So God's Really in the Details?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Emily Eakin, "So God's Really in the Details?,"
NY Times, Saturday, May 11th, 2002 ...

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."

[...]

... 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. 

[...]

Mr. Swinburne also came in for his share of questions.
"Bayes's theorem provides a model of learning from
experience," one philosopher observed. "As time goes
by, it seems you would accumulate more evidence
against the Resurrection because the expected Second
Coming doesn't occur."

Mr. Swinburne acknowledged the point was worth
considering. But he wasn't about to concede it
entirely. When Jesus spoke about the Second Coming,
"he might have said soon but he certainly didn't say
when," Mr. Swinburne insisted, adding, "I don't think
you have a very strong case there." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/arts/11GOD.html?todaysheadlines

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