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It is effectively impossible for him to misunderstand Hume in this way. William Lane Craig September 25, 2020 This is the weekly Q & A blog post by our Visiting Scholar in Philosophy, William Lane Craig. So the problem is not, as TMM first imagines, that the prior probability of miracles is inscrutable and therefore insurmountable by any evidence. Wed have archaeological confirmationcooled magmites originating and situated exactly in accord with the worldwide testimony of thousands of witnesses, whose reports we would have directly from them, in inscriptions, preserved letters on papyrus, and the like. [1]. This is more comparable to asking whether an angel from heaven flew down and murdered his wife. We have zero cases of that. As we have seen, the evidence indicates that his crucifixion was instigated by his blasphemous claims, which to the Romans would come across as treasonous. Jesuss Trial and Crucifixion. Id even believe just one persons testimony, in the right circumstancesfor example, Id not doubt Helens testimony to the technological resurrection of Klaatu if I had, indeed, all the same background evidence of a recent emissary from an ultra-advanced extraterrestrial civilization, as I would indeed have personally witnessed in that case. Philo says this phrase actually refers to the eldest son of God. Indeed the Scientific Revolution was very much about admitting this fact, and thus setting a very high bar of evidence before believing things are other than we think we know. And thats just prior odds. The Atonement - Cambridge University Press & Assessment He would either be a lunaticon the level with the man who says he is a poached eggor else he would be the Devil of Hell. Hume was wrong to say otherwise. According to Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate and continued to have followers after his death. Craig is thus, in my opinion, simply lying when he says, and I quote, And so, Humes argument is mathematically, demonstrably fallacious, because it only considers the prior probability and not the probability of the evidence. This is TMMs big gotcha, and hes right. Ive discussed the modern, Bayesian case against miracles before, in Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and Theism & Atheism: Miracles, and also in my talk on Miracles & Historical Method. Thats why we routinely believe lottery winners won. But we can only work with what we have now. He has not left that open to us. by William Lane Craig. It not only reveals Jesuss consciousness of being the one Son of God, but it presents us with an ascending scale from men to the angels to the Son to the Father, a scale on which Jesus transcends any human being or angelic being. Craig's Kalm Cosmological Argument. From Josephus and Tacitus, we learn that Jesus was crucified by Roman authority under the sentence of Pontius Pilate. Because any evidence that was 10^12 times more likely on that explanation than any other would persuade meand should. Hume asserted this could never happen, which was his only mistake. As Hume put it, the testimony would have to be at least as miraculous as the event testified to. So, your reasoning is a quadruple non sequitur. Wilhelm C. Linss (London: SPCK, 1983). And he who is thus born, imitates the ways of his father. What would that evidence consist of? The number of miracle claims that have been confirmed to be genuine (and not just lies, errors, or edifying fictions), is exactly zero. William Lane Craig sets out to answer these questions through a biblical and scientific investigation. 4. In the one case it does not increase the probability at all; in the other, it actually decreases it. He is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University and a Research Professor of Philosophy at Biola University's Talbot School of Theology. Ergo that testimony decreases the probability that the husband did it, by increasing the probability someone else did (in case its not obvious, within the assumption that she was murdered at all, the probability that the husband did it and that someone else did it must sum to 100%, as that exhausts all logical possibilitiesso any increase in the one necessarily decreases the other). Kunhegyes, Jsz-Nagykun-Szolnok, Magyarorszg Weather Forecast, with current conditions, wind, air quality, and what to expect for the next 3 days. William Lane Craig is my number 1 all time favorite Christian philosopher and apologist. At the very least, we cannot assume they are wrong until proven right. But if all you want to prove is something less ambitiouslike, say, Jesus really rose from the dead owing to his secret discovery of sorcery, in an effort to trick the world into obeying his desired moral reforms, then hid away until his natural death years later, a theory that actually better fits all the evidence than the Christians far more outlandish theory doeswell, you still cant even do that. There are far more logically possible regimes of magic than involve gods. Hume properly takes into account both the prior probability and the likelihood ratio (the probability