Earlier this year I presented at the Pacific regional Society of Biblical Literature conference. My paper’s title in the program was, “Field Update on the Case Against the Historicity of Jesus: Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications For and Against.” Which is now...
Chris Hansen has claimed for years now to be composing a book for peer review that debunks my peer-reviewed monograph On the Historicity of Jesus. I have been waiting for that. But since it seems to not be forthcoming anytime soon, I may as well start addressing their...
The “Scientific Revolution” is often mentioned and discussed as a crucial development in human civilization that fundamentally changed the entire course of history. World society after and before that event looks consistently yet radically different. For...
In 2004 I composed for The Secular Web a detailed Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason. I still reference it whenever the “Argument from Reason” comes up. But anyone who visits it will notice it’s quite long....
One question atheists tend to be bad at answering, because they rarely give it much competent thought, is the ontology of logic: what, physically, does it mean to say that logically impossible things can’t ever happen or exist? Or as a theist might pose the...
Claire Hall summarizes the case with beautiful succinctness: “Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul,” because “AI experts have...
In Bayesian Counter-Apologetics I outlined why the Fine Tuning Argument actually disproves the existence of God. And I didn’t make that up. What I outline there was independently corroborated twice by the peer-reviewed research of multiple experts (see On the...
When looking for “the objectively correct” answer to the question of why we should be moral, we also should look to what the ancient Chinese had to say on the matter. Not because it is any more likely to be correct than Western answers; but because ancient...
Recently on The Canadian Catholic Show I debated the cosmological argument with theologian Robert Koons, under the title “Does the Contingency Argument Succeed?” Koons took the position he has formally articulated in two articles, “A New Look at the...
I noted this month in my series on Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable that rather than teaching its faithful how to think reliably, “Christianity teaches against any sound epistemology, even critical thinking.” In fact, “Christianity’s sacred...
C.S. Lewis may have been the worst philosopher of the twentieth century. Worse even than his contemporary Ayn Rand. And that’s saying something; because she was pretty bad at it. Weirdly, he was an even worse historian. As Bart Ehrman put it, “The problem...
Very rare event! Unofficial but actual: I will be hanging out in person at The Pub in Tampa, Florida on Monday, May 23. Strictly 7pm to 9. I will have a limited selection of books, if you want to buy one personally signed. Stop by and say hi! I’ll chat on all...
This is the final entry in my series on Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian. You can read my general summary of this book; where also at the bottom is a TOC linking to all the follow-ups, in...
Justin Brierley starts his discussion of the historical facts of Jesus by quoting H.G. Wells (p. 94), someone who had no degrees in history, and only remarked upon the historical effect on Well’s era of the literary character of Jesus, and merely presuming the...
Does science prove God? It is painfully ironic that Justin Brierley opens his chapter on this topic with a false quote from a scientist (p. 22). This common Christian failure to do the work to ascertain what scientists have actually said about these subjects explains...
“But why exactly do we believe that human life should be valued?” Justin Brierley asks (p. 52). Nowhere in his quest for an answer does he ever resort to asking experts in moral psychology or sociology what science has found the answer to this question...
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.