Oh dear.

If you are so gullible you can’t Do Your Own Research to realize those miracles have all been debunked, some for decades already, I cannot help you.

This has already been done. You just have to want to find and consult it, rather than stay inside a Christian propaganda silo.

How would you explain Padre Pio’s stigmata from a naturalistic perspective, especially the reports that the wounds persisted for decades and then disappeared without obvious scarring shortly before or around his death?

I’ll link an article that goes through the arguments and evidence in favor of the miracle in considerable depth. I’d genuinely appreciate it if you could engage with the strongest version of the case rather than just dismissing it because it is religious.

https://substack.com/@ethanmuse/note/p-174400229?r=7px8e0

That’s all possible (depending on how it gets fleshed out). I just don’t see that it changes anything.

For example:

When assessing whether a particular hypothesis is more plausible or “probable” than another, it seems that we usually pick the hypothesis that corresponds to more things that have similarly occurred in the past.

That’s the same thing. Those are just two different ways of describing a base rate.

The final probability of a hypothesis is not settled by the base rate, though. The likelihood ratio can reverse a base rate. Or amplify one.

And all base rates are just the outputs of prior likelihood ratios (usually implicit, e.g. our base rates for interpreting visual data were all settled by subconscious Bayesian calculations in our brains as infants and toddlers).

See the “Bayes’ Theorem” tag in my category dropdown menu at right. I have several articles on how we interpret Bayes’ Theorem into an epistemology, from ontology to logics. Some of which are of relevance to what you are asking about.

Thus, the notion of probability seems to be unintelligible without the notion of similarity.

This is just another way of saying abstraction exists: that many particulars share patterns and we label those shared patterns “abstract objects” and use them to track correlations (if pattern x usually correlates with y at rate z, then that is simply the same thing as saying the base rate of xy is z).

Since the former seems to rely upon the latter, does this mean the notion of similarity is more fundamental than probability?

I don’t think these are different things. Similarity is just another way of describing frequency (of a given pattern). A frequency is just y when x, z times. Similarity is just the y when x part of that statement, without which there is no frequency statement at all. So there is no way to separate “similarity” from “frequency.” Frequency simply just is one measure of similarity.

The key to resolving hyperskepticism about abstraction (that’s what Goodman is really doing) is to get at what an abstraction even is. I cover this in Sense and Goodness without God. As a shared pattern of arrangement, its existence is fundamental, even at the level of Cartesian knowledge, which is the most fundamental thing epistemologically (see my recent article The Epistemological Endgame). Frequency is then just counting it.

For example, that all triangles are “similar” in respect to what defines a particular thing as a triangle is fundamentally undeniable. The similarity obviously exists. And when we “count triangles” we are discussing the frequency of similars. In respect to geometry, the correlations are usually 100% (all triangles follow the axioms of trigonometry), but not always (plane trigonometry only describes planar triangles; you need spherical trigonometry to describe curved triangles).

This is exactly the same thing going on with empirical and not just analytical domains of knowledge, e.g. all furry things have some undeniable similarity in the same way triangles do, and though correlations might not be 100% (fur correlates with thermal regulation vs. fur correlates with tactic sensory systems vs. fur correlates with presentation functions etc.) they still have countable frequencies of correlation (even if they have to be fuzzy or ballparked).

Quite simply, once you define what it is you want to count and in relation to what, then you can count it and get a frequency. That this is counting similars is fundamental to what a frequency even is, and so there is no way to separate similarity from our counting of it.

As philosophers like Alan Hajek have argued, there is no such thing as an unconditional probability of an event. Whether we realize it or not, all probabilities are conditional on a particular reference class, and there is no objective way to create that class since any event belongs to an infinite number of classes. You discussed this problem already in your book Proving History.

In practice, we seem to put events into classes by considering counterfactuals that are relevantly similar to the event in question.

When assessing whether a particular hypothesis is more plausible or “probable” than another, it seems that we usually pick the hypothesis that corresponds to more things that have similarly occurred in the past. For example, when making the conclusion that an asteroid hitting earth in the next decade is less likely than an earthquake hitting Japan, it is because the latter is the kind of event that has more frequently occurred in the past.

Only once we establish which events seem similar to the one in question (whether in resemblance or similar in the level of evidence we have for the event) can we establish which kinds of events have more frequently occurred in the past. Thus, the notion of probability seems to be unintelligible without the notion of similarity. Since the former seems to rely upon the latter, does this mean the notion of similarity is more fundamental than probability?

P.S. this seems to create many interesting implications since philosophers like Nelson Goodman have argued,

“Similarity, ever ready to solve philosophical problems and overcome obstacles, is a pretender, an impostor, a quack…”.

