We Are Probably Not in a Simulation

‘Simulation Theory’ is popular lately so I am building a new summary piece on it. The following article repeats material elsewhere on my site but in scattered places, and with some new and connecting material, to provide a thorough and current treatment of...

No, the Original Christians Did Not Loot Egypt

So the big Carrier-Jabari debate went down last week. That all began with my article Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology, which caught numerous catastrophic errors in the crank efforts of Jabari Osaze (who goes by Brother Jabari) to argue a confused...

Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders

While preparing next year’s book and reading and thinking about the one I just reviewed (Margaret Williams on Early Classical Authors on Jesus), I have evolved in my thinking about the rhetorical sense behind the “persecution” section in the Epistle...

Margaret Williams on Early Classical Authors on Jesus

Preparing my new volume on the historicity of Jesus for next year, I’ve found that one of the works published since my first volume that warrants attention in my new one is Early Classical Authors on Jesus (T&T Clark, 2022) by Margaret H. Williams (hereafter...

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...

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...

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...

The Methodological Application of My Theory of Humor

In interviews and hangouts I’ve often discussed my theory of humor and its importance to how we interpret humor, from how we use comedy to understand things about history, to how we decide whether a joke is actually racist or offensive rather than simply funny...

Did ‘Docetism’ Really Even Exist?

Some years ago I briefed the Westar Institute’s conclusion that Gnosticism didn’t exist. It is a modern construct. The term in antiquity never designated any sect or set of beliefs; and what the term designated in modern times never existed in...

How Would We Know Jesus Existed?

You can watch an edited video of my live talk, with slides, for the Secular Humanist Society of New York earlier this month: How Would We Know Jesus Existed? But here I will provide a brief written methodological summary, for ease of reference and use. My talk drew...

Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory

There is a much overlooked late-20th century polemical satire of Christian apologetics by the Russian writer Kirill Eskov called the Gospel of Afranius. Award-winning and popular in the slavic world, from Russia, Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine (even once having...