The assassination of Caesar vs. the resurrection of Jesus

[Juice]

In another thread ZackMartin wrote:

Caesar's assassination is not as well demonstrated as germ theory; it is much more likely that Caesar wasn't assassinated than it is that germ theory is false. But the hill we must climb to rationally justify the belief in his assassination is a lot shorter than the hill we must climb to rationally justify the belief that Jesus rose from the dead.

In fairness to Zack the above quote may have been merely an opinion but nonetheless I thought it was an interesting proposition worth exploring. The proposition I’d like to explore is:

(P) - [T]he hill we must climb to rationally justify the belief in [Julius Caesar’s] assassination is a lot shorter than the hill we must climb to rationally justify the belief that Jesus rose from the dead.

Is (P) true? Is the hill a lot shorter? Or is it only a little shorter? Or is it about the same? Or is it the case that hill for the resurrection is shorter than the hill for the assassination?

I suppose we could even go one step further and ask: If (P) is not true and the hill we must climb to rationally justify belief in the resurrection is as short, if not shorter, than the hill we must climb to rationally justify belief in the assassination, then shouldn’t one which already holds to a belief in the assassination be rationally obligated to likewise adopt a belief in the return from the dead of Jesus?

[Juice]

Now it is sometimes argued that the resurrection of Jesus is an extraordinary event because resurrections rarely if ever happen whereas the assassination of Caesar on the other hand is an ordinary event because assassinations are common in history.

Firstly, this argument would be begging the question. It assumes it is true Caesar was assassinated and those other assassinations really did happen as well. I’m not saying they didn’t, I’m just saying to argue in this fashion begs the question. The proponent of the above argument would be obligated to establish those assassinations (along with Caesar’s) as historical using some type of historical methodology if he wishes to argue they are common throughout history whereas people returning from dead is not.

Secondly, Caesar’s assassination is an extraordinary event since it goes beyond that which is usual, regular, or customary. For the most ordinary way any person can die is by natural causes such as heart attack, stroke, illness, etc. To die in any manner other than natural causes is by definition an extraordinary death. Certainly, even for a head of state, to die by assassination is extraordinary. Even among assassinations Caesar’s can be considered extraordinary when one begins to consider the alleged facts surrounding his assassination compared to other assassinations, even those of other Roman Emperors.

If it is true that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence to rationally justify belief and Caesar’s assassination is an extraordinary event then the assassination of Caesar requires extraordinary evidence to rationally justify belief as well. The hill here seems about the same length.

It has also been suggested that the resurrection is an extraordinary event because it has low intrinsic probability. And because it is an extraordinary event it is subject to the demand of extraordinary evidence (whatever that may mean).

Elsewhere Zack has offered a way to estimate that probability:

Well, here's a simple way to estimate that probability. How many people have died in history so far? Answers vary, but one source estimates around 108 billion have ever lived, and given a current world population of around 7 billion, that means a bit over 100 billion people have died so far. Now, how many people have risen from the dead? Well, let's be generous, and say that every person the NT reports as rising from the dead, actually did. I count 6 (Jesus, Lazarus, Jairus' daughter, Dorcas/Tabitha, the son of the widow at Nain, Eutychus.) So, the frequency of people rising from the dead is, being generous, around 6 in 100 billion, or around about 1 in 17 billion. Which is pretty low odds. But, maybe you are a creationist, and you say that humans have only been around for 6,000 years, and so the 108 billion number (counting humans back to 50,000 BC) has to be revised down, let's say to 10 billion people. So now we have 6 in 10 billion, which is about 1 in 1.6 billion. But what about Matthew 27:52-53, where the dead leave their tombs at the crucifixion? Does that count as a resurrection too? If it does, how many? The text doesn't say. Let's be generous and say 5000. So now we have 5006 people resurrected in human history, out of 10 billion. Which works out, according to my calculator, at around 1 in 2 million. But maybe all these other Resurrections don't count, because they weren't of the same type as Jesus'; in which case we are back to 1 in 10 billion through to 1 in 100 billion, depending on our estimate of how many people ever lived.