of the evidence, in the case testimonies, on either a claim being true or its being false). Jesuss Radical Self-Concept as the Divine Son of God. Primitive ignorance and rampant folly was the result. Indeed, finding scriptures attributed to men of similar nameand there were manycould then inspire subsequent associated legends about this historical Jesus or even have inspired his own delusion toward it. 114-17). So far, it never has been. And thats by thousands of times; because it is extremely rare that it has turned out to be some unknown natural phenomenon later discovered to be natural (like ball lightning or neurotypical hallucination). This preface is written in classical Greek terminology such as was used by Greek historians; after this Luke switches to a more common Greek. Whereas if you can cast a spell and teleport without any such machinery, thats magic. But to illustrate my point about miracles in general I will skip the latter part and just focus on the former: that a miracle happened, regardless of what caused it. The only question is whether such machinery is present and applied. As Professor Leander Keck of Yale University has said, "The idea that this Jewish cynic (and his dozen hippies) with his demeanor and aphorisms was a serious threat to society sounds more like a conceit of alienated academics than sound historical judgement." For example, the final odds that a good god exists has to be many trillions to one against. So we can reverse engineer what a prior probability must be. Hume was not wrong about anything Craig dishonestly claimed he was. It logically necessarily follows that the prior probability of miracles (of magic in any sense) is both scrutable and surmountableeven on a sole basis of testimony. William Lane Craig's Mytho-History vs. Genesis In no way is the evidence she has 10^43 times more likely on it all being real than it all being fake. They arent actually doing science here; thus they arent really formulating a causal model and then testing it. Why I Am a Calvinist - West Virginia for the Gospel Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once! I was an atheist for the better part of the last 15 years, but recently I've felt a calling to return to Christianity. John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), p. 131. Multiple independent testimony is especially powerful in this respect (Aviezer Tucker, The Generation of Knowledge from Multiple Testimonies, Social Epistemology 2015). Dr. William Lane Craig's Response Anyone who studies biblical teaching on the atonement is struck by the multiplicity of metaphors and motifs employed by the biblical authors to characterize the atonement: sacrificial offering, the suffering Servant of the Lord, justification, ransom, redemption, representation, and so on. In that case it becomes inexplicable how belief in his resurrection could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse. Because the truth of the statement I won the California State Lottery today is a function of the evidence for that having happened, which can be such as to increase the probability that it did happen quite enormouslyeasily well above that million to one odds. Yet this is precisely what the earliest Christians did proclaim and believe about Jesus. We have nothing like this for miracles. According to Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman and Greek history are usually biased and removed one or two generations or even centuries from the events they record. Earmans corrected Humean argument is that the latter is never large enough in favor of a testimonys reliability to overcome the prior probability against it. 188-91. According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies, How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity, The GCRR eConference on the Historical Jesus: A Retrospective, Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class, How Not to Be a Doofus about Bayes Theorem. He thought of himself as the exclusive and absolute Son of God and the only revelation of God to mankind! are basically making this intuition . We now know the original script was right: suitably advanced, perfectly natural machinery could reverse the entropy in a corpse and restore it to life (hence Clarkes Laws). Are they innocent until proven guilty or guilty until proven innocent? [19]. According to the gospels Jesus was condemned by the Jewish high court on the charge of blasphemy and then delivered to the Romans for execution for the treasonous act of setting himself up as King of the Jews. We want the upper boundthe highest reasonable probability of a miracle, which on standard apologetical theorizing entails a prior probability of some (just any) magic user being around who is both keen and able to make things happen of the kind in question; like, say, reverse the entropy in a human corpse from dead to alive. Thats false. It doesnt become less magic when the person doing that is themselves even more magical, miraculously lacking even a body or limitations of any kind beyond logical necessity.
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