Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Debunking Christianity: An Interview With Richard Carrier About His Book, "Proving History"

Dr Richard Carrier has a new book coming out, "Proving History". Apparently Bayes Theorem plays a major role in his arguments. John Loftus posted an interview with Dr Carrier in which he posed some questions about the book. There were a couple of things in the interview that caught my attention, but I will only bring up one now. .

At one point, Dr Carrier said:


That Matthew is deliberately contradicting Mark because he is arguing against Mark is vastly more probable than that Matthew and Mark are correctly describing exactly the same events.


I've got to ask "Why is it more probable that Matthew deliberately contradicts Mark?" Carrier accuses Christians of the mistake


...in fundamentalist “harmonizations” of Gospel contradictions: they think they have “rebutted” the conclusion that the Gospels are contradicting each other if they can think of “any” possible way to harmonize the accounts, developing a fanciful “just so” story that makes everything fit, by assuming a hundred things not in evidence. But that ignores the fact that that account is actually extremely improbable.


Yet Carrier does the exactly this if he can't explain why Matthew deliberately contradicting Mark is more plausible than other Christian interpretations. Biases can go both ways. Read the whole interview at the following link.

Debunking Christianity: An Interview With Richard Carrier About His Book, "Proving History"

6 comments:

  1. Here’s the deal, skeptic is correctly saying “A and B contradict each other”, but then the apologist correctly says “A and B do not contradict each other if 1, 2 and 3 occurred”.

    The point is that both the above statements are correct, but given that 1, 2, and 3 are unevidenced assumptions, it is less probable that [A,B,1,2,3] occurred and more probable that just [A,B] occurred.

    This isn’t all that hard to grasp.

    Queue “BUT You cant prove 123 didn’t happen!!!1!”

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  2. That doesn't match Carrier's statement at all. You have to show how 1,2, and 3 are "unevidenced assumptions". Without that, then you just have A and B's contradiction as an "unevidenced assumption".

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  3. No, I'm just going off an old conversation we had about who was present at the tomb, assuming there was a tomb :)

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  4. See my first comment, and explain why it's wrong.

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  5. It's wrong because you cannot demonstrate the that there was no empty tomb when you know the "majority of scholars" agree that there is good evidence that there was an empty tomb and that Jesus was indeed crucified.

    You have to show that "1, 2 and 3" are unevidenced.

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