Stephen Davis on the Resurrection

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Jon Curry said:

Eddie Tabash in his debate with Craig refers to a book by Stephen T Davis which is apparently enthusiastically endorsed by Dr Craig. He quotes Davis as follows:

“Anyone wants to argue in favor of belief in the resurrection of Jesus as I am doing now must make a powerful case……it must be strong enough to overcome the bias that all rational people share against highly unusual and miraculous events…I believe Christians need to recover a sense of the shocking absurdity of the very idea of resurrection.”

I'm saying I agree with Professor Davis. I'm saying that a resurrection is a highly unusual and extraordinary event. Though not necessarily false, it must shoulder a significant epistemological burden. I've shown it with illustration, with math, and yet you just keep denying it. There isn't much else to say.

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I’ll have more to say about this later on, but for now I’ll note that this brief, tertiary quote leaves a very misleading position of Davis’ overall position. Here, in his own words, is a fuller statement:

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Resurrections (if they happen at all) are rare, and that God would raise someone from the dead is surprising indeed. But does it follow from this that the Resurrection is improbable based on our general background knowledge? Well, the question, Is the resurrection initially improbable?, is too ambiguous to admit of a clear answer. The answer will depend on who is asking. If the one who is asking is a naturalist, then R will be judged to have a low initial probability—so low that the evidence in favor of it will probably never raise the probability of R to anywhere near 0.5.

Whose background knowledge is allowed to count in determining the initial probability of R? Critics usually presuppose that the only generally shared beliefs count, beliefs accepted by believers and nonbelievers alike…But if those are the only sorts of beliefs that [Michael] Martin wants to count in determining the initial probability of R, then believers will simply reject this argument as a piece of intellectual imperialism.

The initial probability of R is not nearly so low as Martin imagines, once we look at it from what believers regard as a correct set of assumptions: namely, those of Christian supernaturalism…Evidence can only fail to make a given hypothesis probable if it renders probable instead the disjunction of all the competing hypotheses. But suppose none of them is any good. Perhaps this will be because they all seem historically implausible. Perhaps it will be because they cannot explain why there is so little historical evidence in their favor. Perhaps it will be because they are unable to account for known facts. Then the first hypothesis retains its overall probability.

How should we try to assess the probability of the truth of testimony to extraordinary events? Martin thinks we should consider (a) the probability of the event in question and (b) the probability that the witnesses are telling the truth. But that can’t be the whole story. For then we would have to disbelieve somebody who tells the truth 99% of the time who reports that the number 893420 was the winning number in yesterday’s lottery! So the probability must also be determined in the light of (c) the probability of the witnesses reporting as they did had the event not taken place.*

*See S. L. Zabel, “The Probabilistic Analysis of Testimony,” Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 20 (1988), 327-54.

Notice also that the resurrection hypothesis involves the free choice of an agent: namely, God. This is why the rarity of resurrections—which everybody will grant—cannot be equated with improbability. Suppose I want to buy a car at a lot where there are 1,000 cars for sale, only one of which is red. Now what is the probability that I buy the red one? Clearly, the probability is not just a function of the infrequency of red cars in the lot. This is obvious because my selection of a car might not be entirely random as color. Indeed, I might freely choose to buy the red one precisely because of its uniqueness. So if God had wanted to vindicate Jesus after his death, God might well have chosen to raise him from the dead in part precisely because resurrections are so rare and striking. Thus the very infrequency of resurrections may actually increase the probability of the resurrection of Jesus.

Bayes’ theorem is a useful tool in probability logic, but it is a blunt instrument when used in discussions of the resurrection of Jesus. The main problem is the assumption that you can read probabilities from frequencies (miracles occur infrequently, ergo, miracles are improbable). But as John Earman* has pointed out, the attempt to argue in that way is almost universally recognized in the philosophy of science as unsuccessful.

*J. Earman, “Bayes, Hume, and Miracles, “Faith & Philosophy, 10 (1993), 293-310.

An observed frequency may be flatly zero (cf. an event of proton decay, never before observed, but which scientists are spending huge amounts of money and effort to detect), but it would be simple-minded accordingly to set the probability at zero.

M. Peterson & R. Vanarragon, eds. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell 2004), 171-73.

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