2024年7月5日星期五

PolyU Farewell Seminar - Testing the Son of God Hypothesis

The PolyU Department of Computing arranged a Farewell Seminar by Dr. Robert Luk on 5th July 2024 and the topic named “Testing the Son of God Hypothesis”. 


Before the seminar, I took a photo with Dr. Robert Luk for memory.


In the beginning, Dr. Robert Luk quoted Matthew 7:7 “… Seek and you will Find…” to introduce today’s topic. Then he asked a series of questions like “What is the biggest research question?”, “Why the Son of God hypothesis?”, “Why do we prove an existential statement?”, “Is there an afterlife?”, etc.


Then he used Pascal Wage to explain the consequences of believing or disbelieving whether it is true or false. Thus, the god hypothesis is the biggest question he concluded.


Dr. Luk also mentioned different definitions about the Son of God. And then he said we cannot be sure with 100% certainty the Jesus Christ is or is not the Son of God that we need to test the hypothesis. 


The null hypothesis (H0) stated “Jesus Christ is NOT the Son of God” and the alternative hypothesis (H1) stated “Jesus Christ is the Son of God”. It needs to calculate the probability based on H1 given the evidence (En).


According to Mackie (1982), religion is predicated on miracles. If there is a miracle, M, related to Jesus Christ is the Son of God, then M implicates H1 (M=>H1).We cannot be certain that a miracle is true or not, so we use probability (i.e. p(Mi)) and then combining the evidence by Bayes’ rule.

Finally, Dr. Luk separated different miracle type or evidence types for estimating their probability. Miracle types or Evidence types (En) considered are E1-Shroud of Turin, E2-Eucharistic miracles, E3-Marian apparitions, …, E9-Bible (as Testimonies). 


And then Dr. Luk explained one by one. For the E1-Shroud of Turin, a piece of linen cloth that bears an image of crucified man that is not formed by painting, the image can be shown to have 3D quality using the VP-8 analyzer. Using carbon dating, it was suggested in medieval time (1200-1300) that is heterogeneous. Blood type is AB. He assigned a subjective probability p(M1|E1) = 0.65.


Another miracle is E3-Marian apparition. I am interested that accidentally spilt nitrate acid by a scientist on the image of the cloak and had not damaged the image.


After reviewed nine miracles, Dr. Robert Luk summarized all his subjective probabilities in the table.


He had calibrating p(H0) and calculated the combined probability. Three assumptions on p(H0) that are rejected H0. 


Lastly, Dr. Robert Luk showed the repeatability of miracles happenings since 1100s.


Q&A session. Dr. Luk is preparing the e-book entitled “From Science to Christianity: Hypothesis Testing, Theory, Model, Experiment and Practice”. Our questions could contribute for his e-book.

Reference

COMP, PolyU - https://www.polyu.edu.hk/comp/

20101107: Certainty Among the Uncertainty – Dr. Ng’s Evangelistic Night - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2010/11/certainty-among-uncertainty-dr-ngs.html

1 則留言:

  1. Dear Lotto,

    Many thanks for the photos and attending the talk.

    I am glad that something is new to you in the talk.

    Please note that we just find evidence to support the hypothesis. We did not have a "proof". If it is a proof, it needs to be like that in mathematics. So, this would involve proofing the axioms or assumptions are accepted. We do not have proof of this kind. That is why we do hypothesis testing. I hope this clarifies the issue.

    Best wishes to you!

    Robert Luk

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