Doug Shaver

In the time he had available, it's hard to do much more than that.

Pending your opportunity to read the book, he goes into a little bit more detail here: http://www.richardcarrier.info/CarrierDec08.pdf.

rlogan

I'm a statistician. Econometrician, actually. It isn't that I need it explained to me. It's that I did not see him conveying the basic idea, which can be done in layman's terms in short order.

For example:

How do people combine previous information/beliefs with new evidence?

An irrational person doesn't do this so coherently. The way a rational person goes about it though is that the greater the evidence contradicts the initial beliefs, the more of a change in the posterior beliefs you are going to have.


If God sat right down next to me in the form of a nubile countenance and gave me a great hand-job along with say a million dollars, I would be formulating a pretty big change in my thoughts about God.

If I already strongly believed in God, well it would still feel good but my posterior beliefs wouldn't be affected much.

I have not read his book, but from the literature I do know of the fact is rational people are using bayes' rule without knowing of it formally whereas irrational people or shysters are violating it.

There is a lot more you can do with it, and the mathematics of it are of course difficult for the layman and take formal definitions and algebra. You can approach it differently in your explanation, which in effect is re-arranging the equation.

So I disagree that the layman needs much time to understand the gist of it and as a matter of fact I don't think there is much value to the layman in doing all of the algebra and analytics.

mysteriousworld

http://www.richardcarrier.info/CarrierDec08.pdf.

If I use Carriers probability calculation where do I get the actual numbers to put in it?

Do I just make up the numbers out of my own head?

David Deas

Its all still very subjective. But I applaud Carrier for at least *trying* to be objective here. I've not seen any Biblical historians even make an attempt at objectivity.

Steven Carr

There is a really bad error on the page discussing the Talpiot Tomb

'For example, if 1 in 4 people were named Mark, and you picked three people at random, the odds that they would all be named Mark would be 0.25^3 = 0.016 =
1.6%, in other words very unlikely,

but if you picked ten people at random, the odds that any three of them would be named Mark would be 1 – 0.75^7 = 1 – 0.133 = 0.867 = 87%, in other words very likely.'

This is not the chance of finding at least 3 Mark's among 10 people, if 1 in 4 people is called Mark.

The expected number is 2.5 and the standard deviation is 1.37, so 3 Mark's is hardly statistically signficant.

The chance of finding at least 3 Mark's is 1 - P(0) - P(1) - P(2).

P(0) = 0.75^10. = 0.056
P(1) = 10 x 0.75^9 x 0.25 = 0.1877
P(2) = 45 x 0.75^8 x 0.25^2 = 0.282

So the chance of finding at least 3 Marks is 0.475 (to 3sf)

This is the value published in standard Binomial Distribution Tables. (N=10, p=0.25, r=3)

spamandham

If necessary, yes. But this is still better than the usual approach of complete lack of any rigor whatsoever.

If you take a best guess at a particular number and let the probability calculations land where they may, you can then play with your number to see how sensitive the results are, and then you know where to spend your time investigating and how good your probability estimates need to be to draw conclusions.

Sometimes, the same conclusion will result from a very broad range, and that conclusion may be different than the going in guesses.

For example, what are the odds that any of the Pauline letters are authentic? We could just guess at it, or we could presume that the a priori probability of a given letter's authenticity is the same for all the letters traditionally attributed to Paul. Then, we note that 6 of the 13 letters have been demonstrated to be inauthentic. From this, we can bound the liklihood that any of the letters are authentic. I actually did this in a thread a while back, and the odds are low than any of the letters are authentic, and the odds that the 7 "authentic" letters actually are authentic is fleetingly small. Yet most NT scholars hold to the irrational notion that the 7 "authentic" letters actually were penned by Paul.

aa5874

Is it really strange that NT Scholars hold to IRRATIONAL notions about "Paul"?

Once "Paul" is taken out of the 1st century or is placed AFTER the Fall of the Temple ,then the NT COLLAPSES as COMPLETE fiction.

1. The Church in their writings put forward the Notion that the Gospels were authentic and written Before the Fall of the Temple.

Such Notions about the Gospels have been found or deduced to be in ERROR. The Gospels have been deduced to be written sometime AFTER the Fall of the Temple

2. The Church and its writers put forward the Notion that ALL the Epistles under the name "Paul" were authentic and written BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

It has been deduced that there were MORE than one writer who used the name "Paul" to write so-called Epistles and that some were written AFTER the Fall of the Temple.

3. The Church and its writers put forward the Notion that 1st Peter is authentic and written BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

It has been deduced that ALL NON-Pauline Epistles, ACTS, Hebrews and Revelation in the Canon were written AFTER the Fall of the Temple.

So 20 of the 27 books in the NT Canon have been deduced to have been written AFTER the Fall of the Temple.

The PROBABILITY that ALL 27 books of the NT Canon were written AFTER the Fall of the Temple is VERY HIGH.

Doug Shaver

I don't have time right now, but if I get a chance within the next day or so, I'll check his math against yours and see what I come up with.

andrewcriddle

I'm afraid I haven't checked against Richard Carrier's pdf, but Steven Carr is correct in his analysis of the probablility that at least 3 of 10 samples will be X where the probability of any one sample being X is 0.25.

Andrew Criddle

hatsoff

I too can verify this. Carrier definitely made a mistake there. However, I should caution everyone that this doesn't mean Carrier is some sort of a statistics ignoramus. These things happen, even among experts.

(Not that Carrier is a statistics expert, of course.)