Cooking the books

Bill Curry* has posted a sequel to his article on “Evaluation the Evidence for the Resurrection.”

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/11/evaluating-evidence-for-resurrection.html

*For now I’ll accommodate this conventional pseudonym. See below for my source-critical analysis, in which I peel away the redactional layers to uncover the Ur-Curry.

I’ll content myself with a few comments.

Curry says:

“I fleshed this out in greater detail here and argued that the background probability that God would raise Jesus from the dead (compared to the legendary hypothesis) should be no higher that 1 in million.”

Except that if you go back to his earlier article, he doesn’t presented a detailed argument for this figure. Indeed, he doesn’t present any argument whatsoever. This is what he actually says:

“It certainly doesn’t seem unreasonable for a historian to think (in the absence of evidence) the probability a reported event requires supernatural cause is one in a million 10-6.”

But that’s an assertion, not an argument—much less a detailed argument. There’s a complete failure to explain how he arrived at that figure. We’re simply told that it “doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

This is one of the problems with his appeal to Bayesean probability theory. Even if we accepted that framework, Curry simply mouths a certain amount of Bayesean verbiage to create the illusory impression of quantitative rigor.

But that’s all we get. Some Bayesean lingo. Some fractions and percentiles. But where’s the supporting argument? Where’s the actual process for generating these figures?

So the Bayesean appeal is just an empty show. He’s trying to wow the reader by dropping some technical language into his article, and sticking some numbers here and there, but the actual computations are missing.

Like sawing the lady in half at the circus, the Bayesean trap door is kept out of public view. All we get to see is what the magician wants us to see. It would spoil the illusion to know what’s really going on.

Continuing:

“So far I have considered 1) the time between the reports and events and 2) chief priest's need of Judas as relevant evidence with regard to determining if the Gospel accounts are legendary or historical (see here).”

I’ll confine myself to (1). And if we go there, what do we find?

***QUOTE***

Richard Carrier relates the story of Saint Genevieve here

In 520 A.D. an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that. In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead. No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin.

***END-QUOTE***

But the comparison with the gospels breaks down at several key points:

1.The life of St. Genevieve as anonymous, whereas, as Martin Hengel has argued (see the quotations by Jason Engwer), the Gospels are not. By knowing who wrote the gospels, we’re in a position to know what they were in a position to know.

2.The life of St. Genevieve lacks multiple-attestation, unlike the NT record of Christ.

3. Some of the miracles are clearly imitative of dominical miracles. So this is a secondary, hagiographic embellishment.

Curry cites two more cases:

“There are more modern examples. Many still believe that the crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 is evidence of UFO's. This is in an era when the government keeps records and people have access to the Internet.”

Notice the equivocation here. Who believes in a gov’t cover-up at Roswell? People who were actually on the scene in 1947? Eyewitnesses? People who interviewed eyewitnesses?

Or are we talking about modern-day gossip-mongers at several removes from the original event, who rely on third-hand information?

One more case:

“The fact that Benny Hinn has made miracle claims and still has a following persuades me that even today, people are willing to accept legends as true in a very short time.”

Now why do you think that Curry brings up Benny Hinn? He assumes that the reader will dismiss Benny Hinn as a charlatan.

And why would he make that assumption? Because Benny Hinn’s supernatural claims are widely disputed. Disputed to the point where Curry can depend on the reader to dismiss Benny Hinn as a fraud.

How is that comparable to the Gospels? The charge leveled by hostile sources like Celsus and the Talmud is not that Christ was a fraud, but a sorcerer. So his miraculous powers are not denied, but attributed to the dark side.

Going back to Curry’s latest article:

“I present numeric values in these assessments primarily as a tool to help me think in a disciplined way, not to provide a precision to the results.”

But if they don’t provide precision analysis, why dabble with the Bayesean apparatus?

Observe some of his claims:

“I would assess that P(E|Resurrection)/P(E| Legend) ~ 1.6 (about +2 dB).”

