Critical Thinking as a Function of Math Literacy

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...
A Critical Thinking Course That’s Affordable and Useful

A Critical Thinking Course That’s Affordable and Useful

I’ll be teaching critical thinking next month (December). Learn some easy tools of Bayesian reasoning, how to spot and correct for cognitive biases, how to reason logically and avoid and detect fallacies, and how to better question your decisions and beliefs in...

Two Lessons Bart Ehrman Needs to Learn about Probability Theory

A reader pointed something out to me that was a fantastic facepalm moment. It’s another demonstration of how Bart Ehrman doesn’t know how epistemic probability works, and not only hasn’t read On the Historicity of Jesus, he doesn’t even know...

Help with Christmas Shopping!

If you want to support my work and finish your Christmas shopping this year, here are some things you can do: If you buy any of the books I recommend on Amazon, through my Amazon store, I get a sales commission. There are recommendations there of all kinds, so you can...

Ehrman and James the Brother of the Lord

On the matter of the historicity of Jesus, Bart Ehrman has replied to what I recently summarized about the problems with Paul’s reference to brothers of the Lord in the Epistles. In Carrier and James the Brother of the Jesus (already distorting his facts in the...
The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear

The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear

I once wrote about how we aren’t really doomed, per se. Things could get bad, even really bad, owing to climate change and irrational energy and environmental policies, even economic crashes, even war, even worldwide NBC war. But it won’t be an apocalypse....

The Ehrman-Price Debate

The Mythinformation Con Historicity of Jesus debate last Friday was disappointing to many. To be fair to Robert Price, he is in failing health. And he’s a sweet guy. But I have to be honest. Even granting that, he didn’t respond to hardly anything Ehrman...

Thanksgiving Pubmeets All Across the Southwest!

I’m going to be making a monster drive to California and back, four days each way. I’ll have a ton of books in stow. Not literally; surely their gross weight will be substantially less than a ton. But in any case, many. This will happen the week before and...

Response to Pitts on the Resurrection Body

It’s been a really long time since I’ve bothered with the literature in resurrection apologetics. It mostly just bores me now. Nothing new has ever arisen since my best summary treatment in The Christian Delusion. But there is now something new and...

Help the Thinking Atheist Raise Funds for Camp Quest!

Camp Quest is a secular summer camp that has the potential to reach beyond the secular movement and bring the children of new secular families into the fold, learning secular philosophy, science, and critical thinking. They have been expanding for years, and are all...

Now on Kindle & Nook: Science Education in the Early Roman Empire!

My new book Science Education in the Early Roman Empire is now available on kindle and nook. And some other electronic formats. We are also working on the audio edition but that will still be many months yet. For more details on the book see Ancient Science Update and...

History as a Science

In 1970, David Hackett Fischer published a meaty and entertaining book, Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (well and briefly reviewed by Philip Jenkins at Patheos). I highly recommend it. He’s funny, but correct. It’s not a...

Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God

Everyone agrees multiverse theory refutes any fine tuning argument for God. Because on a standard multiverse theory (e.g. eternal inflation), all configurations of physical universes will be realized eventually, and therefore the improbability of any of them is...