Ignoring the fact that any argument that comes up with a number on the order of 10^39 is obviously flawed in some way, even if the flaw isn’t itself obvious (I don’t have the patience to read through the entire article and frankly doubt I would gain much from it, so that’s about as far as my analysis on the article itself goes), any argument from human psychology is screened off by lower-level arguments. To put it directly: even allowing the argument as valid, simple physics says “no”. For Jesus to be resurrected, the following had to have occurred:
The information in his brain would have had to been preserved despite him having being warm and dead for three days (violating thermodynamics and information theory), or else some incorporeal spirit-substance exists which can preserve information and does not interact with the physical world except through the tiny subset of possible molecular arrangements present in human biology (violating a great number of things).
His body would have had to have been healed of all fatal wounds and restored to a viable state (violating conservation of energy), while at the same time not healing the injuries to his hands or side (not a violation per se, but improbably extreme selective targeting). Alternatively, he got a new body while the old one disappeared (also violating conservation of energy).
Somehow he unraveled his burial shroud without suffocating and managed to remove the stone in front of his tomb, which for a man of normal size and musculature should be close to impossible (and Jesus wasn’t described as particularly buff), which is a violation of simple biology. Or else he teleported out, which violates even more stuff.
So, now we have two options. We can assume approximate independence of the above three statements, in which case I wonder what you’d get if you multiplied their probabilities together, or we can contend that they were all caused by a common factor (Jesus being God), in which case I’d like someone to please calculate Kolmogorov complexity of God.
Either way, you’re going to get a Bayes factor of more than 10^39 against the resurrection from scientific considerations alone, and that’s assuming there was nothing wrong with the original argument from human psychology. Realistically speaking, there’s simply no way you’re going to get a Bayes factor of 10^39 out of an argument involving human behavior; we’re far too noisy for that.
Ad hominem: I also note that the authors are Christians, which strongly suggests to me that motivated reasoning is occurring, even if I can’t pinpoint where exactly the flaw(s) is/are. At the very least, there’s some major hypothesis privileging going on; why are you looking at Jesus specifically? For example, I wonder what a Bayes calculation for Islam’s account of Muhammad’s vision of the angel Gabriel being true would look like?
Ignoring the fact that any argument that comes up with a number on the order of 10^39 is obviously flawed in some way, even if the flaw isn’t itself obvious (I don’t have the patience to read through the entire article and frankly doubt I would gain much from it, so that’s about as far as my analysis on the article itself goes), any argument from human psychology is screened off by lower-level arguments. To put it directly: even allowing the argument as valid, simple physics says “no”. For Jesus to be resurrected, the following had to have occurred:
The information in his brain would have had to been preserved despite him having being warm and dead for three days (violating thermodynamics and information theory), or else some incorporeal spirit-substance exists which can preserve information and does not interact with the physical world except through the tiny subset of possible molecular arrangements present in human biology (violating a great number of things).
His body would have had to have been healed of all fatal wounds and restored to a viable state (violating conservation of energy), while at the same time not healing the injuries to his hands or side (not a violation per se, but improbably extreme selective targeting). Alternatively, he got a new body while the old one disappeared (also violating conservation of energy).
Somehow he unraveled his burial shroud without suffocating and managed to remove the stone in front of his tomb, which for a man of normal size and musculature should be close to impossible (and Jesus wasn’t described as particularly buff), which is a violation of simple biology. Or else he teleported out, which violates even more stuff.
So, now we have two options. We can assume approximate independence of the above three statements, in which case I wonder what you’d get if you multiplied their probabilities together, or we can contend that they were all caused by a common factor (Jesus being God), in which case I’d like someone to please calculate Kolmogorov complexity of God.
Either way, you’re going to get a Bayes factor of more than 10^39 against the resurrection from scientific considerations alone, and that’s assuming there was nothing wrong with the original argument from human psychology. Realistically speaking, there’s simply no way you’re going to get a Bayes factor of 10^39 out of an argument involving human behavior; we’re far too noisy for that.
Ad hominem: I also note that the authors are Christians, which strongly suggests to me that motivated reasoning is occurring, even if I can’t pinpoint where exactly the flaw(s) is/are. At the very least, there’s some major hypothesis privileging going on; why are you looking at Jesus specifically? For example, I wonder what a Bayes calculation for Islam’s account of Muhammad’s vision of the angel Gabriel being true would look like?