I do believe that a case can be made for the claim that the Christian story about what happened in the life of Jesus makes more sense of the evidence than any possible naturalistic story, so long as you are willing to allow for a God who might do such a thing.
But here Hume keeps coming back. If you base probabilities on what is most frequently found in nature, and you don't introduce the possibility of a non-human designer, then it looks as if the frequency of dead people who stay dead defeats anything but "extraordinary" (read virtually impossible) evidence for, say, a resurrection.
But, the believer responds, causing the miracles in the life of Jesus seems like something a God might do. It makes sense from a theistic perspective, as opposed to, say, claiming that God caused a bunch of people to hallucinate, or caused a bunch of people to propagate a hoax that would ultimately result in them ending up on the kind of cross that Jesus was crucified on.
But, the reply goes, likelihoods about what a divine agent might or might not do can't be brought in. They aren't based on experience, the way, say, the frequency of dead people who stay dead does. If you bring God in, you play a wild card. Anything goes.
But, the theist replies, we can draw inferences about possible divine designers from analogy to human designers.
That's why I think Lydia McGrew's paper on design and probabilities is relevant to this whole debate, which I linked to a few days ago.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Probabilities, miracles, and design
Posted on 11:27 AM by Unknown
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