William Craig's Case for the Resurrection of Jesus - Part 3: The Rest of the Core Argument

 In Part 2 of this series, I showed that the core argument of Craig's case for the resurrection of Jesus was a deductive argument that consists of at least the following claims:

1. IF these three facts can be historically established with a reasonable degree of confidence AND alternative naturalistic explanations for these three facts can be shown to be implausible, THEN IF IT IS NOT THE CASE THAT the resurrection hypothesis (i.e. God raised Jesus from the dead) has been shown to be more implausible than the alternative naturalistic explanations for these three facts, THEN the preferred explanation for these three facts ought to be the resurrection hypothesis (i.e., God raised Jesus from the dead).

2. These three facts can be historically established with a reasonable degree of confidence AND alternative naturalistic explanations for these three facts can be shown to be implausible.

3. IF IT IS NOT THE CASE THAT the resurrection hypothesis (i.e. God raised Jesus from the dead) has been shown to be more implausible than the alternative naturalistic explanations for these three facts, THEN the preferred explanation for these three facts ought to be the resurrection hypothesis (i.e., God raised Jesus from the dead).

4. IT IS NOT THE CASE THAT the resurrection hypothesis (i.e. God raised Jesus from the dead) has been shown to be more implausible than the alternative naturalistic explanations for these three facts.

5. The preferred explanation for these three facts ought to be the resurrection hypothesis (i.e., God raised Jesus from the dead).

6. These three facts can be historically established with a reasonable degree of confidence.

 7. Alternative naturalistic explanations for these three facts can be shown to be implausible.

The following argument diagram shows the logical relationships between these claims in Craig's core argument: 

However, this is not the complete content of the core argument, because each of the above seven claims includes the phrase "these three facts" and this phrase has no meaning outside the context of the paragraph from which the seven claims were asserted by Craig.

Here is the previous part of the paragraph that specifies what the phrase "these three facts" means: