Professor Swinburne, in Melbourne to give several seminars and a public lecture at the Australian Catholic University last night, said the mathematics showed a probability of 97 per cent [that Jesus rose from the dead].
And he asks, quite naturally, I think, "So what's going on?"
It appears to be a fairly straightforward case of Bayesianism applied to a claim involving multiple lines of evidence. There are really only a few ways to avoid it: (1) deny Bayesianism; (2) argue that the Resurrection has an insurmountably low prior probability; (3) deny that the multiple lines of evidence are really multiple, i.e., that they are sufficiently independent to be treated as independent lines of evidence; (4) deny the relevance of the lines of evidence. Since I think Bayesianism is clearly false (in general because all views that take the metaphor 'degree of belief' literally are false, and specifically because I don't accept an application of Bayes's theorem unless the means of determining the probabilities are clearly defined), the point is moot for me; but Bayesians make arguments like this all the time. So that's what's going on: the straightforward application of ordinary Bayesianism. Make of it what you will.