In my debate with Craig Evans, one of the strange arguments he attempted was the Argument from Verisimilitude, whereby he says we should believe any story that’s dressed up in a realistic background. In my original Analysis of the Carrier-Evans Debate, I...
Shaun is a YouTube critic who composes a lot of excellent videos critiquing various other YouTube content, from social commentators to entertainment media. He does a good job of summarizing, fact-checking, logic-vetting, and illustrating his finds in the video medium....
Para una edición en español del siguiente artículo, consulte El regreso de Piñero. -:- Last month I found serious faults in Antonio Piñero’s mistreatment of my book On the Historicity of Jesus and its thesis, including his lack of basic knowledge in subjects...
Para una edición en español del siguiente artículo, consulte Antonio Piñero: El historicista vehemente at Mitos o Historia. -:- Antonio Piñero is sort of the Bart Ehrman of the Spanish-speaking world. He has made a public spectacle of attacking Jesus mythicism and...
For the gist of this two-part series see the intro of Part I. That part covered the first of two videos spanning the 2018 debate between YouTubers Godless Engineer and Michael Jones. Here I dive into the second of those (you can watch them online: Part 1 and Part 2)....
In March of 2018 the NonSequitur show hosted a debate between two YouTubers: Godless Engineer, who runs the popular eponymous atheist channel, and Michael Jones, who runs the popular Christian apologetics channel Inspiring Philosophy. The topic was whether evidence...
Want to know how historians vet claims, and how we tell the difference between true and false, probable and improbable? Have some challenges in this regard to pose to me? This is the course for you! Details on how to register and take the course are below. (I also...
You might have heard this one before, but it bears a revisit. Once long ago William Lane Craig started using the argument that a mainstream historian in the early 1960s named A.N. Sherwin-White had demonstrated (in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, pp....
I recently found an article from 2011 making a point I’ve long made myself, that the entire notion of a “presumption of naturalism” being axiomatic to history and the sciences is both an error made by some historians and scientists and an apologetic...
An interesting video discussion of On the Historicity of Jesus took place earlier this year, in which “Kamil Gregor and Joel Pearson discuss the Historicity of Jesus.” It’s well worth a reply. Because Gregor understands the math. So what he gets...
Holy balls. Yep. A dude actually said this. Just recently, a Godfearing San Diegan by the name of Francesco Scinico (credentials unknown but probably non-existent) Tweeted: “There’s no contemporary historical evidence for Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus...
A patron has hired me to write a response to an article by an undergraduate “studying the classics at Indiana University Bloomington” called “Was Jesus a Historical Figure?” on her expansive website Tales of Times Forgotten. Her name is Spencer...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is a logically necessary truth. Notorious Christian apologist William Lane Craig tries to deny this. But only by playing word games. Let’s see how this statement actually pans out, and how Craig is being...
This March is your chance to improve your skills at critically evaluating claims about history. Please join us and learn about historical methods and the logic of historical reasoning! Especially if you want to study the question of whether Jesus existed more acutely....
A few years ago Strange Notions published a strange editorial by statistics professor William Briggs, called Bayes Theorem Proves Jesus Existed (And That He Didn’t). I say strange, because it’s weirdly dishonest, incompetent, and irrational coming from someone...
Just this month Bible scholar James McGrath, whose incompetence and dishonesty I have documented several times now (example, example, example, example), posted a really foolish attempt to critique Bayesian history on his blog. Titled Jesus Mythicism: Two Truths and a...
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.