Gospel Reliability and Miracles: The Resurrection

In this podcast, I take the methods that I talked about in the previous episode on methodology and Miracles and show how they apply to the central miracle of Christianity--Jesus' resurrection. I outline a "Paley-style" argument for the resurrection and give both a super-brief version of it and a somewhat expanded version. I show how Gospel reliability fits into the argument to bolster the claim that the evidence we have is highly improbable if the witnesses were just mistaken in thinking that Jesus rose from the dead. This type of an approach is an alternative to the more common "minimal facts" argument, which I don't think is as strong as its proponents believe it to be or as strong as what is needed to support Christianity. (See link below.) The Paley-style argument has never been rendered obsolete. It has merely fallen out of fashion, probably due to an unjustified deference to more skeptical "critical scholarship" concerning the Gospels and a desire to avoid having to go unequivocally against that tide--something I think we should consider a privilege.  

Here again is my webinar on "Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUt3r3dXBr4  Here is the blog post that I mention in the episode, "Independence, Conspiracy, and the Resurrection"  http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/08/independence-conspiracy-and-resurrection.html  

Originally uploaded to YouTube Nov 5 2020