So we see, even assuming the truth of the Christian position, the intrinsic probability of Resurrection can be estimated as rather low. If we don't accept these Christian assumptions, we'd have to say the intrinsic probability is even lower than that. I don't think anyone can give precise figures, but one can give justifiable estimates in the one-in-a-million through one-in-a-hundred-billion range. Both are very low probabilities, although the later is a lot lower than the former.

The thing you have to remember about intrinsic probability though, is it is the probability we should assign before we consider any evidence specific to this particular case. To make an analogy, it's like asking how likely it is Joe is guilty of murder? Let's say we live in a town of 100,000 people, and we know that 20 of those people are murderers, so a good initial estimate of Joe being a murderer is one in 5000. But then someone shows you a video tape of Joe beating some poor guy's head in with an iron bar, and suddenly the probability you assign to Joe being a murderer jumps to a lot lot higher than one in 5000. So in the same way, the intrinsic probability of Jesus rising from the dead, is just the probability of anyone rising from the dead, before we consider the specific evidence which makes us think it more likely it happened to Jesus than to some other random person. So a Christian can assign a low intrinsic probability to the resurrection, but then assign a high final probability, after considering the evidence available.

The thing about starting from a low intrinsic probability, is that the lower the intrinsic probability you start from, the more certain the evidence you will need to raise the probability up to the same value. This is where the "ECREE" claim makes logical sense. If the intrinsic probability that Joe is a murderer starts at 1 in 5000, then to get to an 80% probability he is one, you need good enough evidence to raise the probability 4000-fold; whereas if you start with Jesus having a 1-in-million probability of having risen from the dead, then to get to an 80% probability that he did, you need good enough evidence to raise the probability 8,000,000-fold. So in a sense, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead requires at least two thousand times stronger evidence than the claim that Joe committed murder, to reach the same threshold of conviction. And maybe you do; I'm not talking here about what evidence you do or don't have, just how much evidence you need.

Arguments from probability are always precarious. Depending upon how one selects the data arguments can appear more heavily weighted in one direction than the other. But the question is, do assassinations also have low intrinsic probability therefore making them extraordinary and subject to the same demand for extraordinary evidence as well? Let’s see.

Using Zack’s estimated number of deaths there have been about 100 billion people that have died since the beginning of history. How common are assassinations then? It’s difficult to pin down precisely but this list by my count gives approximately 975 recorded assassinations dating back to c. 1,000BC. This gives the odds of any person dying by assassination to be about 1 in 100,000,000 by my calculation. But let’s be generous and round up the number of assassinations (because we all know reliable wiki is ) by one order of magnitude to 10,000. That yields us the very approximate odds of about 1 in 10,000,000 that any person will die by assassination. The intrinsic probability of Caesar dying by assassination then is quite low. In fact, if we expand the selection criteria for resurrections beyond only those found in the OT/NT, which are the only ones used by Zack as a baseline for his calculation, the odds of returning from the dead may even be higher than dying by assassination. Who knows? Whatever the case, it is enough here to show the assassination meets the criteria of low intrinsic probability and is therefore an extraordinary event. As such it is subject to the demand of extraordinary evidence if the resurrection is.

[Jaecp]

How is "being assassinated" being differentiated from regular murder here?

[Juice]

How is "being assassinated" being differentiated from regular murder here?

Typically we understand an assassination to be the premeditated murder of a prominent political figure, not just the regular murder of some "Joe" from the general populace. Certainly this is the context of Caesar’s “assassination.”

edit: Let's not forget that even a "regular murder" is by definition an extraordinary event.

