Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[Randy Carson]

Jenny, I have read that article in the past, and I am quite comfortable with it. I encourage everyone in this forum to spend some time reading it.

Then you need to read it again.  It does not make nearly the case you claim it does.  It merely makes the case that most scholars (most of whom are theologians) believe early Christians thought they'd seen Jesus.  

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But is that what happened, Jenny? The Romans buried Jesus?

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Mark 15
42 It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, 43 Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. 44 Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. 45 When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. 46 So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. 47 Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid.

That would be the claim yes.  But it's not proof of anything.  It's an account written 70 years later by who knows who.

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Why were the disciples transformed from cowering men in hiding for fear of the Jews to bold evangelists who turned the world upside down?

We have no evidence that they were except for a book written 70 years after the events by who knows who.

This sounds so commonsensical, doesn’t it? But in fact it is demonstrably false.

Probability theorists studying what sort of evidence it would take to establish a highly improbable event came to realize that if you just weigh the improbability of the event against the reliability of the testimony, we’d have to be skeptical of many commonly accepted claims. Rather, what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred. This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself.

In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred (William Lane Craig, “Stephen Law on the Non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth”, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/stephen-l...f-nazareth.).

So, no, extraordinary claims require sufficient evidence...just like any other kind of claim.

Sufficient means sufficient to make the claim more probable than not. 

While the idea that a sufficiently outlandish claim requires a lot more compelling evidence is quite intuitive, it can be quantified nicely with probability theory in a Bayesian framework. In short, sufficient evidence must be capable of raising a highly improbable claim to be highly probable - and the more improbable the evidence, the better. By application of Bayes' theorem, it's possible to show this in action mathematically.

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Assume, for instance, someone claims to be able to predict what way a coin[1] will land almost perfectly. We know this is an extraordinary claim, so we'll say that just by guessing if the person is telling the truth or not that it's a million-to-one chance. In reality, the number would be even more improbable, but this can be used for illustration. So we ask them to demonstrate the skill. They're almost perfect, so let's assume they guess right about 90% of the time - this allows them the opportunity for their skill to mess up once in a while, but still prove to be pretty good. This gives us all the information we need to know to actually quantify how extraordinary the evidence must be.

Consider if they guessed a single coin toss correctly. The odds of guessing by chance is a mere 50%, or 50:50.

\frac{0.9 \cdot 0.000001}{0.5} = 0.0000018

A single coin toss doesn't improve our odds very dramatically. The evidence just isn't extraordinary enough - you can correctly guess a single coin toss correctly 50% of the time with no special skills involved. It all rests on how improbable our evidence, P(B), actually is and a 50:50 chance isn't particularly improbable. For two coin tosses P(B) becomes 0.25, and for 10 coin tosses it comes to roughly 0.00097. Plugging those numbers in Bayes' theorem gives us a probability of genuine skill (given P(A) of a million-to-one) of around 0.0009, which although still small is a considerable improvement on that original million-to-one chance. By 20 or so correctly guessed coin tosses, the skill is starting to look a lot more genuine.

This is the basic idea underpinning statistical significance; is it more likely that our evidence is random, or due to a real effect, and is the improbability of the evidence presented in proportion to the improbability of the claim being made.

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But Sagan's quip about extraordinary evidence doesn't just mean that we can take someone's word for it if they managed to toss so many coins in a row. Derren Brown can pull off such a feat with some effort and misdirection as shown in his special on The System, so we always need to consider alternative hypotheses and compare how likely they are. Like with Derren Brown tossing a coin with 10 heads in a row, is it more likely that they're psychic, or are cheating? So tests such as James Randi's million-dollar challenge will control for this potential factor, making sure that the probability of foul play, fraud and cheating is far less than the probability of genuine psychic power.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Extraordina...y_evidence

Take the time time to read the hidden material.  Sufficient evidence is far, far more than what you are offering here.  Sufficient evidence is the evidence necessary to make the claim more probable than not.  So far you are still light years from there.

Jenny-

Mark was not written 70 years later. If that were the case, it would have been after the turn of the century.

No one accepts that date. You shouldn't either. Mark was written very early as I have shown in another thread.

Maybe one reason why you are having a hard time finally coming to a faith position is that you are working with bad data.

Garbage in, garbage out.