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Probability Proves Bible Prophecy (or Not)

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Now and again I come across bold statements that are widely accepted within Christian circles, but they’re often passed along without evidence, like urban legends. The Christian who shares them usually doesn’t know why they should be believed.
For example, the claim that Mark was the assistant to an eyewitness and wrote the gospel named Mark (I wrote about that here).
That the apostles wouldn’t die for a lie (I wrote about that here).
And that the probability of just eight of Jesus’s 300 fulfilled prophecies coming true randomly—that is, without him being the real deal—is 1 in 1017.
Cover the state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep and find a particular one, blindfolded, by dumb luck—that’s the equivalent probability. In other words, probability shows the reliability of the evidence for Jesus. Who’s going to argue with probability?
At least, that’s the question we’re meant to focus on. The proper question: Who says the probability is 1:1017? And what was the calculation?
I finally had a chance to explore this claim when I recently stumbled across the source, Science Speaks by Peter Stoner, originally published with a different title in 1944. The online version is here (go to chapter 3).
The computation examines eight different prophecies, determines the likelihood of their happening to anyone, and then multiplies them together to get the minuscule 1:1017.
Stoner was the chair of the departments of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College, so he should know something about reasoning. Let’s step through these eight prophecies and see.
1. Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). Stoner asks the probability of someone being born in Bethlehem as opposed to anywhere else in the world and concludes that one birth of every 280,000 worldwide happens in Bethlehem. In other words, if Jesus could have been born anywhere, that he was born in Bethlehem was quite unlikely.
Let’s ignore the fact that a character in a book about Israel was far likelier to be born in Bethlehem than in Bermuda, Brazil, or Borneo, so comparing Bethlehem against the rest of the world is unrealistic. Let’s also ignore that Stoner simply assumes that Jesus was divine.
At least we have it on good authority that the Micah reference, “out of you [Bethlehem] will come … one who will be ruler over Israel,” actually refers to Jesus, because the gospel of Matthew says so (Matt. 2:6).
Or do we? When you actually read Micah 5, it is clear that this ruler of Israel will be a warrior who will turn back the Assyrians, the empire that began conquering Israel piecemeal beginning in 740 BCE. “Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed” (Micah 5:9) doesn’t sound like any event in the life of Jesus.
Additionally, Stoner takes the historical accuracy of the gospel story as a given, but why assume that? The authors of Matthew and Luke were obviously literate, and they would have read Micah. Did they accurately record Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus, or did they just throw in Bethlehem to jazz up the story with a “fulfilled” prophecy?
2. Jesus didn’t enter Jerusalem carried in regal splendor but riding humbly on a donkey (Zech. 9:9). Stoner asks: Of all the men who entered Jerusalem as a ruler, what fraction did so on a donkey? He gives this a probability of 1 in 100.
But again, this simply assumes the historicity of the gospel story. It’s like asking, “How many people who walked the Yellow Brick Road did so after landing on a witch in a house?”
Let’s take a closer look at Zech. 9:9. It says that the victorious king will come

lowly and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

What are they saying here? Is this a mother donkey with its colt? No, this is synonymous parallelism, a poetic form found in the Old Testament, where the last line simply echoes or restates the previous line.
All four gospels have Jesus enter Jerusalem on a donkey, and Matthew and John both mention the prophecy. But Matthew doesn’t understand the poetic structure and thinks that it means two donkeys: “They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on” (Matt. 21:7).
What’s more likely—that Jesus rode two animals like a circus acrobat or that Matthew was inventing the fulfillment of a prophecy?
And like the previous prophecy, the king is a warrior. This time, his domain after his victories will extend from sea to sea, which (again) doesn’t match the Jesus of the gospels.
3. Jesus was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (Zech. 11:12). Stoner’s question: “Of the people who have been betrayed, one in how many has been betrayed for exactly thirty pieces of silver?”
The gospel fulfillment (Matt. 27:9) refers to Jeremiah, not Zechariah. Oops—I guess divinely inspired authors are only human. But even when we find the reference in the correct book, the Zechariah story has nothing to do with betrayal.
And so on. There’s no need to dig into the remaining prophecies; you see how this plays out. Not only are these “prophecies” poor matches for the Jesus story, the probability calculations for these eight examples simply beg the question by assuming that the gospels are history (which is the question at hand) and make meaningless estimates of probability to create the fiction that actual science is going on here.
Are we dealing with actual prophecies? No—the allusions to Old Testament stories are easily explained if we suppose that the authors of the gospels simply searched the Scriptures for plot fragments that they could work into the Jesus story. The probability calculations are meaningless.
Don’t suppose that the gospel authors were journalists writing history. Scholars don’t categorize the gospels as biography but as ancient biography, which is not the same genre. An ancient biography isn’t overly concerned about giving accurate facts but with making a moral point.
When we have a plausible natural explanation like this, the supernatural explanation doesn’t hold up.