[Psychic Missile]

I think you also have to consider that the resurrection involves the supernatural and assassination involves that natural. If CNN said that the President of Indonesia was assassinated, most people would think it true. If CNN said that fairies have been proven to exist, people would think it's April Fool's Day, or they've been hacked. This is because the supernatural is not proven, and any supernatural phenomenon would need extraordinary evidence to be believed in. Another issue is believers being caught in assuming the supernatural exists and is established. A believer in Christian faith healing wouldn't bat an eye to another report of such, but the average person would consider it a delusion. If Juice presupposes Christianity (as he no doubt does), then it doesn't make sense for anyone to object to supernatural phenomena.

[Roy]

Secondly, Caesar’s assassination is an extraordinary event since it goes beyond that which is usual, regular, or customary. For the most ordinary way any person can die is by natural causes such as heart attack, stroke, illness, etc. To die in any manner other than natural causes is by definition an extraordinary death.

Approximately thirty-five thousand people die unnatural deaths in the UK every year - roughtly one twelfth of all deaths are caused by accidents or by drugs/alcohol.

Exactly zero get resurrected.

If you think something that ultimately happens to some 8% of the population is extraordinary, and hence comparable to something that happens to nobody at all, then quite frankly you're an idiot.

But it gets worse:

Certainly, even for a head of state, to die by assassination is extraordinary.

Really? Let's look at Caesar's successors up to the division of Rome:

Natural causes: 12 [Augustus, Tiberius (probably), Vespasian, Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Severus, Claudius II, Numerian]
Suicide: 3 [Nero, Otho, Gordian, Diocletian]
Assassinated: 23 [Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Galba, Vitellius, Domitian, Commodus, Pertinax, Caracalla, Elagabalus, Alexander, Maximinus, Pupienus, Balbinus, Philip Iunior, Trebonius Gallus, Volusianus, Aemilianus, Gallienus, Aurelian, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carinus]
Executed: 4 [Vitellius, Didius Julianus, Macrinus, Valerian (by Persia)]
Died in battle: 5 [Gordian II, Gordian III (maybe), Philip, Decius, Daia]
Anyone's guess: 1 [Carus]

So for Roman heads of state to be assassinated was not only not extraordinary, it was more common than any other cause of death. You're not just an idiot, you're an ignorant idiot. Furthermore, this information is not particularly obscure or hard to research, making you an indolent ignorant idiot.

Using Zack’s estimated number of deaths there have been about 100 billion people that have died since the beginning of history. How common are assassinations then? It’s difficult to pin down precisely but this list by my count gives approximately 975 recorded assassinations dating back to c. 1,000BC. This gives the odds of any person dying by assassination to be about 1 in 100,000,000 by my calculation.

Except that the article you cite explicitly states that 1) "This is an incomplete list, ...", and 2) "This is a list of notable assassinations", both of which make your calculation an underestimate. And that, plus the fact that your source includes details of the unextraordinary assassinations of those Roman Emperors, makes you an incompetent indolent ignorant idiot.

Which is nothing new in an apologist.

Roy

[shunyadragon]

The argument based on basic academic historical methods is whether miraculous claims of events carry the same weight as mundane records of events, births, deaths, assassinations, or death in Battle, or natural causes. The answer is no universally and consistently by secular academic historians. This is true whether the miracles claimed are moving mountains, stopping time, virgin birth by emperors or messiahs, or resurrections, or claims of an assention to heaven by Mohammud. Historically they are recorded as miraculous claims of 'religious beliefs' or in some cases 'popular anecdotal beliefs'

[Whag]

Typically we understand an assassination to be the premeditated murder of a prominent political figure, not just the regular murder of some "Joe" from the general populace. Certainly this is the context of Caesar’s “assassination.”

edit: Let's not forget that even a "regular murder" is by definition an extraordinary event.

I think you don't know what "extraordinary" means. It doesn't mean "relatively uncommon."

[Juice]

I think you also have to consider that the resurrection involves the supernatural and assassination involves that natural.

Who said anything about involving the supernatural at this point? I sure didn’t.

