FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE 97% MESSIAH :

So God's Really in the Details? (EMILY EAKIN, May 11, 2002, NY Times)

Economists use probability theory to make forecasts about consumer spending. Actuaries use it to calculate insurance premiums. Last month, Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, put it to work toward less mundane ends: he invoked it to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Mr. Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers who had convened at Yale University in April for a conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."

Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning 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. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols--using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem--and 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, this means that, by Mr. Swinburne's calculations, the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.

Well, Ivory Soap still has it beat anyway... [Originally posted: May 13, 2002]
Posted by oj at March 31, 2013 12:00 AM
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