My Monthly Recommendation: Understanding Physicalism as a Philosophy
To help make ends meet and help you become a better philosopher, and thus a better citizen and thinker, every season I’ll post three books from my long-standing recommendations list, and review and discuss their value. And here’s how you can help: I am an...The Utter Destruction of the Fine Tuning Argument
Christopher Hitchens rightly said the argument from fine tuning is the best argument theists have, but only because it requires thought to figure out why it’s bullshit (whereas most Christian apologetics is obvious bullshit from the first moment you hear it)....Conclusively Ending the Kalam Cosmological Argument
What makes the whole flat-earth debate so eye-rollingly insufferable is that it’s just nothing but easily refutable made-up bullshit. I tire of even having to talk about it. It’s like arguing whether viruses exist or the moon is made of cheese—like,...Quantum Consciousness Is Bullshit (But Quantum Cognition Is Not)
You may have heard a lot about a thing called “quantum consciousness.” Most of what you’ve heard is bullshit. The Not Bullshit First let’s discuss the bit that isn’t bullshit. Many papers in various sciences that have words in their...What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?
Yesterday I published my take on a recent debate I had with Andrew Loke, before an audience of philosophers, on whether my conclusion is sound that We Should Reject Even the First Premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I took the stance of a nothing-first...We Should Reject Even the First Premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument
After an exchange of articles with Andrew Loke (see Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco and his reply) we were asked by a private professional forum to debate the topic of the Causal Principle, which anchors the first premise of the Kalam...Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio
I was hired recently to look into the claims of the German philosopher (really, now, theologian) Holm Tetens regarding why Naturalism has to be false because it can’t explain conscious experience. There’s nothing new about the idea. The Argument from...Boyce and Swenson’s Theological Argument against Multiverse Theory
In 2020, Christian philosophers Kenneth Boyce and Philip Swenson presented a thesis at a conference, which has yet to appear under peer-review (though a version is in review), arguing that “fine tuning” is actually evidence against a multiverse. This is...How the New Wong-Hazen Proposal Refutes Theism
A new law of nature has been fleshed out and proposed, in a research paper by Wong, Cleland, Arend, and Hazen, which theory I will just label for convenience the Wong-Hazen thesis. To read the original paper, see “On the Roles of Function and Selection in...Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco
I’ve long defended an argument theists seem to have no ability to escape: The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists. Robert Koons couldn’t get around it (Koons Cosmology vs. The Problem with Nothing). And...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...The Ontology of Logic
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...Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist
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...The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit (and the Foolery of Frank Turek & Tricia Scribner)
Time for some traditional counter-apologetics this holiday season. Today I tackle a dumb Christian argument atheists often have a hard time even understanding (because it’s so dumb, they aren’t thinking dumbly enough to get it). Frank Turek (of I...Thomism: The Bogus Science
I have pretty thoroughly embarrassed Edward Feser already, the preeminent advocate for Thomism today, the Medieval Dumbity that consists of purely armchair, and often pseudological, theorizing about natural reality, which ignores the entirety of the sciences and...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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