Innumeracy is more of a threat than scientific illiteracy. And I want to illustrate this today. A Problem Atheists Should Care About Ordinary literacy is not so much a problem online, since participation on the internet requires basic literacy—although of...
I’ve commented a lot lately in my articles on the historicity of Jesus that critics themselves are now demonstrating why historicity is a bankrupt paradigm: they never have a sound or valid argument for it. Instead, they kneejerk oppose it emotionally, doing no...
Just this week a student in one of my online classes answered a test question with a real-world example of trying to manipulate people using numbers and graphs, which they had to debunk. The example they chose (from the course text, Levitin’s Field Guide to...
This continues my discussion from Part 1, reviewing Thinking-Ape’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes. You’ll need to read that to understand what’s going on here. Because there I surveyed important background facts about...
Lately I’ve seen a flurry of repeated mistakes in reasoning about probability. I realized a primer is needed to correct some people so they can stop making those mistakes (assuming you care about not making mistakes; an alarming number of people don’t, but...
The headline of this article should be a no-brainer. But there are still too many people who think otherwise, causing little action to be taken, and who are thereby dragging the rest of us into hell—a problem recently made fun of in the movie Don’t Look...
This book is the definitive starting point for anyone intent on questioning or defending the resurrection of Jesus. Introductory and aimed at a broad audience, but thoroughly researched, all the key works are here cited and arguments addressed, and with sound...
I noticed some fake news spreading on Facebook last week. Like usual. But then I noticed what a great example it provided of how to defend yourself against just this kind of politicized fake news, with just a few basic principles of critical thinking. This time the...
Here I’ve collected a variety of general tips you may find useful for debating, whether you are doing a live formal debate, a formal written debate, or anything more informal online. It’s not a comprehensive tutorial. Just some of the first things you...
It’s often claimed Medieval Christians invented the university. But this is as false as the similar claim that they invented the hospital. In both cases the underlying claim is used to sell a “Christianity saved the world” narrative in the halls of...
A certain Colin Green, sports enthusiast and author of How To Run A Football Club, maintains an amateur Christian apologetics blog called The Truth of Things. Where he wrote a tediously long attempt at rebutting my peer reviewed scholarship in the Journal of Early...
I contributed a chapter to a great new book that was just released, a book I dare say is required reading for anyone who wants to be up-to-date on the “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” debate. It pits atheist professor Carl Stecher against Christian...
Joseph Atwill is a crank. His acolytes at Postflaviana are cranks. They are all conspiracy theory nutcases who prefer wildly, implausibly complex interpretations of history that insist Shakespeare was a black Jewish woman, the writers of Jane the Virgin may have...
What do you get when you combine atheism, mathematics, evolutionary psychology, and the science of cognitive biases? Critical thinking skills! I discuss many aspects of this in my online course on critical thinking. (It’s easy, useful, and affordable, so...
So far only two contemporary books have been written in defense of the historicity of Jesus (nothing properly comparable has been published in almost a hundred years). They both suck. Which is annoying, because it should not be hard to write a good book in defense of...
More innumeracy for today: this religious apologist is claiming atheism causes suicide, and he cites a study that supposedly proves this, but both s/he and the study’s authors suck at numeracy and basic logic. I warned about this before (Innumeracy: A Fault to...
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.