May (Web-only) 2002

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It's 97 percent probable Jesus rose from the dead, says Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne
"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Oxford University philosopher Richard Swinburne said last month at a Yale conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate." Then, reports The New York Times, Swinburne

proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols—using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem—and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"

In plain English, this means that, by Mr. Swinburne's calculations, the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.

The New York Times isn't biting. The rest of the article isn't on Swinburne's postulation, but on the rise of respectable Christian philosophers, including Swinburne, Notre Dame's Alvin Plantinga, and Yale's Nicholas Wolterstorff. (Swinburne is Greek Orthodox, Plantinga and Wolterstorff are Calvinist evangelicals.) "Deploying a range of sophisticated logical arguments developed over the last 25 years, Christian philosophers have revived faith as a subject of rigorous academic debate, steadily chipping away at the assumption—all but axiomatic in philosophy since the Enlightenment—that belief ...