If the probability of a randomly selected human rising from the dead is less than 1 out of 500 (and I had to admit that it was substantially less, even when I was a believer), then these two considerations suggest it more likely that Jesus did not rise from the dead.
But Jesus isn’t a randomly-selected human. He already had followers before being executed by the state, so shouldn’t we be using the probability of a randomly-selected religion/cult leader rising from the dead? (Not that that’s much different.)
Though I’m not sure we have enough information to use Bayes’ rule properly here. P(Person rose from the dead | Person is God) = 1, and we’ll assume¹ that P(Person is God | Person rose from the dead) = 1 so that we just need to consider “person rose from the dead”… okay, never mind, I just got it wrong. Your argument holds.
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¹: even though that’s a simplification from a theological point of view; the argument could be made rigorous by your particular denomination simply by making this statement specific enough to be correct
Does his argument hold? Because I had the same intuition as you, that a “random person raising from the dead” isn’t the comparison to make here, but I can’t fully articulate what the right comparison to make would be.
But Jesus isn’t a randomly-selected human. He already had followers before being executed by the state, so shouldn’t we be using the probability of a randomly-selected religion/cult leader rising from the dead? (Not that that’s much different.)
Though I’m not sure we have enough information to use Bayes’ rule properly here. P(Person rose from the dead | Person is God) = 1, and we’ll assume¹ that P(Person is God | Person rose from the dead) = 1 so that we just need to consider “person rose from the dead”… okay, never mind, I just got it wrong. Your argument holds.
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¹: even though that’s a simplification from a theological point of view; the argument could be made rigorous by your particular denomination simply by making this statement specific enough to be correct
Does his argument hold? Because I had the same intuition as you, that a “random person raising from the dead” isn’t the comparison to make here, but I can’t fully articulate what the right comparison to make would be.