Three articles I read recently contain such valuable lessons for critical thinking that for my end-of-month analysis I want to summarize them for you and extract for you the general lessons you can learn from them, so you can apply them to every question in your life...
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...
The great cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett passed away this year. And shortly after, Cameron Bertuzzi interviewed a Christian apologist, Bob Stewart, on his channel Capturing Christianity, regarding “Daniel Dennett’s Philosophical...
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...
There are thousands of crappy videos in aid of dubious projects. So I generally have to be paid to care about any of them. And lo, my latest hire: to examine what’s going on with Stardusk’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes on...
The title of this article is a double entendre. I’m responding to a pretty good video by Emerson Green (“atheist, non-physicalist, and host” of the podcasts Counter Apologetics and Walden Pod) titled 5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology. In...
Last time I analyzed YouTube’s “best” argument for God: Ben Shapiro’s, which tops the YouTube “influence” list with six million views. I also briefed a really terrible argument for God second on that list by Jordan Peterson, at...
Yesterday I asked YouTube what the “best argument for God” was; and I limited the results to those published within the last twelve months, and ranked them by view-counts (looking for the most viewed and thus most influential and thus most crucial to...
There is a much overlooked late-20th century polemical satire of Christian apologetics by the Russian writer Kirill Eskov called the Gospel of Afranius. Award-winning and popular in the slavic world, from Russia, Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine (even once having...
Youtuber Captain DadPool recently published a short video (Responding to Godless Engineer’s Recent Attacks) that so aptly captures the backwards methodology of defenders of the historicity of Jesus it will be productive to analyze. Especially as it supplements...
The fundamental goal of legitimate critical thinking (as opposed to the fraudulent kind) is to ascertain what is true, about yourself and the world. So the tools that constitute critical thinking must be tools for finding the truth. And that means tools for...
There was a recent internet storm over Gnostic Informant’s (Neal Sendlak’s) attack video “Refutation of Richard Carrier & the Church of Mythicism,” which is so disjointed and inept (and until its subsequent editing, slanderous and...
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...
I noted this month in my series on Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable that rather than teaching its faithful how to think reliably, “Christianity teaches against any sound epistemology, even critical thinking.” In fact, “Christianity’s sacred...
This is the final entry in my series on Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian. You can read my general summary of this book; where also at the bottom is a TOC linking to all the follow-ups, in...
Justin Brierley is an excellent host in Christian broadcasting. I’ve been on his show several times, including in person, when ironically I was an American visiting Brierley’s studio in London discussing the historicity of Jesus on a call with Mark...
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.