Pseduo-science isn't enough...now we have pseudo-math! [View All]

[Pab Sungenis]

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/package.jsp?name=fte/resurrection/resurrection

Oxford University professor Richard Swinburne...has created a formula that he says shows a 97 percent certainty that Jesus Christ was resurrected by God the Father, report The Age and Catholic News.

Now, anyone who knows mathematics, statistics, and probability better than I do, please join in the argument, but let me see if I can knock his logic down quickly:


The probably of God's existence is one in two. That is, God either exists or doesn't.

I choose to grant him this one, just for argument's sake, and to avoid having to work in the thousands of factors that would be raised by an attempt to prove the existence of God (something no philosopher has ever done).

The probability that God became incarnate, that is embodied in human form, is also one in two.

Again, I'll grant him this one. Since the odds of God existing are 1 in 2, and the odds of him becoming incarnate are also 1 in 2, then the odds of him existing AND becoming incarnate are 1 in 4.

The chance of Christ's resurrection not being reported by the gospels has a probability of one in 10.

Just for fun, let's grant him a 100% chance of God Incarnate rising from the dead. The odds of him rising, then, are still 1 in 4.

Since there is now a 9 out of 10 chance factored into this 1 in 4, that makes the odds 9 out of 40.

Considering all these factors together, there is a one in 1,000 chance that the resurrection is not true.

Actually, if we grant him every one of his arguments raised above, there is only a 22.5% chance of the Resurrection happening.

Hardly a certainty, and definitely not a 1 in 1,000 chance.

I can't believe any half-intelligent editor would regurgitate that crap without even thinking about it. Unless they were trying to forward their Intelligent Design arguments with Unintelligent Algebra.