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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
Does atheism have a rational foundation? If we are just atoms in motion, how can anything be right or wrong? What is reason and why trust it? What is true? What should I believe, about myself and the world I live in? What should our politics be? What should our values...
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...
Unfortunately the conference was canceled. But by coincidence I’m going to be in town that same weekend, Saturday evening, October 29. I’ll be hanging out at Andrews on the Corner from 7pm to 10pm (after shooting for a local vidcast earlier that day)....
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...
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...
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...
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...
On my way to the Milwaukee Mythinformation conference (which happens on October 21; get your tickets now if you haven’t already!) I’m making several stops on a long drive. Let anyone know you think might be interested! Or come by and say hi yourself. In...
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.