Bayes' Theorem Archives • Richard Carrier Blogs

Three Recommendations in Godless Epistemology

Richard Carrier — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:01:28 +0000

Godists have their own bogus epistemologies, designed to rationalize believing in gods. But rational people use only godless epistemologies, which aren’t rigged to favor any conclusion. I have long advocated Bayesian Epistemology as the correct logic for knowing what to believe and how confidently to believe it. So I realize I need to add a […]

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Public Zoom on Josephus and Bayes

Richard Carrier — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 15:02:43 +0000

This video is now publicly available. I am keeping the original announcement below. But to watch see The Knowledge Nexus. The de-animated slides are available here (but the usual advisory: the slides are not the lecture, so don’t just read the slides and think you heard all the qualifiers, exceptions, qualifications, and expansions—you will only […]

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The Historicity of Aristotle

Richard Carrier — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:01:21 +0000

In my new book The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus I show mathematically why we are so confident in the existence of most ancient persons, and why we get different results for Jesus when we hold him to the same standard as everyone else—in the second section of chapter six, starting with Socrates and […]

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Matt Kovacs Demonstrates What’s Wrong with Atheists Clinging to the Historicity of Jesus

Richard Carrier — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 14:32:09 +0000

I’ve commented a lot lately in my articles on the historicity of Jesus that critics themselves are now demonstrating why historicity is a bankrupt paradigm: they never have a sound or valid argument for it. Instead, they kneejerk oppose it emotionally, doing no work to even understand the peer reviewed studies questioning it (they rarely […]

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Correcting 5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology

Richard Carrier — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 01:16:46 +0000

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 which Green aims to correct what he sees as the five most common mistakes atheists make […]

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Daniel Bonevac’s Bayesian Argument for Miracles

Richard Carrier — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 15:35:06 +0000

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 significant philosophers (atheist and Christian) were in attendance. Alas I missed most of it, and couldn’t […]

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Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism

Richard Carrier — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 03:01:55 +0000

Last month I launched my three-part series on analyzing peer-reviewed philosophy papers with my Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency, where I explain my process and how I selected the articles for review. I followed that with my Bayesian Analysis of Shelley Park’s Uncanniness Thesis. Third and last up is “Reviving the […]

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Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency

Richard Carrier — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:28:06 +0000

Last September I ran a project testing the merits of peer-reviewed history articles, by selecting three articles at random and analyzing their methodology and its underlying Bayesian logic (because, really, all sound epistemic reasoning is Bayesian: see A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis; A Bayesian Analysis of Kate Loveman’s Pepys Diary Thesis; and […]

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The Jesus Chronicles: Three Things People Get Wrong about Probability

Richard Carrier — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 17:56:47 +0000

Lately I’ve seen a flurry of repeated mistakes in reasoning about probability. I realized a primer is needed to correct some people so they can stop making those mistakes (assuming you care about not making mistakes; an alarming number of people don’t, but I can’t help them). I’ve discussed related issues in probability theory before […]

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A Bayesian Analysis of the Winling-Michney Thesis on Redlining

Richard Carrier — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:53:35 +0000

Last month I began a three-part series with A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis and A Bayesian Analysis of Kate Loveman’s Pepys Diary Thesis. Today I will conclude with the third random selection from my test set: LaDale C. Winling and Todd M. Michney, “The Roots of Redlining: Academic, Governmental, and Professional Networks in […]

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