Philo 2 (1):62-76 (
1999)
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Abstract
This essay is a response to Michael Martin’s “Why the Resurrection Is Initially Improbable,” Philo, Vol. 1, No.1. I argue that Martin has not succeeded in achieving his aim of showing that the Resurrection is initially improbable and thus, by Bayes’s Theorem, implausible. I respond to five of Martin’s arguments: the “particular time and place argument”; the claim that there is no plausible Christian theory of why Jesus should have been incarnated and resurrected; the claim that the Resurrection accounts in the New Testament are unreliable; Martin’s assumptions about how one establishes the initial probability of Resurrection; and the use Martin makes of Bayes’s Theorem to discredit belief in the Resurrection.