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint.
When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist.
— Archbishop Helder Camara

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Dr Johnson: Dunning-Kruger Effect

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Has it ever seemed to you that less competent people rate their competence higher than it actually is, while more competent people humbly rate theirs lower?
It’s not just your imagination. This is a genuine cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The Dunning-Kruger experiments behind the research focused on cognitive tasks (logic, grammar, and evaluating humor), but similar disparities exist in other areas. In self-assessment of IQ, below average people overestimated their score and those above average underestimated (the Downing effect). Studies of healthy and unhealthy behaviors are handicapped when they rely on self-reporting because test subjects tend to improve their evaluation. In self-evaluations of driving ability, job performance, and even immunity to bias, we tend to polish our image.
This is the Lake Wobegone effect—the town where “all the children are above average.”
Notice that there are two different categories of error:
(1) the error where there is a preferred answer and everyone (apparently) is biased toward giving that answer (“How much snack food do you eat?” or “How popular would you say you are?” or “How good a driver are you?”) and
(2) the error where bias changes depending on actual competence, with the less and more competent groups rating themselves too high and too low, respectively.
Let’s look at the second category, where the two extremes make opposite errors. The results of the Dunning-Kruger research hypothesizes that the competent overestimate others’ skill levels. But the error is more complicated for the incompetent—they overestimate their own skill level and they lack the metacognition to realize their error. In other words, they were too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. Improving their metacognitive skills drove down their self-assessment scores as they became better evaluators of their own limitations.
The original paper was titled, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” for which the authors won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, not those who know much,
who so positively assert that this or that problem
will never be solved by science.
— Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871)

Photo credit: Martin Beek

Dr Johnson: Extraordinary Claims and Extraordinary Evidence

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In the 8/12/12 Stand to Reason podcast (start at 1:06:00), Greg Koukl discusses the popular aphorism, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” He doesn’t care for it, probably because he wants to lower the bar of evidence for his own remarkable claims about Jesus.
He proposes instead, “Extraordinary claims require adequate evidence.” As an example, he cites the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. “A man has walked on the moon” is an extraordinary claim (or certainly was in the 1960s), but he notes that we were satisfied with the evidence of “a simple newsreel” (by which I presume he means the live video feed from the moon).
That video alone, as powerful as it was, might not have been enough to support the enormous claim of the moon landing, but of course we had far more than just that. We had public statements from NASA, the press, and the president; we had public launches of ever more enormous rockets from Cape Kennedy through the 1960s; we had thousands of workers within the aerospace industry who were in a position to blow the whistle on a hoax; we had satellites visible from the back yard of the ordinary citizens; and we even had the validation from the USSR—if we hadn’t landed on the moon, they would have delighted to point out the lie.
Was Koukl’s “simple newsreel” extraordinary evidence? In pre-Photoshop days, I think so. Add all the peripheral evidence backing up the claim, and you have evidence that, by any measure, was extraordinary. Koukl’s attempt to downplay the necessary evidence for an extraordinary claim fails. It’s a weak and disappointing attempt to shirk his burden of proof for the supernatural elements of Christianity, presumably because he knows that that burden, rightly evaluated, is gigantic.
One aspect of an extraordinary claim is its importance. “Extraordinary” means both “surprising and unexpected” as well as “important.” The Guinness Book of World Records has many entries for extraordinary in the first sense but very few in the second. The gospel claims are both unexpected and important, so they’re extraordinary by any measure.
Back to Koukl:

Use of this slogan functions to stack the deck against the … religious person making the claim because when you buy that equation it turns out that there’s almost no evidence that is going to be extraordinary enough to substantiate the extraordinary claim (1:09:40).

