Dr. Richard Carrier has a PhD in ancient history from Columbia University, but he might be best known for his zealous evangelism for atheism.
Dr. Carrier is a historian, not a scientist, yet he is unafraid to wander away from the focus of his professional training to offer opinions on diverse subjects ranging from theology to cosmology and the origin of the universe, or his apparently uninformed thoughts on the chemistry necessary for the origin of life.
In a relatively short (11+ minute) video seen by clicking on this link, Dr. Carrier enumerates the following four points to explain why he’s not a Christian. His reasons are:
God is silent.
According to Richard Carrier, God doesn’t exist because no messages from this deity have been universally communicated so that every human on earth has a fundamental understanding of what God wants and doesn’t want us to do.
Dr. Carrier says, “In every culture everywhere, God’s gospel would have been preached to them by God Himself, he wouldn’t need intermediaries. So we’d be able to confirm, yes, there’s this guy called God somewhere, who’s giving us all the same information, and we we would what that information is, and we would all still have the freedom to reject that message, or not care about it or whatever, but we would all agree on what that message was, there wouldn’t be disagreements on it.”
Obviously, Dr. Carrier rejects the Bible as being the word of God, in spite of the fact there are (allegedly) 300 specific Old Testament prophesies that were reportedly fulfilled by the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Personal disclaimer: I believe that Jesus is God, so the wisdom and the information he shared with his followers came from God. But I also believe that my belief cannot be construed as proof for someone else that God exists.
On the other hand, the mere fact that biblical scholars can point to 300 passages in the Old Testament where the life and agonizing death of Jesus Christ appear to have been predicted centuries prior to his birth would seem to skew the scales of belief in favor of my opinion over the opinion of Dr. Carrier on this particular subject. Jesus said that the two most important things were to love God with all of your heart and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Love your neighbor. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. This might seem counter-intuitive to a species conditioned to believe in survival of the fittest, but philosophically and morally, it’s brilliant.
What sane and reasonable person could argue that hating others or throwing stones at them would be a good thing? God has most certainly not been silent. However, we humans are proud creatures, with lofty ideas and stiff necks, unwilling to bend them in humility. If people like Dr. Carrier would stop talking so much (mostly just to hear themselves talk) and just listen for a change, they might be able hear God when He speaks.
In the Book of Psalms, we are told,”Be still, and know that I am God.”
Indeed.
God is inert.
According to Dr. Carrier, there’s no reason to believe in a supernatural God because God doesn’t “do anything.” Carrier giggles like a gleeful child when the interviewer asks his opinion on miracles, which he declares are a correlation fallacy (post hoc ergo propter hoc), meaning of course that correlation does not equal causation. His point is that just because Dan Barker and Jerry DeWitt claimed to have prayed for unlikely events to occur and those specific unlikely events did in fact occur does not mean that their prayers were answered. However, neither can we assume their prayers were not answered because the “answer” was not always the one they wanted.
If you call my cell number and I happen to miss the call or decline to answer the phone, should you assume that I don’t exist, or that I’m dead?
Using rudimentary statistics and simplistic logic in an attempt to illustrate the point, Dr. Carrier suggested in the interview that in a nation with a population in excess of 300 million people, up to 300 individuals per year could be expected to experience “1-in-a-million” sort of stupendous good luck.
However, in doing so Dr. Carrier appears to be making his own logical error, committing what is known as the gambler’s fallacy. He has assumed that if some purported miracles can be disregarded as the result of good luck instead of divine intervention, then every alleged miracle can be successfully disregarded for that exact same reason. To be brutally honest Dr. Carrier seems to be committing quite a few logical fallacies in his four arguments, but lacking any formal training in philosophy and sufficient motivation, I’m reticent to try and identify them all.
Probably the most significant problem with his cursory dismissal of the idea that true miracles have occurred is that even atheists have investigated and confirmed them. Additionally, several quite prominent atheists have admitted they have prayed for an extremely unlikely positive outcome, during a crisis with potentially dire consequences, and received the outcome they desired.
Later, after the fact, once they decided to become atheists, these people seem to have developed amnesia about what actually happened — but they do still confess to making their prayers for divine intervention, and receiving the benefit of the very unlikely outcome immediately following their prayers, as an almost instant gratification.
It is also true that we know inexplicable events have occurred which are considerably more unlikely than a mere “million-to-1” shot, events for which there are no rational explanations. Those scientific “miracles” will be discussed in a moment, when we address the fourth and final point of Dr. Carrier.