“I would assign this ratio the value of 0.5 (about -3 dB).”

“Reported conversion of James. Assessment posterior: 0.96 x 10-6”

“Jesus' ignorance deemphasized. Assessment posterior: 0.48 x 10-6”

So he presents the reader with results on the order of such-and-such fraction to the negative power of such-and-such.

Isn’t this a transparent attempt to create the impression of mathematical precision?

But then he prefaces his results with this general disclaimer.

And I can understand why. For, once again, no effort is made to justify the assignment of these “plausibility” ratios and percentiles by actual computation.

So what are we to make of these figures? Are they just deceptive window-dressing? Cosmetic figures to foster a false impression of mathematical rigor when, in fact, all the hard work is left out of the equation?

The reason he avoids the detailed questions is that it would immediately expose all of the unspoken and unsupported assumptions which are feeding into his ersatz results. As one philosopher explains:

***QUOTE***

Indeed, any Bayesian analysis of the question of justified belief in miracles must be otiose until the difficult and essential questions concerning "evidence" in relation to an allegedly miraculous occurrence are resolved — at which point any Bayesian analysis will add little except the technical complexity of a formal apparatus that may or may not "clarify" the structure of Hume's argument.

The balancing of probabilities is of no use until it is decided what goes into the balance — that is, what constitutes the evidence that is to be subject to the balancing of probabilities. The point is this; apart from independent philosophical arguments — arguments that would in effect undermine the relevance of a Bayesian analysis to the question of the credibility of reports of the miraculous — no such analysis can, in principle, prove that no testimony can (or cannot) establish the credibility of a miracle.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/

***END-QUOTE***

But two can play this game. Permit my to my own back-of-the-envelop calculation. Assuming that there were about 6 billion people alive today, there’s only a one-in-six billion chance that Bill Curry even exists.

Given such overwhelming odds against his existence, I don’t believe that Curry is a real person. Just imagine the extraordinary evidence it would take to overcome such a crushing presumption to the contrary?

It is far more rational to subscribe to the Curry-myth. According to the mythic hypothesis, Curry never existed.

What is more, there are certain anomalies in the Curry-myth which point to legendary embellishment—such as the pretense of being a Bayesean probability theorist when, in fact, there’s no hard evidence that the pseudo-Curry is more than a dilettante in this highly specialized field of probability theory.

Hence, it’s far more rational to conclude that “Bill Curry” is a literary construct. John Loftus needed to dress up his infidelity in a pseudoscientific garb of mathematical precision, so he invented the character of Bill Curry, as well as his brother Jon.

But the manifest lack of technical competence in the actual elaboration of the argument betrays his educational limitations.

This is further corroborated by the fact that Jon and Bill are stock characters, recycling the stereotypical anti-hero in the monomythic saga of apostasy. Their utterly predictable, cliché-ridden, and one-dimensional characterization is just what you’d expect of a literary construct by a hack writer like Loftus. Pulp fiction in the service of atheology.

Finally, we have this delicious statement:

“The author of Matthew also covers roughly the same event. Here the phrase "nor the Son" is missing in Matthew 24:36 (or it is at least not present in early manuscripts according to my NIV). Matthew's omission is consistent with legendary development and less consistent with the claim that Matthew was writing history.”

Notice how he slides over the distinction between an original, editorial omission and a subsequent, scribal omission. But a scribal omission would not be evidence that Matthew was writing something other than history.

In fact, Bart Ehrman, for one, who’s no friend of inerrancy or Evangelicalism does, indeed, attribute the omission to scribal tampering. Cf. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford 1993), 91-92.

And while we’re on the subject of omissions, Curry doesn’t bother to interact with Stephen T. Davis’ criticisms of Bayesean theory in this context:

http://www.philoonline.org/library/davis_2_1.htm

And it won’t do just to refer us to Martin’s rejoinder, for we must still evaluate the degree to which, if any, Martin successfully defangs his critic.

But I look forward to Loftus’ next installment in the apocryphal Acts of the Brothers Curry.