6.2 Probability of an event being from God

Published by 1c15 on 14th December 201914th December 2019

What can the Sceptic do at this point? Well, I think their only recoil is to try and argue that God acting to raise Jesus from the dead is incredibly improbable. 

So even before investigating a claimed miracle, we know that there is a huge mountain of probability against it ever being an act of God, Bart Ehrman I’ve heard made this claim in his debate with William Lane Craig. Corpses stay dead more often than them coming back to life. In short, the world we inhabit does not make room for the miraculous. So even if we cannot explain what happened to Jesus after his crucifixion, this reasoning would insist that there could not have been a resurrection. This is called antecedent probability. Even prior to investigation, past experience says they are highly unlikely if not practically impossible. As thoughtful as this mindset seems, it is plagued with problems

1. If the sort of God described in the Christian scriptures exists, there is no reason to reject the possibility of miracles as the explanation of well-attested events for which no plausible natural explanation exists

Although a scholar like David Owen is a critic who supports this objection, he still acknowledges that the existence of God would alter the miracles issue. 

2. To say that we should deny the resurrection, no matter how strong the evidence, is to be biased against the possibility that this could be the very case for which we have been looking

This critique is more forceful here than with other objections in this chapter, since this challenge often explicitly states that no evidence could ever qualify an event as a miracle.

3. The entire foundation for which this objection is based is fatally flawed.

We learn about the natural world through our experience of reality, our knowledge of the world around us is gathered by gaining information. If you cast your net over a pond, you will get few fish. Cast it over an ocean, you’ll get a much greater yield. If we look at all the data, it will reveal many reports of unusual occurrences that might be investigated and determined as miracles. Surely most of the supernatural claims would be claimed untrustworthy. But before making the absolute observation that no miracles have ever happened, someone would have to investigate each report.

It only takes a justified example to show there is more to reality than the physical world. We must analyse the mountain of data to justify the naturalistic conclusion assumed in this objection. This response does not claim we have evidence, rather it is more directly a challenge to naturalistic methods. Evidence that there has been (and perhaps still are) supernatural phenomena. Although not as well attested as Jesus’ resurrection, to the extent that they can be confirmed, they should significantly change our ideas concerning the natural world. This would not only overturn the naturalistic objection, it turns it back on itself. If other miracles do occur, then the resurrection is far more plausible. 

Scientists occasionally found ways to measure and discern a possible correlation between prayers and healing (Perhaps scientific testing can begin to look into the supernatural. An interesting study conducted by a physician, the beneficial effects of prayer on sick patients, have been documented. Using strict scientific guidelines in a double-blind study. 393 patients in a coronary care unit were the subjects. About half were prayed for over a ten-month period. In twenty-one of the twenty-six categories monitored, patients receiving prayer fared better than those who did not receive prayer. The results were published in Randolph C. Byrd, “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population” in a medical journal.

Bayes theorem scores the resurrection as probable considering the evidence.

The evidence for the Resurrection is actually so good that even if we thought God’s existence was super unlikely prior to looking at the evidence, once we take the evidence into account it still ought to convince us that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is where the second kind of argument, the Bayesian version, comes into play. We don’t just say that the Resurrection is very unlikely and then stop, we’ve got to look at the evidence and come to a final probability given everything we know. We have to take everything into account. And once we do that, the evidence for the Resurrection is so good that the Resurrection still comes out on top.

This is actually precisely what Timothy McGrew argues. He says that the evidence is so confirmatory of the Resurrection that even if the prior probability of God raising Jesus from the dead were 1 in a billion, the strength of the evidence would still end up confirming the Resurrection in excess of .9999999999999…. basically, .9 with 34 9’s behind it. That should help us get some perspective on how strong the evidence is. Richard Swinburne Numbers arn’t as generous but still comes to a conclusion that on probability theory, God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. For more on this check out Tim and Richards work.

Sources

• David Owen — See David Owen, “Hume Versus Price on Miracles and Prior Probabilities,” in Swinburne, ed., Miracles, 132.
• Prayer study — The results were published in Randolph C. Byrd, “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population,” Southern Medical Journal 81.7 (July 1988): 826–29.
• Other ways God cold interact with us — For details, see the two audio tape lecture set by Gary R. Habermas, “Ten Ways God Interacts with Us,” available from Impact by calling 704-846-1226 or at impactapologetics.com.