A professor of philosophy says the probability of Christ's resurrection is around 97 per cent.
New evidence for Christ's Resurrection?
A professor of philosophy has used a probability formula to weigh evidence for and against Jesus Christ's Resurrection — and says the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 per cent!
An article in The New York Times of May 11, 2002, written by Emily Eakin, reviewed a conference on ethics and belief at Yale University in April, 2002.
Eakin said Richard Swinburne, a Greek Orthodox professor of philosophy from Oxford University, used a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem to assign values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime, and the quality of witness testimony after his death.
God overrides natural laws
“For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable,” Professor Swinburne said. “But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because He makes them operate.”
Swinburne gave his notes and calculations to the audience so they could follow while he did the math.
“Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true,” he said. “The probability of h given e and k is .97”.
In plain English, Professor Swinburne's calculations allegedly show that the probability that the Resurrection really happened is a staggeringly high 97 per cent.
Growth movement
Many other academics have weighed into the defence of the Christian faith, the newspaper said. Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, noted, “It would be accurate to say that it's a growth movement.”
Christians, of course, do not need probability theory to convince them of the Resurrection. But this certainly is a good point to throw back at atheists and skeptics who say there is no chance that the Resurrection took place.
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