I don’t of course subscribe to the thesis that similarity is an impostor. It may be in the sense that there may be no one general notion of similarity that is useful for all contexts (i.e. it may be context dependent). But this does not imply that similarity is useless.

Nevertheless, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this

First, Jesus was a real life name of hundreds of thousands of Jews in antiquity. It thus did not have to come from the LXX. Indeed, many of the instances in the LXX might be also real people (e.g. the Zechariah myth you and Philo reference, which was applied to the Christian Jesus, was originally about Jesus ben Jehozadak, first high priest of the second temple; Philo and the Christians simply “reinterpreted” it to mean something else).

Second, that it is possible the name came from those sources (e.g. that Jesus later called Christ started out in Jewish angelology as one of the names of the Angel of Many Names) does not result in it being probable. Those are two different things. I do not prove it probable; I only document it is possible. The name might have come from somewhere else, there being many possibilities, such as it being assigned after his atoning sacrifice was believed to have occurred to designate his function now as “God’s Savior,” which is what the name means; or even, from it being the guy’s actual name; and indeed, that might have even inspired the equation of him with that angel, or with any messianic figure extracted from scripture. So we cannot argue against historicity with fallacies like this.

I think you have mistaken background information as to what’s possible, with evidence establishing what’s probable. I was never able to prove probable where the name came from; I only prove more probable than not that it was assigned somehow, to designate a celestial figure. And even then I conclude there is as much as a 1 in 3 chance it designated a real historical figure, and then his name could easily have actually just been his name, and all the associations made from it, were caused by that, and not the other way around. And yes, it could also be the other way around—even if Jesus really existed!

All of this is covered in my book On the Historicity of Jesus. I recommend you read it carefully.

The name of Jesus comes from the LXX, not real life.

A. In LXX Zechariah we have a Jesus who is described as Rising, ending all sins in a single day etc.

B. Philo of Alexandria quotes and comments upon LXX Zechariah:

‘Behold, the man named Rising!’ is a very novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and soul. But if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being who is none other than the divine image, you will then agree that the name of ‘Rising’ has been given to him with great felicity. For the Father of the Universe has caused him to rise up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the firstborn. And he who is thus born, imitates the ways of his father.

C. Here Philo says that it is weird to describe a normal human man as Rising. Philo says this phrase actually refers to the eldest son of God. Philo goes on to describe this being as having all the same properties as Paul’s Jesus.

Oh, indeed. Well spotted. I’ve written that up more directly elsewhere: theism suffers at the prior probability level both evidentially (Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them) and in its gratuitous theoretical complexity (The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism). It’s thus both a conceptually terrible explanation of anything and deeply contradicted by our entire body of background knowledge (see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics and Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof).

Huh?

I am not sure if you are this naive or just being a disingenuous troll.

But if you are actually bizarrely sincere:

(1) I explain in detail how I get to the odds range I do in On the Historicity of Jesus. That also lays out in tables what estimates you’d have to change to get a different result. If you think you can get a different result, you need to do the work and find what estimates there you can actually change, and present empirical evidence justifying your alternative(s).

(2) There is no such thing as an epistemic probability of 0 for any substantive claim to fact (i.e. the only claims capable of a 0% epistemic probability are trivial, like “I am not experiencing myself typing this sentence right now,” which asserts nothing as to whether anything I am experiencing is real, and thus makes no substantive claim to fact, but only asserts a trivial tautology). It is, literally, a mathematical impossibility. See my explanation in How Not to Be a Doofus about Bayes’ Theorem and Epistemological End Game.

(3) “Jesus was not raised from the dead” has no effect whatsoever on the probability “Jesus existed.” So there is no logical way you can get from “His name, death and resurrection are straight from the LXX” to “There was no actual man to whom those things were attributed.” That a dying-and-rising motif found in the LXX was mythically attached to an actual man who died (and men, for as long as they remain mortal, always have a 100% chance of being dead at some point) is already the position of mainstream historicity.

(4) I point out further in OHJ that the name “Jesus” (in fact that’s an Latinism for Joshua) was one of the most common names of actual historical men in Judea, and therefore not that unlikely to have been this man’s real name. Indeed, finding scriptures attributed to men of similar name—and there were many—could then inspire subsequent associated legends about this historical Jesus or even have inspired his own delusion toward it. More importantly, it need not have even been his name. The historical man may have had any name, and was only assigned “Jesus,” which means Savior of God, when he was hailed a Savior of God. Therefore, the derivation of the name from or its coincidence in Scripture actually has no effect on the probability the man nevertheless existed.

So, your reasoning is a quadruple non sequitur.

His name, death and resurrection are straight from the LXX.

The odds of Jesus existing is 0%