Jeff Lowder on "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" here.
(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen...
Comments
But the elephant in the room with all of Craig's Resurrection arguments is that he simply assumes that the Biblical account is unequivocally established as historical fact. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and that's where, in my judgment at least, Craig really needs to be hammered on these arguments.
What led you to that conclusion?
I think he claims that 75% of scholars believe the tomb was empty.
You can re-word Bayes Theorem not-so-mathematically to say that to find the probability of H when you have E you divide:
A. All the times you'd have E because of H
by
B. All the times you'd have E, whether because of H or not
If H were very, very unlikely (ie "extraordinary!") then the times you'd get E because of H would be very, very, few. This makes the probability of H (A/B) smaller and smaller the more and more extraordinary H is.
A/B would still be a large number if B were very, very small. The smaller A (the more extraordinary H) then the smaller B would need to be: ie the frequency of E from whatever cause would need to be lower and lower the more extraordinary H was.
And very, very infrequent events are, when they happen, "extraordinary!".
WLC, in his response, seems to take "extraordinary" evidence as "extraordinarily reliable evidence" and contrast this with "evidence that would be unlikely to arise if the hypothesis were not true". But this contrast is a sleight. "Reliable" evidence is rarely wrong: that is to say reliable evidence is evidence that would be unlikely to arise if the hypothesis were not true".
Isn't it just as straightforward to concede that what is extraordinary about extraordinary claims is that they violate our scientific knowledge of how reality works? They say sicence is not justifiable by introspection and logical a priori arguments. But can't you turn it around, say that cumulatively science now justifies the metaphysics of naturalism? That it is the notion of logical a priori proof that philosophy has refuted, leaving only experiential, after the fact justification (ex posteriori, I think the phrase is?) Yes that implies that only science produces knowledge in the sense of justified true (corresponding to reality) belief?