Things Fall Apart Only When You Check: The Main Reason the Historicity of Jesus Continues to Be Believed
After ten years of observing the field after publishing my academic study on the subject, I find there are generally only two reasons to remain confident in the historicity of Jesus: a desperate faith-based need to; and a disinterest in actually checking. The former...On Andrew Moon’s Defense of Circular Arguments
In 2021, Andrew Moon published a philosophical study, “Circular and Question-Begging Responses to Religious Disagreement and Debunking Arguments,” in Philosophical Studies 178, pp. 785–809, in which he attempts to build on the Christian epistemological...Goldberg’s Attempt to Rehabilitate the Testimonium Flavianum
Did Josephus write his paragraph about Jesus by slavishly copying Luke? No. In my Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus I maintain a section on Josephus, and as of now it simply summarizes and references my article...Is Science Impossible without God? The Argument of Tomas Bogardus
Yesterday I surveyed a whole category of arguments for theism, the “Science Needs God” complex. And I concluded by mentioning a (sort of) new one, by a well-credentialed professor of philosophy, Tomas Bogardus (another fashionable Protestant convert to...The Myth That Science Needs Christianity
Years ago I wrote several articles debunking the commonplace claim that Theism (or indeed even Biblical Christianity) was necessary for modern science. It’s time for an updated round-up, particularly in preparation for a recent new attempt to argue this that I...And So Kipp Davis Conclusively Demonstrates His Incompetence as a Scholar
Kipp Davis has composed three videos about my work that now amount to dishonest slander. Because once you make mistakes and find that out—but keep repeating those false statements anyway, rather than correcting them—you’ve transitioned from merely...Some Controversial Ideas That Now Have Wide Scholarly Support
I just completed a research trip to UC Berkeley and its neighboring Graduate Theological Union and garnered up a treasure trove of books, studies, and journal articles, checked and re-checked quotes and footnotes and citations, and took abundant notes. And all this...And Then Kipp Davis Fails to Heed My Advice and Digs a Hole for Himself
Dead sea scroll specialist Kipp Davis is doing a multi-part series on On the Historicity of Jesus (or at least select parts of it), and in his first video he demonstrated a catastrophic failure to actually read the text he is critiquing, such that he actually just...All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable
A lot of what happens in the universe is caused by the Laws of Thermodynamics. Christians often wonder where these laws come from. What explains them? Well, the interesting thing is that nothing explains them. And I mean that in the literal sense: the absence of...Kipp Davis’s Selective Confirmation and Ignoring of Everything I Actually Said in Chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus
Kipp Davis recently published a kind of analysis of the fourth chapter of my academic study On the Historicity of Jesus: “How (Not) to Read the Talmud: Reviewing Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, Part 1.” It’s a weird one, because...Correcting 5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology
The title of this article is a double entendre. I’m responding to a pretty good video by Emerson Green (“atheist, non-physicalist, and host” of the podcasts Counter Apologetics and Walden Pod) titled 5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology. In...An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus
My academic study On the Historicity of Jesus was published in 2014, by respected biblical studies press Sheffield-Phoenix. It was the first complete study of the historicity of Jesus to pass peer review in over a hundred years. Since then only one other has been...Daniel Bonevac’s Bayesian Argument for Miracles
I was privileged to be able to sit in on some of a private virtual Q&A with Christian philosopher Daniel Bonevac regarding his peer-reviewed paper “The Argument from Miracles,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 3 (2011), pp. 16-40. Many...Another Two ‘Best’ Arguments for God?
Last time I analyzed YouTube’s “best” argument for God: Ben Shapiro’s, which tops the YouTube “influence” list with six million views. I also briefed a really terrible argument for God second on that list by Jordan Peterson, at...Ben Shapiro’s Worst Argument for God
Yesterday I asked YouTube what the “best argument for God” was; and I limited the results to those published within the last twelve months, and ranked them by view-counts (looking for the most viewed and thus most influential and thus most crucial to...Get Dr. Carrier’s Latest!
About the Author
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.
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