ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the objections to Jesus’ resurrection based on its miraculous nature. It is shown that classic objections by Hume and contemporary objections by Shapiro, Ehrman, and others are based on multiple fallacies. While infrequencies can help us exclude natural impersonal causes and naturalistic alternatives to Jesus’ resurrection given that natural causes are supposed to act in predictable law-like ways, a miraculous event is supposed to be caused by a supernatural personal agent who might freely choose to act in a certain unique way only on special occasions in religiously significant contexts, for example, to confirm what someone proclaimed has divine origin. Concerning the claim ‘extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence,’ one should not require the evidence to be extraordinary in the sense of forming an insuperable epistemic barrier, which would prevent us from recognizing extraordinary events, but rather in the sense of being sufficient for demonstrating the unreasonableness of alternative hypotheses. I discuss claims of resurrection in other cultures, and argue that they have plausible naturalistic explanations and are thus disanalogous to Jesus’ resurrection. Finally, contra Shapiro, it is shown that there are independent reasons for thinking that the agent who raised Jesus from the dead is God rather than aliens, demons, etc.
