Bernard Muller wrote:this assumption will likely be regarded as controversial by some
Can anyone show me how?
Several of us have tried and tried. I am not sure why I am doing this, but one more attempt....
Bernard Muller wrote:For example, if Jesus Christ was not presented as from the seed of Abraham in Galatians, would that reduced the probability of Jesus Christ as from the seed of David?
No, but that is not what independence means in this context. Independence means that our calculated probabilities do not change
even when we know the outcome of one of them.
Example of independent events: two coin flips. What are the chances of getting heads on the second flip if we know that the first flip was heads? 50/50, because the coin does not have a memory. What are the chances of getting heads on the second flip if we know that the first flip was tails? 50/50, because (again) the coin does not have a memory. Knowing the outcome of the first flip does not change our estimate of the outcome of the second.
Example of interdependent events: drawing two colored tokens out of a bag, assuming the drawn tokens are not replaced. If we know that the bag started out with 3 red and 3 white tokens, what are the chances of our second draw being red? For the issue of independence, the crucial question is: does knowing the result of the first draw matter? The answer is that
of course it does. If we know that the first draw was white, this will leave only 2 white tokens and 3 red tokens in the bag, making the chances of drawing red the second time three out of five. If we know that the first draw was red, now the chances of drawing red the second time is only two out of five. The key here is that
knowing the outcome of the first draw necessarily affects our estimates of the odds for the second draw.
This is why everybody on this thread (myself included) except for you seems to regard your list of events as
interdependent, not
independent. We would all change our estimate of the odds on some of those events
if we already knew the outcome of at least one of the other events. The example I gave was Jesus as the descendant of Jesse and Jesus as the descendant of David. On their own,
without us considering the other statement, these two statements might best be given similar chances of Paul referring to a real human being: let us say 80% for the sake of argument. But just because we
can consider them separately does not make them independent events. (Just because we
can does not mean that we
should.) In this case, all of us on this thread, except apparently for you,
would lower our estimate of the value of the Jesse statement if it were proven to us that Paul intended the David statement to be purely metaphorical or spiritual, and not literal. In order to tell whether the events are independent or not, we
have to imagine what would change, if anything,
if we knew the outcome of one of them (if we knew the "truth" about one of them, "what really happened").
So, Bernard, when you claim that the Jesse statement and the David statement are independent of one another, you are telling us that
it does not matter what Paul meant by one statement when we evaluate the odds surrounding the other statement. You are telling us that,
even if you became
fully convinced that Paul was thinking of Jesus as a mythical being derived from a heavenly sperm bank or whatever when he described Jesus as the "descendant of David", you would
still give the "descendant of Jesse" statement an 80% chance of indicating that Paul was thinking in this case of a real, historical human being. You would not drop the odds on the Jesse statement even a fraction,
even if you were now admitting that Richard Carrier was right about Paul's David statement. Think about that; really think about it. We are
assuming (only for the sake of determining whether or not these statements are independent) that
Paul was a mythicist when he wrote that Jesus was the descendant of David, and you
still think that there is an 80% chance that Paul was an historicist when he wrote that Jesus was a descendant of Jesse! But this, to the rest of us, is absurd. It would be illogical the other way around, too: if we
knew for certain that Paul was thinking of a real human being when he wrote about the descendant of David, then surely 80% is now
too low for him thinking of a real human being when he wrote about the descendant of Jesse. The point is that
knowing what Paul was thinking in one case would change our estimate of the odds for the other cases, just like knowing that the first drawn token was red affects our estimate of the odds for the second draw.
That is why we do not consider Paul's statements to be independent of one another. We all surmise, except for you, that Paul was probably not both a mythicist and an historicist at the same time; he probably did not randomly flip back and forth between those two positions (like a coin flipping back and forth between heads and tails on successive tosses) as he composed his epistles. If he was thinking of a real human when he wrote one statement, he was probably also thinking of a real human when he wrote the other statement; conversely, if he was thinking of angelic being spawned by celestial sperm in one statement, he was probably thinking of that same kind of being in the other statement. Therefore the statements are not
independent; they are
interdependent.
As Peter said, this does not mean that all is lost for your approach:
I'm confident you could reach a figure of 99% or higher with the multiplication rule and without trampling over probability theory. But you seem to think I'm attacking your conclusion, instead of helping with an error of method, so you don't seem to see that either.
It just means you have to be more diplomatic with the equations, not treating obviously interdependent events as independent.
Sure hope this helps. I think we are all running out of ways to explain this to you.
Ben.