Robert Conner On Jesus Studies and the Use of Bayes Theorem

I have asked crucial questions of the use of Bayes Theorem before. [See Tag Below] So it's refreshing to see others share my skepticism. Professors Louise Antony and Dan Lambert don't think it applies to miraculous historical claims either, to say the least! Now Dr. William M. Briggs weighs in.

[Y]ou may not be surprised to learn there is not one, but two books which argue that a fixed, firm number may be put on the proposition, "God exists." The first, by Stephen Unwin, is called The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth, in which he uses Bayes’s theorem to demonstrate, with probability one minus epsilon, that the Christian God exists.

This is countered by Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus by Richard Carrier, who uses Bayes’s theorem to prove, with probability one minus epsilon, that the Christian God does not exist because Jesus himself never did.

Briggs: "These authors would help themselves better, and contribute to a more fruitful discussion about Jesus, by explicating the evidence and eschewing unnecessary quantification."

Robert Conner comments:

It may have slipped right by you, but there's a new religious festival: Bayes Theorem. Sometimes it proves without a doubt that Jesus never existed and sometimes it proves God exists.

Then other times it proves Jesus rose bodily from the tomb. (Yeah, suckers, PROVED!!)

The author, Jake O'Connell, nearly had a stroke when a scholar at Bellarmine, D.T. Prince, suggested Jesus' post mortem appearances in Luke were modeled after apparitions of ghosts. Now he's used Bayes Theorem to prove that just wasn't possible. Literally, not possible, for Jesus to be anything but a body.

Bayes Theorem's like Halloween in that you can dress up anything as anything else, but also like Easter, which confuses Jesus and bunnies. Also like cultural appropriation in that proponents plagiarize something they may not understand to explain something they can't defend.

Richard Swinburne wrote a book proving to 97% Jesus that resurrected, based solely on the Christian definition of God [Go figure people! Duh, stupid is as stupid does!]