Yet another problem with Dr. Carrier’s ad-hoc example to dismiss miracles comes with his choice to use the number 300, which coincidentally was the same number of Old Testament prophesies that the life and death of Jesus allegedly fulfilled. What an unfortunate number for him to pull out of thin air!
According to biblical experts, several different authors wrote the Old Testament books that included 300 unique and specific predictions about the promised Messiah. Furthermore, several centuries separated the lifespans of those authors and the birth of Jesus. New Testament authors documented how Jesus fulfilled those Old Testament prophesies found in Zechariah 9:9, Micah 5:2, chapter 9 in the Book of Daniel, and Isaiah chapter 53, to name a few of the better known examples.
In the next section about the “wrong” evidence for God, we shall use statistical analysis to show the true importance of the number 300 which, in fact, destroys these four arguments that Carrier has given to justify his atheism.
We have the “wrong” evidence for God.
Dr. Carrier is not a mathematician. Nor does he appear to have the slightest idea about how to apply statistical analysis to complex problems.Unfortunately, he has absolutely no hard data to substantiate his claims. He’s literally making up numbers that vaguely sound reasonable as support for his glib opinions. On the other hand, a highly qualified mathematician named Dr. Peter Stoner once made a serious attempt to quantify as a statistical probability the likelihood that 8 of the 300 Old Testament prophesies about the life, execution, and death of Jesus would hold true for any man who has ever lived. Dr. Stoner calculated the probability that any 8 of the 300 Old Testament predictions would be true for any human who had ever lived was only about 1 in 1o to the 17th power, which is an infinitesimally small fraction a single percentage point.
The numbers truly became staggering when Dr. Stoner increased the number of fulfilled prophetic predictions in his analysis from only 8 up to 48 out of 300, generating numbers that become difficult to contemplate and virtually impossible to put into perspective for someone else using words. Basically it’s a “1 in 10 to the…” number with so many zeroes after it, the results look silly.
Compared to fantastic odds-aganst-success like those, Carrier’s 1-in-a-million lucky shot sounds almost like a sure thing. Whatever number comes after billion and trillion — is it gazillion? Does it matter? It’s a really, really large (or in this case, extremely small) number.
Nevertheless, according to the Bible, Jesus was 300 for 300 in fulfilling Old Testament prophesies with his life and death.
To be fair, Dr. Carrier is a Jesus mythicist, meaning that he doesn’t believe Jesus of Nazareth was a real person. He believes that the authors of New Testament books created a fictional character with contrived details in order to proclaim the fulfillment of these prophesies, like sort of a weird application of (urban legend) tandem story writing.
That sort of places Dr. Carrier in a “1-in-a-million” category of his own — historians who deny the historical existence of Jesus.
This fact alone might help explain why he’s teaching online introductory courses on atheism instead of serious college-level courses that he’s certainly qualified to teach at an institution of higher learning.
We have the “wrong” universe.
The fourth and final argument of Dr. Carrier against the existence of God is perhaps the most bizarre. In his opinion, the universe that exists is the one that only random chance could have created. Dr. Carrier seems to believe that a universe larger than our own solar system is superfluous. And how does he reach this remarkable conclusion? He doesn’t actually say, but Dr. Carrier does spend a lot of time talking about what he would do, if he were God.
Unfortunately for this wannabe source of omniscience, experts in physics and cosmology such as Sir Martin Rees have studied the unique composition of our universe. Dr. Rees proposed that there are six crucial cosmological factors, for which even the slightest variation in their current values would have caused this universe to fail, immediately following the Big Bang.
Sir Roger Penrose then attempted to quantify the statistical likelihood of our universe and calculated that the probability the Big Bang would have randomly created this particular universe from nothing is an infinitesimally small fraction of a single percent, only about 1 in 10 to the 300th power.
And according to experts in existential chemistry such as Dr. James Tour, the odds of a purely accidental origin of life don’t get any better.
Dr. Richard Carrier tries very hard to cast himself as a scholar and a teacher, but he has confused actual knowledge with what he thinks he knows, and believes to be true.
This leaves one with the unfortunate but almost inescapable impression that Dr. Carrier is roughly the equivalent to “Doogie Howser” in academia, but that seems more than a bit unfair.
Unfair to Doogie Howser, of course. He always sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
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