Vincent Torley Responds! News and Views From An Apologist Who Became a Skeptic

I have argued with Vincent Torley a time or two. As an honest Christian scholar he eventually changed his mind. A history of our debates can be found here. [Especially see Christian Apologist Vincent J. Torley Now Argues Michael Alter’s Bombshell Book Demolishes Christian Apologists’ Case for the Resurrection, plus Christian Apologist Vincent Torley Says I've "rendered a service to philosophy", and finally, what he wrote about Bayes Theorem: Bayes Theorem with Regard to Vincent Torley.]

I emailed Vincent to see what he's doing, and what his views might be now:

I hope you're well. What are you up to lately? I was reading some of your writings using Bayes Thereom. Hume didn't use Bayes Thereom.

Christian apologists like Tim McGrew and several others, including Richard Carrier, Benjamin Speed Watkins, and Paulogia (a popular content creator) think Hume is obsolete. They think we should ignore Hume and just present our arguments (in Baysian terms if possible).

With the caveat that Hume didn't want to state his arguments using math, I'm considering plugging his arguments into Bayes Theroem to satisfy his critics.

We know he disputed the ontological argument and the cosmological argument, plus he went into length against the design argument. He doesn't give any of it any credence. I'll see what he might have said about the moral argument, but that won't matter.

The rest of what Hume says is against the probability of ancient testimony to miracles on behalf of the Christian religion in deference to other religions.

God is out. All that's left is ancient testimony.

This could be a game changer for his legacy.

What do you think of this project?

To cut to the chase after more than two months Vincent responded:

I haven't written anything for The Skeptical Zone in a long time, but I might do a piece on Joe Schmid's videos in the near future. [EDIT, Torley recently did just that!] The truth is that lesson planning takes up quite a bit of my time, as well as running and keeping fit. Still, I have a lot more leisure time than I used to. Spiritually speaking, I'd call myself a skeptical Catholic, these days. Although I'm intrigued by NDE accounts, which have been described in great detail by authors such as Bruce Greyson and Jeffrey Long, I recognize that they're not well-documented enough to demonstrate the reality of an afterlife.

More on that later. First, here's what he's up to now:

After 25 years of living and teaching in Japan, I've moved back to Australia. I'm now teaching maths at a high school in the Northern Territory - an area about the size of Alaska, but with just 270,000 people. I live in a town of about 8,000 people called Katherine. It's a great place, and I like it a lot. I'm famous around town for walking everywhere, as I don't have a car. Shopping downtown means a walk of 6 kilometres (about 4 miles) to the shops and back. I'm also involved in a worldwide community event called Parkrun, which involves people of all ages and walks of life meeting up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning in their local town or city, and running or walking 5 kilometres (3.1 miles). I'm a keen runner, and my best time this year is 22 minutes 45 seconds - not bad for a 65-year-old!

The reason why I moved back to Oz was that under Japanese law, you can no longer teach in Japanese high schools once you turn 65. I was juggling about four different jobs in Japan and working seven days a week, but the bulk of my income came from my high school teaching job: I taught English as a Second Language. With that job taken away from me, I had no means of supporting my Japanese wife and our 21-year-old son who's currently studying architecture at the University of Tokyo. As I had secondary teaching qualifications in both mathematics and ESL, I decided to reach out to a former school principal who's an old friend of mine and ask her if I could pick up work in Australia. She told me I'd be welcomed with open arms. I applied for work in the Northern Territory because there's always a high demand for teachers up there. I had a huge number of forms to fill out, and it took me a while to cut through all the red tape, but I also had a lot of people helping me along the way. Eventually, I was offered a teaching job in Katherine, which I happily accepted. I can truthfully say that landing that job may have saved my life, as I was in a pretty dark place during 2025, when it looked as if my income would fall by about 50% if I remained in Japan. I blamed myself for not being able to provide for my family.

