Part 6: The Plausibility of Jesus Christ’s resurrection

So how do we decide how plausible the resurrection is? Well, we find something plausible or implausible depending on how it relates to our background beliefs. If you think that medicines are well tested and regulated, you’ll find the initial claim of vaccine harms implausible. On the other hand, if you think that big pharma companies are serial liars, only looking out for their bottom line, and that the regulators are compromised, then you’ll find initial claims of vaccine harms quite implausible.

The same is true of the resurrection. If your background beliefs don’t include anything with the power to raise a dead person, no god, no super-duper aliens, etc., then you’ll find the resurrection quite implausible. If, however, you think that a god exists, and that god wants to raise Jesus from the dead you’ll find the resurrection quite plausible. Actually, if there is a God who has the power to raise the dead, and the desire to raise Jesus from the dead, then the resurrection of Jesus becomes overwhelmingly likely (if not necessary). 

The argument

From a Christian perspective these are the two fundamental issues, does God exist and did he want to raise Jesus from the dead. The first is an entire issue in its own right. I think it is much much likely that God exists than that he doesn’t. There’s been a whole lot of ink spilled on this issue (you can start here for some reasons to think that God exists); here we’ll just assume that it’s true.

But what about the second? How could we possibly evaluate that? It’s one thing to say that Jesus Christ is not just some random person. We have more written sources that mention Jesus than the Roman Emperor at the time. He was a purported prophet and miracle worker. He was the claimed descendent of the royal line of David and consequently the heir of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel. The Bible, still the most published book in the history of the world, is about him.

So while Jesus was not just a random human, that doesn’t get us to “God wanted to raise him from the dead.” How would we know? Well, it seems like God would have to tell us something like that. We can’t just look at the fine tuning of the universe or some such and figure it out. So, as we talked about earlier, in order for us to know its God talking we probably need some sort of miracle to serve as a sign that he’s talking.

What sort of miracle would work? Well, it’d have to be a pretty obvious one. And… this causes a problem for future generations. There is a difference between having a first-person experience of something, and hearing about it secondhand. However, secondhand experiences aren’t all the same either. If somebody you knew and trusted for years told you something hard to believe, you still find it more persuasive than the report of a guy you’ve never met who died a long time ago. You’ve never personally had the opportunity to validate the dead guys character and truthfulness.

This is precisely the problem we’ve found with the resurrection of Jesus. Yes, it might be the best explanation of the historical evidence, but it is still a bunch of dead people from a long time ago from a different culture. This is a hump that many people just can’t get over. The problem with appealing to previous miracles to establish a higher plausibility/probability is that it would seem to have to appeal to other dead people even further away in time and culture. So the data for Jesus’ resurrection isn’t enough, how would appealing to something even more distant be more persuasive? How do we get out of such an epistemological cul-du-sac?

One answer (perhaps the best answer) is predictions / prophecy. For prophecy we don’t need prior testimony about some miracle, we just need to establish that (1) the prophecy happened before the event, (2) the prophecy pointed at the event, and (3) the event was unlikely to be predicted at the time of the prophecy. So for the resurrection, this means that we’ll be looking for (1) a prophecy (preferably claiming to be from god), that (2) predicts the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and (3) is unlikely to be predicted at the time.

The reason why predictions / prophecy are epistemologically relevant, that they provide evidence for us, is simple. When someone accurately predicts something, we have good reason to think that person understand that thing. Or else, how did they predict it? Now this is not necessarily true, it’s always possible the person just got lucky. But the more repeated the successful predictions, and the more unlikely those predictions are, the greater reasons we have to believe that whoever is doing the predicting has a greater grasp than the rest of us.

Now this notion of ‘unlikely to predicted’ needs a bit more explication. Some predictions are pretty easy to make. “The sun will rise tomorrow” is pretty obvious. It is very likely to be true on its own and not very impressive. We are looking for predictions of things that are less likely. One way for something to be less likely is for it to be intrinsically improbable—the resurrection being a paradigmatic case. Another thing that makes predictions more unlikely is their precision. It is one thing to say that a stock market will crash in the next 5 years—that’s pretty likely. Its another thing to locate the place and time of the crash; like the US stock market will crash in 9 months, or even more amazingly, it will crash in exactly 265 days. The greater the precision, the less likely the prediction, the more amazing it is when it happens. As a general epistemological principle, we take note of people or systems that accurately make such predictions because it indicates that person or system has grasped something that was unknown to most people.

Another thing that adds to the unlikeliness of a prediction is how far in the future the predicted thing will happen. This is simply a function of how any probabilistic things have to happen before the event. So if there is only one condition that needs to occur for an event to happen and that condition has a 90% chance of yielding the event, then that event would have a .9 probability. However, if there are seven things that have to happen in a row, each of which has a 90% chance, then (in the simplest analysis) we have a .9 x .9 x .9 x .9 x .9 x .9 x .9 chance of it happening, which equals a .48 or 48% chance of it happening. So even if each step is likely, the combination of the different steps makes it unlikely the final event will occur (52% chance of it not happening).

This is why predicting a market crash 900 months in advance (75 years) is much more impressive than predicting one 9 months in advance. There are so many different things that could possibly happen in that time. This is why such a prediction looks more like a prophecy—its not based on some model that calculates probabilities but appears to be the voice of someone who knows the future (or is just a nutter talking).

The application

Now there are lots of prophecies recorded in the Bible but we can’t reliably establish that they were given before the event happened, and that’s a problem. The miraculous part of a prophecy is that it was predicted in advance (not necessarily that it predicted a miracle). So, if we can’t establish it happened in advance then it is evidentially useless. Indeed, one of the nice things, evidentially speaking, about prophecies, is that the predicted events need not be intrinsically improbable (e.g. Stock market crashes are not that unusual, but a precise prediction of it is still impressive.).

However, if there are prophecies that we know were written down before the events, that were highly unlikely (long temporal distance, precise, etc.), and those prophecies came true we’d have good reason to think that the prophet knew a lot more about the future than others. Indeed, some predictions are so hard to make, it is unlikely that there is any algorithm that could make it. It’s one thing to predict the outcome of the next presidential election based on some rule or program. It’s another thing to predict the outcome of the presidential election in 150 years. That would seem to require someone that could see the future (or that could determine the future). But who is someone who can see or determine the future? Well, if God exists, he’d have to be the top candidate.

So what does this mean for evaluating Jesus resurrection? Well, the application is straightforward. If the Hebrew Bible has sufficiently unlikely predictions / prophecies about Jesus that come true, we have good reason to think that God was talking. If it also says that Jesus would come back from the dead, we’d then have good reason to think that God wants Jesus to rise from the dead. Because God is powerful enough raise Jesus, and we have good reason to believe he wants to, it’s reasonable to expect that Jesus would come back to life.

The obvious next question is this—are there such prophecies and how do we evaluate them? That is the task of the next section.