I was going to do a news roundup of several new developments in ancient manuscript studies, until one of them turned out to be a roller-coaster ride down a rabbit hole filled with all manner of twists and turns. The subject? The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. The other...
Clearing the dusty shelves of old unanswered things. One such is the Lowder-Barnes critique of my application of Bayesian reasoning to reverse the fine tuning argument into a case against God, rather than an argument for God. Actually this is not my argument. It is...
I made an error in the use of data yesterday. Sincere apologies to Thunderf00t. And kudos to his fans who finally sussed it out. My post has been revised, with all substantive corrections and additions made clear within the text. The background section is unaffected...
Revised. Something really funny happened yesterday. And then something funny happened today. Thunderf00t tried to lie, and got caught. And embarrassed, he threw out a bunch of insults and blather, and ran away. The event was amusing. It was so easy to catch him out....
This year the annual Darwin on the Palouse event will be on February 6 (2016). I’ll be a featured speaker. The event begins at 6:30pm and is being held in the junior ballroom at Washington State University. Free to all. Details here. The event is sponsored by...
Do you want to cuddle in with an interesting biography on a subject you probably never imagined reading about? Then I have a book recommendation for you. It’s a little personal. And a lot about humanism as a movement today, and its global importance, not just...
A good interview with me has gone up at Atheistically Speaking with Thomas Smith (“Taking a clear, rational look at atheism and surrounding issues!”). It’s episode 202, “Dr. Richard Carrier on EvoPsych.” The description: Is 90% of all Evo...
Just some random stuff today: I’ve lost track of all the many pods and vids in which I’m interviewed or featured. But I shall try to link to more of them in notes like this as they come up. Anyone who knows of others from this year, please add them in...
Two debates are happening next year (2016), sponsored by Mythicist Milwaukee as part of their Buzzed Belief debate series. Details here. You can get tickets now, through links there, and start making plans to travel and lodge where you can for these momentous debates....
Here is some handy linkage on coincidences. Thanks to a coincidence. I was reading the The #Skeptic’s Daily News and in it, by coincidence, were two separate papers on the subject of coincidence. Though only one was labeled such; the other, just happened by...
Next month I’ll be teaching my popular course Counter-Apologetics: The Best Ways to Refute Arguments for God. And this time I am including material on how to counteract Islamic apologetics. The required course text is still Murray’s comprehensive yet...
Here are some things I learned when I posted on Facebook an article about the rising abuse of innocent Muslims in America for no valid reason but an irrational fear of Islam. Trigger warning: a fuckton of awful racist shit follows (or equivalent). First, The Set-Up I...
Evolutionary Psychology is the study of how attributes of human psychology evolved biologically by natural selection. I and others have averred many times that it is mostly a pseudoscience. EvoPsych proponents balk and take offense. We cite numerous papers by experts...
Jerry Coyne. Peter Boghossian. Richard Dawkins. Various others. I call them the Dudebros because they act like white privilege is awesome, pontificate infallibly like the Pope, and don’t understand any of the things they complain about. They are the Archie...
Raphael Lataster, an Australian doctoral student in religious studies, has published a book recently, Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate among Atheists, examining the debate over the historicity of Jesus by focusing only on what atheist and agnostic experts are saying, and...
Today is my birthday. And I am officially launching my Patreon support page. Please take a gander, and consider becoming a patron, even at just a dollar per. I would love to have more financial security and a better sense that what I’m doing is valued and...
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.