die and seal my fate for eternity?
Likewise, I have similarly argued in a previous article that the cumulative Bayes factor of the evidence for God’s existence, on the most charitable of assumptions, is sufficient to overcome a prior probability of 10-18 and still yield posterior odds of God’s existence of 0.9999.
And again, the real world teaches us that God has no interest in communicating with his sincere followers, and yet you continue fallaciously assuming that if god "exists", all refusal to serve him becomes irrational and unreasonable. Not so.
Thus, one can calculate how small a prior would need to be in order to overcome the positive evidence for a hypothesis. Even if we do not know precisely what the prior is, if we are reasonably confident that the prior is higher than that value, then a more precise estimate of the prior becomes less important.
Conclusion
To conclude, while the dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” may have rhetorical appeal, a closer inspection reveals that it is fraught with oft-overlooked problems.
No, the s tupid version of ECREE as espoused by lazy atheists, is fraught with oft-overlooked problems. The objective and fair version of ECREE does not have those problems and still shows the reasonableness of those who reject miracle claims where the evidence hasn't passed the highest authentication standards.
Sagan’s dictum has regrettably often been used to shut down inquiry and discourse rather than foster it and encourage an open-minded and careful investigation of the public evidence bearing on resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
And you'll never know how many times an atheist saved herself from a life of Mormonism by shutting down an apologetics conversation with a Protestant.
My hope and prayer is that this article clears the way for more productive dialogue between Christians and skeptics on the epistemology of testimony and the provability of miracles.
That doesn't seem to be sincere. I robustly challenged you a few years ago, and you signaled your fear of losing any such debate by pretending that because I had sued several people in the past, you were choosing to avoid the debate. FUCK YOU.
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