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...

Jesus Is an Extraterrestrial

There are two new books assessing the intersection of religion and astrophysics. Both are fantastic reads. First is Aliens and Religion: Where Two Worlds Collide, by Jonathan MS Pearce and Aaron Adair (Onus 2023), which explores the philosophical problems that...

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...

My Rank-Raglan Scoring for Osiris

The first question anyone has to answer when answering the question “How likely is it that Jesus was a mythical and not a historical person?” is “How often, at that time, were people like Jesus mythical and not historical?” And that requires...

Did Jesus Even Exist? Bart Ehrman’s Latest Take

Bart Ehrman has almost entirely avoided discussing “the historicity question” for years (I continually catalogue everything, and my responses, in Ehrman on Historicity Recap; some people have mistaken an article on his blog on this as recent, but in fact...

How We Know Acts Is a Fake History

I was asked by a patron to evaluate an article by Neo-Christian theologian Greg Boyd on the book of Acts being “a reliable history” (“Is the Book of Acts Reliable?,” which you can find at his mission website ReKnew). Of course I have...