Bayes Theorem's application depends entirely on how precisely the parameters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. With a historical question, Carrier is forced to think up probabilities for each parameter he put into the equation. This is a purely subjective process - he determines how likely or unlikely a parameter in the question is and then decides what value to give that parameter. So the result he gets at the end is purely a function of these subjective choices.
In other words: garbage in/garbage out.
So it's not surprising that Carrier comes up with a result on the question of whether Jesus existed that conforms to his belief that Jesus didn't - he came up with the values that were inevitably going to come up with that result. If someone who believed Jesus did exist did the same thing, the values they inputted would be different and they would come up with the opposite result. This is why historians don't bother using Bayes Theorem.
So what exactly is Carrier doing by applying this Theorem in a way that it can't be applied? Apart from being incompetent, he seems to be doing little more than putting a veneer of statistics over a subjective evaluation and pretending he's getting greater precision.
Not surprisingly, despite his usual grandiose claims that his use of Bayes Theorem is some kind of revolution in historiography, his book <em>Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus</em> (2012) has pretty much sunk without trace and been generally ignored by historical Jesus scholars and historians alike. His failure to convince anyone except a gaggle of historically clueless online fanboys means that Carrier is most likely to remain what he is: an unemployed blogger and general nobody in academia.
Sort of indirectly related to SneerClub subjects, I hope that's ok. Apparently this guy Richard Carrier - of course not himself a New Testament specialist at all - tried to show that Jesus did not exist by waving the Bayes wand. Needless to say, it got rather bad reviews in professional journals. It seems a pretty astonishing example though of the belief that by applying Bayes' formula to any subject, you don't need to actually know anything about it...
> Darwinism could very well be wrong
So could relativity and quantum mechanics. In fact, we know that at least one of those is wrong (if not both) because they are mathematically incompatible with each other. That doesn't change the fact that relativity and quantum mechanics are both extremely well tested theories, the best currently available. Some day someone will probably figure out how to unify them, and in so doing they will show which one is wrong and how, in exactly the same way that relativity and quantum mechanics showed how classical mechanics is wrong. This is how science makes progress, by showing how previous theories were wrong.
But relativity and quantum mechanics are "less wrong" than classical mechanics, which is "less wrong" than Ptolemaic epicycles, which were "less wrong" than Aristotelian physics. But none of these were totally wrong. Even flat-eartherism, which everyone likes to deride as the very paragon of scientific wrongness, isn't totally wrong. It's actually a pretty good approximation to the truth at small scales.
> It’s the first definition when you Google the definition of science
OK, well, Google is wrong. :-) The correct definition of "science" is that it is the process of seeking the best explanations for what we observe. The person who figured this out is Karl Popper if you want to know the gory philosophical details. (You can also read David Deutsch for excellent popular accounts.) BTW, the reason that this is the correct definition of science is that it explains the difference between science and pseudo-science and why science is more effective. It is, quite literally (though not in the usual sense), self-explanatory :-)
> This is actually one of the challenges to historical science (which is a legitimate field and important). The farther in the past you go, the harder it is to get the clues as time starts to erase your evidence.
You really should read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595
The sequel is pretty good too:
https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494/
> there is a great article on how that applies to evolution
The distinction between "historical" and "operational" science is totally bogus. All science is "historical" because all data is about things that happened in the past. The instant you make any measurement, it immediately begins to recede into the past.
The reason we can use science to make reliable inferences about the past is the same reason we can use it to make reliable predictions about the future: our universe behaves according to laws. It didn't have to be that way. In fact, it is quite remarkable that it is this way. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that it is this way. There are laws of physics according to which our world behaves. Evolution is a direct consequence of these laws of physics. If you have a self-reproducing system with variation then evolution is inevitable. Even Creationists concede this (they call it micro-evolution). The processes that are at work today are the same ones that were at work ten thousand years ago and ten million years ago and a hundred million years ago. So if someone told you today that they saw someone turn water into wine the most likely explanation of that, absent any corroborating witnesses or other evidence, is not that someone actually turned water into wine but rather that what they saw was a magic trick, or they were hallucinating, or they were simply telling a tall tale. That is equally true for the same claim made 2000 years ago. Fantastic claims do not become more credible with the passage of time.
You may be interested in these five books: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. These examine the claimed evidence of the existence of a historical jesus without presupposing any of christianity is true (i.e. they were written by atheist scholars). They judge it way more likely that the jesus story is a melting pot of earlier myths and stories without any basis in fact.
> Do you think a book written today, about someone living today [etc]
Yeah this makes me think you think there was an actual fellow named Jesus who preached in Judea about 2000 years ago. Which considering the evidence is very unlikely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The first two sources being the best scholarly work on the historicity of "Jesus" reviewing and coming to the conclusion that any positive belief is unwarranted. The other three giving a very detailed description of how the jesus story contains elements from various pagan mythologies popular around that time in the region of wider Judea, concluding that it is likely that the jesus story is a fictional account consisting of a Hebrew substrate overlain with pagan motives.
Proving History by Richard Carrier applies Bayes's Theorem to the historicity of Jesus.
All of those are old tired arguments thoroughly debunked by Richard Carrier one by one. Who is the only historian in the history of humanity who has papers on the historicity of Jesus actually published on peer reviewed journals. So up to this day, his research on the subject is the only one that can be called scientific.
He shows all the evidence we do have shows there was never a Jesus. No, not even in the sense that the biblical stories were inspired by a real man. There was never that real man to begin with, it's straight made up myth from start to finish.
http://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595
I think historians would beg to differ. For example, there are quite a few books on the historicity of Jesus. Are not the hypotheses and evidence presented tests in the traditional sense?
Did you read? Can you tell me what the arguments are, or you are just dismissing the source. Also I can provide hundreds of sources, but it won't make any difference because you won't read them, will you?
Here is one very well researched book:
http://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595/ref=pd_sim_b_6
Once you read it, we can talk.
>Jesus believed in slavery.
Can you cite a biblical passage that supports this claim, particularly from one of the gospels?
Also, no offense, but I find it amusing that you're psychoanalyzing the Jesus character, as though he was an actual, living person in history. Historian Dr. Richard Carrier's treatment of the historicity of Jesus reveals that he very likely did not exist at all. Check out his books <em>Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus</em> and <em>On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt</em>.