Yes, there’s almost no evidence documenting events 2000 years ago that can substantiate the extraordinary claim, “Jesus rose from the dead.” No, that’s not stacking the deck. That’s the same skepticism you apply to other nutty claims, whether it’s that Mohammed rode to heaven on a winged horse or that someone can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, cheap. There simply isn’t enough evidence to support the gospel’s enormous claims, so there is no reason to accept them.
That’s the easy resolution to this difficulty—if there’s not enough evidence, don’t accept the claims.
Koukl admits that “people don’t rise from the dead very often” but then goes on to say that the gospel story isn’t a resurrection claim all by itself but that this is woven into a narrative that says that a man was dead and then people saw him alive again, and before his death the man predicted all this. Given that this is the evidence, “Well, that would change things, wouldn’t it?”
Not in the least. The facts we have at hand are that there is a story that talks about this. It’s not a fact that people saw Jesus risen from the dead, it’s just a story (perhaps more precisely: a legend). It’s in the same bin as the stories of Merlin or Prester John or Caesar Augustus, each of which has supernatural elements. I’ve written more about how the gospels weren’t written by eyewitnesses (“Is Mark an Eyewitness Account?“).
Koukl says that what is an “extraordinary claim” is subjective and depends on the person. Okay—but is Koukl saying that the claims of Scientology aren’t extraordinary to the Scientologists, so they are entitled to believe in their religion because they have a different worldview? And would this also be true for Mormons or anti-vaxers or flat earthers or those who believe in fairies? This seems to be evidential relativism of a sort that I can’t imagine Koukl supports.
Koukl is playing Whac-A-Mole, and by shoring up one problematic issue in his apologetics he forces another to emerge.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions,
but they are not entitled to their own facts
— Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Dr Johnson: Abiogenesis and Panspermia

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Abiogenesis is the process by which nonliving matter turns into living matter—that is, something that natural selection can work with. This is thought to be how life on earth originated, though there is no consensus on how this happened. Evolution then shaped that early life into what we see today.
But there is another hypothesis.
Asteroids that hit the earth are mostly bits of rock that formed from the early accretions of and collisions with material in the early solar system. Sometimes, however, big asteroid impacts can eject material from a planet, and this new material itself can become asteroids. If this planet had life, the new asteroids might be contaminated with bacteria that, if they fell on another planet with the right conditions, could seed an otherwise barren planet with life.
This is the idea behind panspermia. It bypasses the problem of a planet having the right conditions for sustaining life but not the right conditions for creating it.
A variation is directed panspermia, the idea of panspermia being not accidental but deliberate. Imagine an advanced civilization deliberately sending out durable primitive life on rocks or satellites to infect sterile planets.
But does panspermia simply move the problem rather than solving it? The buck has to stop somewhere; how does panspermia help?
This was the reaction by some Creationists to Richard Dawkins’ interview with Ben Stein for the movie Expelled (video, go to 4:00). Dawkins was caricatured as saying, “How do we explain how life started on earth? Imagine that it was put here by aliens. Problem solved!”
But a few minutes’ thought shows that panspermia doesn’t just pass the buck but does indeed change things.
The early earth had a certain set of initial conditions—amount of water, a particular gas mixture in the atmosphere, available chemicals, temperature, range of salinity and alkalinity, amount of sunshine, and so on. What if those initial conditions could never allow abiogenesis but the different conditions on another planet could? Panspermia is the mechanism in which the otherwise-barren planet could be seeded with life. Panspermia in effect expands the initial conditions.
Of course, that may not please the Creationists as much as the caricature, but that’s the lot of science.
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God’s Diminishing Power

