If the probability of a randomly selected human rising from the dead is less than 1 out of 500 (and I had to admit that it was substantially less, even when I was a believer), then these two considerations suggest it more likely that Jesus did not rise from the dead.
But Jesus isn’t a randomly-selected human. He already had followers before being executed by the state, so shouldn’t we be using the probability of a randomly-selected religion/cult leader rising from the dead? (Not that that’s much different.)
Though I’m not sure we have enough information to use Bayes’ rule properly here. P(Person rose from the dead | Person is God) = 1, and we’ll assume¹ that P(Person is God | Person rose from the dead) = 1 so that we just need to consider “person rose from the dead”… okay, never mind, I just got it wrong. Your argument holds.
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¹: even though that’s a simplification from a theological point of view; the argument could be made rigorous by your particular denomination simply by making this statement specific enough to be correct
Does his argument hold? Because I had the same intuition as you, that a “random person raising from the dead” isn’t the comparison to make here, but I can’t fully articulate what the right comparison to make would be.
I think the bigger problem with the argument is: if Jesus rose from the dead for the same reasons that a randomly-selected human would, then Jesus is just an arbitrary human who got lucky, and mainstream Christianity is false. So if you’re invoking that to try to estimate whether Christianity is true or not, you’re clearly asking the wrong question.
But Jesus isn’t a randomly-selected human. He already had followers before being executed by the state, so shouldn’t we be using the probability of a randomly-selected religion/cult leader rising from the dead? (Not that that’s much different.)
Though I’m not sure we have enough information to use Bayes’ rule properly here. P(Person rose from the dead | Person is God) = 1, and we’ll assume¹ that P(Person is God | Person rose from the dead) = 1 so that we just need to consider “person rose from the dead”… okay, never mind, I just got it wrong. Your argument holds.
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¹: even though that’s a simplification from a theological point of view; the argument could be made rigorous by your particular denomination simply by making this statement specific enough to be correct
Does his argument hold? Because I had the same intuition as you, that a “random person raising from the dead” isn’t the comparison to make here, but I can’t fully articulate what the right comparison to make would be.
I think the bigger problem with the argument is: if Jesus rose from the dead for the same reasons that a randomly-selected human would, then Jesus is just an arbitrary human who got lucky, and mainstream Christianity is false. So if you’re invoking that to try to estimate whether Christianity is true or not, you’re clearly asking the wrong question.