But I think what you are arguing is if we claimed ahead the causal agent that raised Jesus from the dead was God then I would have to provide evidence for God. This would make the hill longer for the resurrection as the assassination would not have to climb that extra distance. However, I’m not claiming any causal agent at this point, only that Jesus return to life after being dead. So this extra length to climb is avoided by making no claim ahead of time regarding the causal agent. Thus the assassination and resurrection are on equal footing at this point.

If CNN said that the President of Indonesia was assassinated, most people would think it true.

Interesting. By definition that would be an extraordinary event and yet you presumably would accept it on the sole basis of the ordinary evidence that CNN claimed it happened. You wouldn’t think they were joking even though it is incredibly extraordinary. No demand for extraordinary evidence at all you just swallow it up hook-line-and-sinker. Or perhaps you consider CNN to be extraordinary evidence? Interesting indeed.

If CNN said that fairies have been proven to exist, people would think it's April Fool's Day, or they've been hacked.

Oh, I see, if you a priori reject a claim it doesn’t matter if it has the extraordinary evidence of CNN reporting it. Even if CNN reports it has been “proven.” You’ll accept one extraordinary claim simply because someone tells you it happened but you reject another extraordinary claim even though it was the same source that told you it had been “proven.” You don’t see just a teensy-weensy little problem there?

What if CNN made the disclaimer that this was no joke, that they were staking their reputation as credible news reporting agency on this claim that fairies had been “proven to exist”? What then, would you still a priori reject it? What if they claimed someone had been pronounced dead and then spontaneously return to life would you accept it? What if they claimed that science had finally created life from non-life would you buy it or would you demand extraordinary evidence? Do you just accept the extraordinary claims you like and reject the ones you don’t? Because it sounds like that is your methodology.

This is because the supernatural is not proven, and any supernatural phenomenon would need extraordinary evidence to be believed in.

But you just implied you wouldn’t believe in fairies even if they had been reported to be “proven to exist” by a source you accept as credible enough to accept at face value other extraordinary claims anyway. So what difference would it make if we “proved” the supernatural? None because it would seem you a priori dismiss claims you don’t like.

[Juice]

I just love it when atheists flip out and start shootin’ their mouth off. Don’t worry though folks, Roy has had a bad case of hemorrhoids for a while now and he gets a bit crotchety when they flare up.

Approximately thirty-five thousand people die unnatural deaths in the UK every year - roughly one twelfth of all deaths are caused by accidents or by drugs/alcohol.

And by definition they are all extraordinary if they are not by natural causes.

Exactly zero get resurrected.

Patently false, Roy.
June of 2000
February 2012

How many Prime Ministers have been assassinated in the UK in the last 100 years, Roy? That’s right Roy, zero. In fact, there has only ever been one assassinated Prime Minister, Roy, and that was Spencer Perceval 200 years ago.

Really? Let's look at Caesar's successors up to the division of Rome:

Natural causes: 12 [Augustus, Tiberius (probably), Vespasian, Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Severus, Claudius II, Numerian]
Suicide: 3 [Nero, Otho, Gordian, Diocletian]
Assassinated: 23 [Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Galba, Vitellius, Domitian, Commodus, Pertinax, Caracalla, Elagabalus, Alexander, Maximinus, Pupienus, Balbinus, Philip Iunior, Trebonius Gallus, Volusianus, Aemilianus, Gallienus, Aurelian, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carinus]
Executed: 4 [Vitellius, Didius Julianus, Macrinus, Valerian (by Persia)]
Died in battle: 5 [Gordian II, Gordian III (maybe), Philip, Decius, Daia]
Anyone's guess: 1 [Carus]

So for Roman heads of state to be assassinated was not only not extraordinary, it was more common than any other cause of death. You're not just an idiot, you're an ignorant idiot. Furthermore, this information is not particularly obscure or hard to research, making you an indolent ignorant idiot.

