So God's really in the details?

Economists use probability theory to make forecasts about consumer spending. Actuaries use it to calculate insurance premiums. Recently, Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, put it to work toward less mundane ends: He invoked it to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers who had convened at Yale University for a conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."

Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols -- using a probability formula known as Bayes' theorem -- and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is 0.97"

In plain English, this means that, by Swinburne's calculations, the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.

While his highly technical lectures may not net Christianity many fresh converts, Swinburne's efforts to bring inductive logic to bear on questions of faith have earned him a considerable reputation in the small but vibrant world of Christian academic philosophy. Thanks to the efforts of Swinburne and a handful of other nimble scholarly minds -- including Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale -- religious belief no longer languishes in a state of philosophical disrepute. Deploying a range of sophisticated logical arguments developed over the last 25 years, Christian philosophers have revived faith as a subject of rigorous academic debate, steadily chipping away at the assumption -- all but axiomatic in philosophy since the Enlightenment -- that belief in God is logically indefensible.

"They are the first group within 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy to tackle questions of religious faith using the tools of philosophy," said Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, which ranks academic philosophy departments. "It would be accurate to say that it's a growth movement."

Wolterstorff, who retired from Yale in December and in whose honor the conference was organized, agreed. "And it's not just graybeards," he added, referring to the dozens of younger scholars and graduate students in attendance. "Within the general discipline, this development of the philosophy of religion has been extraordinary."

To be sure, not all of the movement's philosophers agree with one another, use the same tactics or even hold the same religious beliefs. Some, including Swinburne, for example, are what's known as evidentialists: They accept the Enlightenment doctrine that a belief is justified only when evidence can be found for it outside the believer's own mind. According to the classic evidentialist argument, for faith to be considered rational it has to be supported by independent proof, and there simply isn't any.

In The Existence of God (Oxford University Press, 1979), Swinburne, a Greek Orthodox Christian, tried to meet the evidentialist challenge using Bayes' theorem. Supplying pages of intricate, technical argumentation to back up his claims, he wrote that many natural phenomena -- including the universe itself -- are, well, if not incontrovertible proof of God's handiwork, at least "more probable if there is a God than if there is not."

More influential at the moment, however, are the "reformed epistemologists" led by Plantinga and Wolterstorff, who are Calvinists. These scholars reject the evidentialist insistence on independent proofs. After all, they point out, the ability to distinguish good evidence from bad requires reason, but why trust our ability to reason? Where's the proof that our reason is any good? For the evidentialists, reason is considered a "basic belief," one that doesn't require additional evidence to be true. But if reason can be considered a basic belief, then so, too, say the reformed epistemologists, can faith in God.

Accepting faith as a basic belief, they say, does not make faith irrational. On the contrary, they insist, a belief can lack independent evidence and still be rational. Some beliefs are simply self-evident. Most people know that 1 plus 1 equals 2, Wolterstorff points out, just as they accept beliefs about their bodily state -- like "I feel dizzy" -- without having to consult other sources. "We believe lots of things that don't have publicly formulated arguments," Wolterstorff said. "Reformed epistemology challenges the need for arguments."

Good post.

I marvel at the mystery of how one can proclaim that faith is irrational. Show me a theoretical model of how the universe [or us for that matter] came into existence, and I will show you something that will ultimately be accepted by faith--by the "believer".

A better question is what faith is more rational or reasonable?

It is in this instance or realm, where Christ-based philosophy stands heads and shoulders above the rest. Take the Resurrection for example; it does not suffer for lack of historical evidence--it is generally disbelieved simply because it is "unbelievable".

Well, is it believable that the Milky Way has 200 billion stars in it, is it believable that the keys on your PC key board "aren't really there", in quantum physical terms?

Is is believable that we are even here??

How is unbelief justified in the case of the Resurrection of Christ, in the face of the rest of the unbelievables? To disprove the Resurrection requires more than sheer unbelief.

Brian.

I have to say, though, that I find this all very pedantic.

The fact is that we human beings have such puny understanding of the universe anyway. The same sort of arrogance that allows one guy to say "I can prove that everything that happens in the universe, happens out of sheer chance," allows this guy to see "look, I can mathematically prove that the Resurrection PROBABLY happened."

I know that's perhaps a minority opinion but to me it is senseless to try to use finite methods to "prove" the infinite.

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