Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Miracles and risk assessment

Larry Shapiro is a secular philosopher who's been attacking miracles in different venues. He published a book on the subject. And he recently debated Mike Licona. In that debate he recycled an illustration he uses in this article:

It's a good illustration of risk assessment. There can be multiple factors to balance. How likely is this to happen? How harmful if it did happen? How likely is misdiagnosis? How successful is the treatment? How harmful is the treatment? Problem is, his example is a poor analogy for what he's attempting to illustrate. 

Even granting the tremendous reliability of the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, the case for accepting their account is very weak. How many people return from the dead? It must be very low, far less than the number of people who have the serious disease in our analogy. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that God resurrects one in a billion people. This means that even if the witnesses to the resurrection were incredibly reliable (perhaps they misidentify non-miraculous events as miraculous only one in a million times), the chance that they were correct about Jesus’ resurrection would be only one in a thousand. To summarize, the extreme rarity of divine interventions works against the rationality of believing in them…However, my argument does not show that belief in miracles is never rational. Just as receiving numerous positive test results for a disease would raise the probability that you really are sick, numerous independent witnesses testifying to the same miracle would increase the probability that it really occurred. Alas, we lack numerous independent accounts in the case of biblical miracles. Therefore, though miracles might be possible, belief in them is irrational.

Several problems:

i) He's staking out the position that even if an event really happened, and even if we have evidence that it really happened, we should refuse to believe it. But when skepticism pohibits us from believing what's true, even when we have evidence, then isn't skepticism irrational?

ii) Dead people naturally stay dead. By his own admission, the Resurrection takes that for granted. The Resurrection is predicated on the introduction of a factor that's contrary to the ordinary course of nature:

Events like these require divine intervention because, presumably, without such intervention the natural laws according to which the universe marches would have prevented them from happening…That’s why, if Jesus really did return to life, something must have intervened to block the otherwise inevitable march of natural laws.

But in that event, Shapiro's standard of comparison is disanalogous and irrelevant. By his own admission, Shapiro's comparison is a category mistake by resorting to a frame of reference that isn't parallel to the case of miracles. It's odd that having framed the issue correctly, he proceeds to draw a conclusion that disregards his framework. His entire analysis is vitiated by that systematic equivocation. His lack of consistency is puzzling. 

iii) We to have multiple attestation for some dominical miracles. In addition, there's extensive evidence for modern miracles.

iv) In addition, a miracle isn't like a randomly occurring, randomly distributed event. Rather, a miracle is an intentional action by a personal agent. 

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