Of course Roy royally begs the question by assuming these Emperors really were assassinated. But we’ll leave that aside for the moment. What Roy doesn’t tell us is if we look at all Roman Emperors and how they died it looks a little different. Taken from this list of Roman Emperors, here is a rough break down of causes of death:

Natural causes: 36
Assassination: 17
Murdered:11
Unclear: 9
In battle: 9
Executed: 8
Suicide: 5

Tsk-tsk, Roy, you cherry picked your data. The most common way for a Roman Emperor to die was by natural causes and bear in mind this is from a sample group that has a propensity for assassination claims. Even if we include “murdered” in the assassination group natural causes are still the more common form of death. And keep in mind some of those murders took place after they were no longer Emperor. It’s not unless we also add the “unclear” category (which could include death by natural causes) into the “assassination” group along with “murdered” would “assassinations” finally outstrip natural causes and that is only by one! Who’s the idiot now Roy?

But since we're just just cherry picking data, Roy. How many messiah claimants that also claimed to be the Son of God/God between oh, I don’t know, let’s just pick between 30AD and 50AD were there, Roy? That’s right, Roy, one. And it’s claimed he rose from the dead. So in that sample group we have a 100% probability of rising from dead. See how this works when we just cherry pick data to make our argument work, Roy?

Except that the article you cite explicitly states that 1) "This is an incomplete list, ...", and 2) "This is a list of notable assassinations", both of which make your calculation an underestimate. And that, plus the fact that your source includes details of the unextraordinary assassinations of those Roman Emperors, makes you an incompetent indolent ignorant idiot.

If we trimmed it down to just assassinated heads of state the list would be significantly shorter. But Roy didn’t notice where I increased the general list of assassinated people from around 1,000 by one order of magnitude to 10,000 to make up for any missing claims. Roy must have been too busy applying his hemorrhoid cream to notice that.

Which is nothing new in an apologist.

You’re priceless Roy.

[Whag]

Roy must have been too busy applying his hemorrhoid cream to notice that.

Classy.

[ZackMartin]

Let me put it this way: "extraordinary" is a vague term. When we say something is "extraordinary", we are saying it is a very low intrinsic probability; but still, there is vagueness in how low the probability has to be to count as "extraordinary", and different people will give different answers here. And even among extraordinary things, some of them can be more extraordinary than others. To get lost in the semantics of exactly what counts as "extraordinary" is to miss the real point - the lower the intrinsic probability of an event, the stronger the evidence required to rationally accept that it occurred.

I think Juice is right that probabilities, especially in matters like these, are lacking in rigour, and different people will estimate them differently. But I don't think that makes them useless. I think it is useful for people to be asked to offer a rough guess of what they think the probabilities involved are, and some justification of why they picked that probability or range of probabilities. And then we compare the values different people pick, and the reasons they give for each, and see who we think has the stronger case. That doesn't mean that we can ever know precisely what these probabilities are, but we can speak in broad terms, that some guesses seem more justifiable than others, and some probabilities are clearly greater or lesser than others (even if we can't say by exactly how much).

Also, I think we need to remember, that an assassination is just a special type of murder. Rather than focus on the claim "Julius Caesar was assassinated", let's focus on the claim "Julius Caesar was murdered". Generally speaking, only leaders can be assassinated (although it might depend a bit on exactly how you define "assassination") - the proper comparison class for the probability of assassination, is not all people who have ever lived, but rather only those who could have been assassinated - those who held some form of leadership (politicians, royalty, generals, religious leaders, etc.). So identifying who is in this group is getting a bit tricky. But using an estimate of all the people who have ever lived as the denominator, as Juice does, is not correct. While everyone who ever lived could have been murdered, only a minority of people who ever lived could have been assassinated - i.e. murdered in a situation which could reasonably count as an assassination. Not everyone can lead, most must follow.

