This month I have been showcasing how apologetics is fundamentally bankrupt methodologically. It depends on fallacious reasoning, held up as sound and professional, yet which adheres to the methods of no actual legitimate academic field—except those very fields...
I’ve been asked to assess a bizarre argument for God published recently in Metaphysica (“Proving God without Dualism: Improving the Swinburne-Moreland Argument from Consciousness,” by Ward Blondé and Ludger Jansen, March 2021). I have already rather...
Even the historicity of Daniel the man is dubious. Unlike other prophets, he has no patronymic, profession, or place of origin, and he first appears in historical records when “Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the...
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 have written many times before on the strange history of my scholarly involvement in the so-called “Table Talk” of Adolf Hitler. The most prominent example is the inclusion of my peer reviewed article in German Studies Review, with a new epilogue and...
Dawkins is spewing irrational, uninformed bigotry-fuel on Twitter again. I don’t think deliberately; he’s just a clueless fool. But the effect is the same. He even unknowingly chose the tired old bigot’s tactic of Just Asking Questions, in precisely...
I’ve written on biogenesis before (and before that). It’s even one of the subjects in philosophy in which I’ve had peer reviewed research published. And I have a whole section on it in Sense and Goodness without God, my survey of naturalism as a...
It’s not common that major, respected academic journals exhibit a catastrophic failure in their peer review process. But it happens. Everything from creationist dribble to just about anything in any field has “slipped past” peer review protocols in...
Dennis MacDonald and I have discussed the question of Jesus’s historicity many times over the years. These are among the most important kinds of discussions to have, as MacDonald isn’t a Christian apologist and actually agrees the Gospels are almost...
A while ago I composed Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus, summarizing and categorizing the main arguments pushed in a kind of phylogeny. Here I will expand on that by adding a few more arguments, within the same scheme I constructed there....
This is part two of my series on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a...
I’ve been asked a lot about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a...
Years ago I sat for a day of interviews for a film by Marco Bazzi about a geologist obsessed with the alleged earthquake at the time of Christ’s death. The resulting movie is now available (you can find it in most of the usual places, including Amazon Prime or...
I am getting asked the same question far too much lately: “What is your take on [x]; it seems pretty convincing; how do we know it’s not reliable?” Where [x] will be some crank on the internet, some ridiculous news headline, some random article...
In the extant text of 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul is made to say: For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: you suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the...
I’ve been asked to comment on Peter Hacker’s bizarre claim that qualia don’t exist in his arrogantly braggish essay “The Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness.” So here goes. Say What Now? First, what are qualia? If you’re new to the...
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.