Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (ECREE), Part 4: NT Reliability, Extraordinary Claims, and the Base Rate Fallacy

I want to re-visit the issue of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (ECREE), by considering a type or class of argument for miracles based upon the historical reliability of the New Testament (NT), hereafter "the argument." According to this argument, the general historical reliability of the NT provides sufficient evidence to make the historicity of NT miracles more probable than not. I shall argue, however, that this argument commits the base rate fallacy and therefore is inductively incorrect. While the base rate fallacy is not a new idea, its possible application to the argument is, so far as I can tell, a neglected topic in discussions about NT miracles.



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