But anyone can be murdered. So, what's the probability of someone being murdered. Today, annual intentional homicide rates per 100,000 range from about 86 in Honduras down to 0.56 in Austria. It seems reasonable, that for most of history, the rates have probably been nearer to the Honduras end than the Austria one. Let's say 50 per 100,000 per an annum is a rough estimate for all of human history. What proportion of people who ever died were murdered? Say the average lifespan across human history was 40 years. So if the odds of being murdered are 50 in 100,000 a year (so in any 1 year, you have a 0.05% chance of being murdered), in 40 years your lifetime odds of being murdered are around 2%. Which doesn't sound unreasonable to me, as an estimate for all of human history. So this suggests that 2% of people in history have been murdered. Even if we accept all Christian claims, a lot less than 2% of people in history have been resurrected. So the intrinsic probability of someone being murdered is a lot higher than the intrinsic probability of someone being resurrected, for all reasonable estimates of either of those.

You can argue with my figures and my calculation - 2% is a guesstimate, and maybe you will estimate higher or lower, and your guess could well be better than mine. (And obviously, in prosperous and relatively peaceful modern societies, the lifetime odds of being murdered are a lot lower than this, but our societies are the historical exception rather than the historical rule.) But that's not really the point - who seriously claims that resurrections are more common in history than murders? So, the intrinsic probability of murder, whatever it is exactly, is a lot higher than the intrinsic probability of resurrection, whatever it is exactly.

So the intrinsic probability of Julius Caesar being murdered is higher than the intrinsic probability of Jesus rising from the dead, and so stronger evidence is needed to support the conclusion that Julius Caesar was murdered than there is to support the view that Jesus was resurrected.

Now it is sometimes argued that the resurrection of Jesus is an extraordinary event because resurrections rarely if ever happen whereas the assassination of Caesar on the other hand is an ordinary event because assassinations are common in history.

Firstly, this argument would be begging the question. It assumes it is true Caesar was assassinated and those other assassinations really did happen as well. I’m not saying they didn’t, I’m just saying to argue in this fashion begs the question. The proponent of the above argument would be obligated to establish those assassinations (along with Caesar’s) as historical using some type of historical methodology if he wishes to argue they are common throughout history whereas people returning from dead is not.

I think just about everyone agrees that many assassinations have happened in history. You might dispute about how many exactly, or about the historicity of any individual one, but I don't think there is any serious doubt that many have happened. So I don't think you need to assume Caesar's assassination in particular actually happened to estimate the intrinsic probability of assassinations. It is enough to assume that most of the claimed assassinations in the historical record actually happened - which doesn't require belief that any particular one actually did.

Even Christians don't claim that resurrections are common occurrences. If they were, it would undercut the Christian claim that Jesus resurrection was unique and special. Comparing all those who have ever died, the percentage of those who were assassinated is a lot higher than the percentage of those who were resurrected, even if we accept all Christian claims as true. So we are justified in concluding, even accepting Christian claims, that the intrinsic probability of assassination is a lot higher than the intrinsic probability of resurrection.

I think all probabilistic arguments have an inescapable element of circularity in them - in order to estimate probabilities, you have to look at past frequencies, but what's the probability that your knowledge of those past frequencies is accurate? You'd need past frequency data to estimate that too. So your reasoning is either circular, or infinitely regressive, or you are pulling numbers out of a hat. (Munchausen's trilemma.) But if we view this as a fatal, rather than unavoidable, flaw, then we can't use probabilistic reasoning at all, and then Christian apologetic arguments that we should believe in the Resurrection as the most likely explanation aren't valid either.

[ZackMartin]

And by definition they are all extraordinary if they are not by natural causes.

As I clarified, the thing that matters here is not the definition of "extraordinary", but that rarer events have lower intrinsic probability than more common events, and the lower the intrinsic probability of an event, the stronger the evidence required to rationally convince us it happened. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a nice and succinct way of stating this, but I think it is a mistake to read the statement too literally.

