Miracles, probability, and the resurrection of Jesus: A philosophical, mathematical, and historical study

My dissertation, as its title suggests, is a joint exercise in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science. It addresses, specifically, the traditional epistemic problem of miracles from a thoroughgoing, formal, probabilistic perspective. I argue in Chapter 1 that the philosophical debate over the epistemic problem of miracles has suffered from two serious problems. First, the debate has been highly general and abstract. Hume and his followers have consistently ignored the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus despite the repeated insistence of their opponents that this constitutes the primary argument for the epistemic possibility of miracles. Second, the debate has preceded without reference to an adequate theory of probability, despite the fact that the epistemological problems that arise concerning miracles are at heart confusions regarding probability. The goal of my dissertation, then, is to help solve these problems in the debate over the epistemology of miracles. To this end I develop a formal theory of probability in Chapters 2 through 7 of the dissertation that is generally applicable to all kinds of events. This is based upon a moderate Bayesian theory of epistemic probability, Richard Jeffrey's probability kinematics, and my own proposal for deriving the values of single-case conditional epistemic probabilities (e.g., the probability that this particular building is on fire given that it is enveloped in smoke) as weighted-averages from the chance-values of statistical generalizations (e.g., the statistical generalization that the chance that any given building enveloped in smoke is on fire is greater than 0.95). Then in Chapter 8 I summarize William Lane Craig's sophisticated version of argument for the resurrection of Jesus and in Chapter 9 subject it to the mathematical theory of probability developed in Chapters 2 through 7. I conclude on the basis of a Bayesian analysis that the argument for the resurrection is structurally defective and that the most probable explanation of the historical evidence is the theory that Jesus Christ had an unknown identical twin who perpetrated the hoax of the resurrection. This result vindicates the general Humean position since the evidence for other miracles is weaker than that for the resurrection.