HeyJaredThe Lydia McGrew Podcast
The goal: To take common sense about the Bible and make it rigorous.I'm an analytic philosopher, specializing in theory of knowledge. I've published widely in both classical and formal epistemology.
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- Sep 6, 2026
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- Jul 6, 2026
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Gregor's weak explanation 2 (opens the original)
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Skeptics are fond of saying that they have an explanation of the evidence that does just a job as good as, the theory that Jesus rose again (or at least very close) but that has a higher prior probability than the resurrection.Here I argue that Kamil Gregor's pareidolia theory doesn't even come *close* to being as good an explanation of the resurrection evidence, even just considering the stories in the Gospels as made-up stories. In fact, his pareidolia theory, together with his claims about wh
Gregor's Weak Explanation 1 (opens the original)
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I continue illustrating the fact that skeptics develop theories that they claim explain the evidence just as well as the resurrection, even though this can be easily seen to be untrue. They then run the priors, claiming that these explanations have a much higher prior probability than the resurrection, so it's a win-win for the skeptical side--equal or nearly equal explanatory power and higher prior.Here I'll discuss the oddity that in Gregor's theory, the disciples already believe that Jesus ha
Running back to the priors 4: Evidence does not matter (opens the original)
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Here I point directly to Arif Ahmed's "run back to the priors" move. He very nearly admits that his "explanation" of the resurrection evidence doesn't do a very good job explaining, but then he says that however low the prior probability of a naturalistic hypothesis, the prior probability of the resurrection should always be much, much lower. This means that he could always just conjoin the evidence with "the miracle didn't happen" and assume that the prior probability of that conjunction is muc
Running back to the Prior 3: Arif Ahmed resuscitates the swoon theory (opens the original)
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There are two different ways to try to address a strong case for some hypothesis H, and they are not sharply distinct from one another. One way is by just saying that "somehow" we have this and this and this evidence but H is not true. Another is to make a stab at actually explaining a set of evidence if H is not true. When there is a really strong case for H, what will happen is that that "stab" doesn't actually do a good job at explaining the evidence either--nowhere near as good a job as H it
Running back to the prior 2: Vagueness, laziness, and antisupernaturalism (opens the original)
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Skeptics tend to be far too quick to make two assumptions: 1) That it is easy to find a naturalistic alternative to any claimed miracle that does just as good a job as the miracle itself at explaining the evidence for it and 2) That the conjunction of "no miracle" with the evidence in question will always have a higher probability than the miracle itself. For a well-attested miracle like Jesus' resurrection, maintaining these two assumptions, (whether or not one uses probabilistic terminology) d
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