Moving to Katherine has given me a new lease on life. Although my family is still in Japan, I'm able to support them by sending money back home every month. I can provide generously for them now, as the pay is quite good, but I have to live simply. Buying a car would be out of the question, but I honestly don't mind walking, and I really appreciate having a weekend again, after working seven days a week in Japan. Moving back to Oz has meant learning new digital skills, acquiring a new digital identity (Medicare card, private health insurance, and so on), learning to handle my finances once again (in Japan, wives usually do that) and doing basic things like cooking for myself. At 65, re-learning all that was a bit of a challenge, but I was able to navigate my way through the obstacles, with some help along the way. In the process, I've become a more resourceful person. As far as the teaching is concerned, I have to say there's a huge difference between Australian and Japanese high school students, but I've learned to adjust, and I'm in a school where there are lots of really helpful and friendly teachers, many of whom are my friends and two of whom are my housemates: a married couple from Kenya, who started working at the school where I teach at the same time as I did. We all get along well.

Torley on Bayes:

You asked me about Bayes' Theorem. I have to say I'm a lot less enthusiastic about its apologetic (or counter-apologetic) value than I used to be. I don't know whether you've watched the mammoth 12-hour video put out recently by Digital Gnosis (Nathan Ormond) and James Fodor, titled, "Joe Schmid's Catholic Conversion - Natural Theology | Bad Apologetics 33," but in the video, Fodor contends that Bayesian probabilities are basically GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Fodor's point is that when arguing for the occurrence of a supernatural miracle, we have no idea what the prior probabilities are, even if one grants the truth of theism for argument's sake. So even if a piece of evidence raises the probability that a miracle has occurred, it may still be very low, if the prior probability is astronomically low.

A case in point is the Resurrection. Tim and Lydia McGrew estimate the prior probability of Jesus' Resurrection to be about 1 in 10^11 (or 1 in 100 billion). Their reasoning, as I recall, is fairly straightforward: the number of people who have ever lived and died without coming back to life is about 100 billion, so by Laplace's sunrise argument, we should assume that the probability of any single person being resurrected is about 1 in 100 billion. Interestingly, skeptic Michael Shermer cites a similar figure. But if we use the number of animals who have ever lived as our universal set instead of the number of human beings who have ever lived, we will come up with a much lower prior probability: 1 in 4.5.x 10^27, according to Live Science ("How many animals have ever existed on Earth?" by Joanna Thompson, October 8, 2023).

Having said that, I think you could certainly use Bayes' Theorem to illustrate Hume's arguments, if you wanted to. I believe that Hume granted the theoretical possibility of human testimony being strong enough to establish a miracle, but he also maintained that in reality, no testimony was of a sufficiently high quality to warrant such a conclusion. Fraud, human error and natural causes all need to be ruled out, and it's virtually impossible to rule out all three. The McGrews argue that the disciples' collective multimodal and synchronous hallucinations of Jesus would constitute an even greater miracle than the Resurrection, as their combined probability would be far less than 1 in 10^11, or even 1 in 4.5 x 10^27 (I think the estimate they give is 1 in 10^43, from memory). However, their argument assumes that the Gospel accounts of Jesus' appearances are accurate, and that's something we don't know, so their argument fails. More recently, Ethan Muse and Joe Schmid have appealed to Catholic miracles as being supported by much better evidence, and they are correct on that point: the documentation is quite impressive. However, most of these alleged miracles have been debunked or called into question, and if you look at Kevin Nontradicath's website, you'll find takedowns of the most celebrated cases. (I also have a ton of links on these miracles, if you're interested.)

Another thing you might like to consider when appealing to a larger audience is that most people don't think in Bayesian terms. There's a good reason for that: the formula itself is quite tricky, and people generally have a hard time getting their heads around it. Of course, if you want to sound academically rigorous, Bayesianism is the way to go, but Fodor contends that the appearance of rigor is illusory, and that apologists' use of Bayes' Theorem is motivated by math envy.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I hope you're keeping well, John, and I'd like to wish you all the best. Feel free to drop me a line if you have anything you want to ask me.

Best wishes,

Vincent