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In the beginning … God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary supernatural Joe. He dropped by Abraham’s for a cup of coffee and a chat. He didn’t know what was up in Sodom and Gomorrah and had to send out angelic scouts for reconnaissance: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me” (Gen. 18:20–21).
But, like Stalin gradually collecting titles, God has now become omniscient and omnipotent. He’s gone from needing six days to shape a world from Play-Doh and sprinkle tiny stars in the dome of heaven to creating 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.
That’s 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg of universe.
And yet, oddly, his biblical demonstrations of power faded with time. From creating the universe, he’s weakened such that appearing in a grilled cheese sandwich is about as much as he can pull off today. He has the fiery reputation of the Wizard of Oz but is now just the man behind the curtain.
Even God’s punishments became wimpier. A global flood, with millions dead is pretty badass. Personally smiting Sodom and Gomorrah is impressive, though that’s a big step down in magnitude.
And it’s downhill from there—God simply orders the destruction of Canaanite cities, and to punish Israel and Judah, he allows Assyria and then Babylon to invade. As Jesus, he doesn’t kick much more butt than cursing a fig tree, and today he simply stands by to let bad things happen.
Maybe God’s power diminishes as the universe’s dark energy increases?
Photo credit: Why There is no God

Dr Johnson: Legend, Myth, and More

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Jesus, God, and all thatLet’s straighten out some of the terms used in the study of religion, the supernatural, and related topics.  I know I’ve not always used the terms precisely, so this is a chance to make amends.
We’ll begin with the big category, folklore.  This is the traditional knowledge or forms of expression of a culture passed on from person to person.  Folklore can be material (quilts, traditional costumes, recipes, the hex signs on Amish barns, etc.), behavioral (customs such as throwing rice at a wedding, what constitutes good manners, superstitions, etc.), or traditional stories.
Traditional stories is itself a large category, containing music, anecdotes, ghost stories, parables, popular misconceptions, and other things you might not think of.
Now on to the kinds of traditional stories that are most interesting to apologetics.  These terms can overlap quite a bit, so consider these definitions approximations.  First, let’s consider stories seen as true (or plausibly so) by their hearers.

  • Legends are grounded in history and can change over time.  They can include miracles.  Urban legends are a modern category of legends that don’t include miracles, are set in or near the present day, and take the form of a cautionary tale.
  • Myths are sacred narratives that explain some aspect of reality (for example: the myth of Prometheus explains why we have fire and the Genesis creation myth explains where everything came from).  Epic poems such as Beowulf and the Odyssey are one kind of myth.

The difference between legends and myths is that a legend is set in a more recent time and generally features human characters, while myths are set in the distant past and have supernatural characters.  Some stories are mixtures of the two—the Iliad tells the story of a real city, and the characters include gods, humans with supernatural powers, and ordinary humans.
Lady Godiva, King Arthur, William Tell, and Atlantis are examples of legends—the stories have human characters and are set in a historic past.  Myths include the stories of Hercules and Zeus, Hindu mythology, the Noah story, and the creation stories of dozens of cultures—they have gods as characters and are set in a distant or undefined past.
Let’s take a brief detour to look at a few relevant terms that are not part of the category of traditional stories.

  • Religion starts with the sacred narratives of mythology and adds beliefs and practices.  Myth and scripture are both sacred, but scripture is the writings themselves.  Doctrine is codified teaching, and dogma is that mandatory subset of the doctrine that must be believed for one to be a member.
  • Superstition is any belief that relies on a supernatural (instead of natural) cause like astrology, omens to predict the future, magic, or witchcraft.  It can also be defined as the unfounded supernatural beliefs of the other guy’s religion (not your own, of course).  Merriam-Webster defines it as “a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.”

Finally, let’s consider stories understood by their hearers to not be true.

  • Fables have a particular kind of character: nonhumans such as animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that have human-like qualities.  Fables end with a moral.
  • Fairy tales also have particular characters: fantasy characters such as fairies, goblins, and elves.  Magic is also an element.  There is no connection with historic time (it begins “Once upon a time …”).
  • Parables are plausible stories with plausible characters (no talking rocks, no magic) that are not presented as true.  Parables illustrate a moral or religious principle.

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