Patently false, Roy.
June of 2000
February 2012

But how many of those count as resurrections in the sense of the term demanded by Christianity? Many of these "resurrections" seem to be simply cases of people who were believed to be dead but actually weren't, not clear cases of someone who was undoubtedly dead coming back to life. The boundary between life and death isn't always clear, so it is no wonder that doctors occasionally get it wrong, and think that someone is dead when they weren't. We commonly call the cessation of heartbeat "death" - and officially it is even called "clinical death" - but it's not really death, its just getting awfully close to it. People resuscitated using CPR aren't cases of resurrection. People whose hearts start beating again spontaneously after CPR is abandoned aren't clearly cases of resurrection either - it is quite possible some poorly understood natural process is responsible. As the journal article you linked to points out, we do have scientific theories to explain many of these cases; that some cases, like that of the young man in question, cannot presently be explained, could well just be due to some natural process we don't understand yet. The Christian claim is that Jesus actually fully completely died and then came back to life, not that they mistakenly thought he was dead and he was really barely living - that's the sceptical swoon theory, not the Christian account of resurrection.

How many Prime Ministers have been assassinated in the UK in the last 100 years, Roy? That’s right Roy, zero. In fact, there has only ever been one assassinated Prime Minister, Roy, and that was Spencer Perceval 200 years ago.

If the claim that "X was assassinated", then we should really start with the global probability of assassination throughout all human history. Arguably, the probability of assassination for British PMs is below the global historical average for all political leaders (you could say that British political culture has been unusually peaceful by global standards, especially in the last few centuries); so, rather than viewing this as a different intrinsic probability, we could view "X is a British PM" as evidence which causes us to update the probability downwards. Of course, if God forbid it actually happened, and a PM was assassinated, then the evidence we'd have that it occurred would likely be so strong that whether we used the global historical probability or the British PM probability wouldn't have mattered.

Tsk-tsk, Roy, you cherry picked your data. The most common way for a Roman Emperor to die was by natural causes and bear in mind this is from a sample group that has a propensity for assassination claims. Even if we include “murdered” in the assassination group natural causes are still the more common form of death.

I think it's beside the point. Assassination or murder of Emperors (not even sure how we clearly distinguish those two categories, or how much it matters if we do so) was not an uncommon way for an Emperor to die. Whether its the most common or not isn't that important.

And keep in mind some of those murders took place after they were no longer Emperor.

Which ones was that? In most cases, Roman Emperors reigned for life. Resignation was rare - up until the fall of the Western Empire, I can only count three who did - Diocletian, Vetriano and Romulus Augustulus; forcible removal from office generally involved being killed, if not straight away, then shortly thereafter. If they remove you from office then kill you the next week, I think that still counts as an Emperor being murdered, even if you say he wasn't technically Emperor at the time of time of being killed.

But since we're just just cherry picking data, Roy. How many messiah claimants that also claimed to be the Son of God/God between oh, I don’t know, let’s just pick between 30AD and 50AD were there, Roy? That’s right, Roy, one. And it’s claimed he rose from the dead. So in that sample group we have a 100% probability of rising from dead. See how this works when we just cherry pick data to make our argument work, Roy?

I think to estimate the intrinsic probabilities, it is important that we choose a reasonably non-specific comparison class. If we get too selective, then our sample gets too small, and we can't estimate the intrinsic probabilities any more. A sample size of one tells us nothing about the intrinsic probability of that event - remembering that intrinsic probability is not the probability of a particular event occurring, it is the probability of any event like that occurring, before we know anything specific about the event, and if we get too specific about what counts as like that, then the intrinsic probability becomes impossible to estimate.

Roy must have been too busy applying his hemorrhoid cream to notice that.

Juice, we disagree about many things, sure, but I honestly thought you were classier than that. You say you are a Christian - what do you think Jesus thinks of what you just said?

[lao tzu]

I just love it when atheists flip out and start shootin’ their mouth off. Don’t worry though folks, Roy has had a bad case of hemorrhoids for a while now and he gets a bit crotchety when they flare up.

It's just possible that after a few years mucking about around here, you'll have a reputation that suggests people should take you seriously. But before that can happen, folks are going to have to forget this post.

I wouldn't bet on it.

[fm93]

Classy.

Meanwhile, Roy called him "an incompetent, indolent, ignorant idiot," and you haven't called out Roy. Why is that?