Chapter 5 provides a similar analysis of typical “Historicity Criteria” used in Jesus Studies, e.g. “multiple attestation.”
Is there a summary anywhere? I just remembered one of Hanson’s better papers:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But on uninteresting topics, surprising claims usually are surprising evidence; we rarely make claims without sufficient evidence. On interesting topics, however, we can have interests in exaggerating or downplaying our evidence, and our actions often deviate from our interests. In a simple model of noisy humans reporting on extraordinary evidence, we find that extraordinary claims from low noise people are extraordinary evidence, but such claims from high noise people are not; their claims are more likely unusual noise than unusual truth. When people are organized into a reporting chain, noise levels grow exponentially with chain length; long chains seem incapable of communicating extraordinary evidence.
Think I’ll email a pointer to Carrier, it seems very appropriate for one of his footnotes in chapter 4:
18. Accordingly, Hume’s antiquated argument against miracles has been corrected using BT, verifying my conclusion here: Aviezer Tucker, “Miracles, Historical Testimonies, and Probabilities,” History and Theory 44 (October 2005): 373–90 (with further sources cited, e.g., p. 374, n. 3); Robert Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael Levine, “Bayesian Analyses of Hume’s Argument Concerning Miracles,” Philosophy and Theology 10, no. 1 (1997): 101–106; Jordan Howard Sobel, “On the Evidence of Testimony for Miracles: A Bayesian Interpretation of David Hume’s Analysis,” Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 147 (April 1987): 166–86. See also Mark Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introducrtion to Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), pp. 456–68 (with pp. 363–65); and Yonatan Fishman, “Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?” Science and Education 18, no. 6–7 (August 2007): 813–37. Also pertinent is Jaynes’s Bayesian treatment of ESP, in Jaynes and Bretthorst, Probability Theory, pp. 119–48. As a result, while “naive” Humean arguments against miracles are soundly refuted in Keener (“A Reassessment”), sound Bayesian reconstructions (such as I have briefed here) are not.
Sometimes I forget what pro-Christian arguments look like, and I read something like Cavin’s “Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection of Jesus?”, and I remember why, even as a little kid, I thought it all looked pretty dubious.
Is there a summary anywhere? I just remembered one of Hanson’s better papers:
Think I’ll email a pointer to Carrier, it seems very appropriate for one of his footnotes in chapter 4:
(Philpapers, as it happens, links it to a paper by Cavin, “Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection of Jesus?”.)
That Cavin paper is hilarious.
As I commented on Google+:
Sometimes I forget what pro-Christian arguments look like, and I read something like Cavin’s “Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection of Jesus?”, and I remember why, even as a little kid, I thought it all looked pretty dubious.