The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking

The fundamental goal of legitimate critical thinking (as opposed to the fraudulent kind) is to ascertain what is true, about yourself and the world. So the tools that constitute critical thinking must be tools for finding the truth. And that means tools for...

Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist

In recent years I came to a revelation: Christians are actually worshipping the Antichrist. Not all Christians, of course. Consider, for example, the Christian youth who come out to me after a presentation to a church group to explain their disappointment with their...

Antinatalism Is Contrafactual & Incoherent

Antinatalism is the view that the human race should let itself go extinct; more particularly, it should do so because that outcome is “better”; and therefore having children is immoral (there is a decent entry on this in the Internet Encyclopedia of...

Dennis MacDonald’s Change of Position

I mentioned in my last article (What I Said at the Brea Conference) that I first became aware there that Dennis MacDonald has switched from saying that doubting the historicity of Jesus was improbable but at least plausible, to insisting it’s not even plausible....

Chris Hansen on Jesus from Outer Space

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 Argument from Reason

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....

A Primer on Christian Anti-Intellectualism

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...

The False Trichotomy of Lord, Liar, or Lunatic

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...

No, Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist

This week I debated whether Hitler was really a Christian, on London radio, with historian Richard Weikart of the Discovery Institute, hosted by Justin Brierley. I’ve been on Brierley’s Unbelievable? show before. Last time I was literally in London so I...

List of Responses to Defenders of the Historicity of Jesus

Since my book On the Historicity of Jesus was published, for convenience I have been collecting here links to all the responses I’ve published to defenders of the historicity of Jesus. This article will be continually updated with new entries. Within the listed...

The Goodacre Debate

One of the many things I did when I was in England was go on a radio show that then aired in London just this last weekend (Saturday, December 15th, 2012), called Unbelievable with Justin Brierley, for Premiere Christian Radio. There, I had a cordial and informal...