How Not to Be a Doofus about Bayes’ Theorem From Someone Who "Doesn't Really Understand Bayesianism"

The title is a response to two posts Richard Carrier wrote here, and recently here. If anyone disagrees with Carrier we're irrational, ignorant, foolish, and now with a newly released super-bad description, doofus/doofuses. 

I would like to catalog the variety of responses apologists and atheists have toward Bayes, but I won't. What I do know is apart from the people he mentions who "don't understand Bayes" he should also include David Hume, Apologist Michael Licona and Dan Lambert. One wonders if anyone could have argued for anything before Bayes given Carrier's praise. Pffft. What I know is that those who use Bayes come up with wildly different results with regard to the resurrection of Jesus.

--Apologist Richard Swinburne calculates the probability of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, given the existence of a god, is 97%. Swinburne should run that past a peer-review panel including Muslims Jews and Hindu's to see how that goes over. ;-) We know from a historian's perspective that's utterly idiotic! 

--Apologist Vincent Torley calculated that "there’s about a 60-65% chance that Jesus rose from the dead." Of course, that was before he read Michael Alter's book on the resurrection, which I recommended, that had no math in it at all! How could this happen without Bayes? Oh my! But it did. Apparently the shear evidence Alter presented was enough. Wow! Who would have thunk it. 

--Apologists Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew calculated the odds of the resurrection of Jesus to be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. *Silence* *Awe* *Respect* Christians must revere them for coming up with the highest calculation any intellectual *cough* has done so far. Can anyone do better here? They need to go see a doctor and get some meds, quickly. Richard Carrier thinks Bayes helps. Okay then. Please tell us how such a useful tool can produce these wide diverse results. Tools are supposed to help. But even among apologists themselves it does no such thing. Carrier says Bayes helps us clarify where we disagree and by how much. Really? We already know this! Dressing up a delusion in math is still a delusion. Responding in kind only gives a delusion an undeserved respectability. This is a major point of mine in Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. Who's the doofus again? 

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Introducing My Next Anthology "The Case against Miracles"

[Update on 11/18/19: This Introduction has been significantly lengthened].

I finally submitted the digital book files to my publisher Hypatia Press, an imprint of Ockham Publishing out of the UK. David G. McAffe is the editor. It has been seven months since I started working on it. Getting authors, working with them, and writing my own chapters while on the road for the last two months has wore me out. I'm glad that hard phase is over. I'm told it should be published by September or October, just in time for year end holiday shopping. How good is it? Well, I consider it the best anthology yet, and they've all been good! You can see the chapter contents right here. To whet your appetites my Introduction is below:

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A Challenge for Churches

Here's a post that I endorse by my friend Bob Seidensticker at Cross Examined. Churches should step up and do this. LINK

John Gray’s Criticism of the New Atheists, Part 1

In Seven Types of Atheism, political philosopher John Gray, who’s an atheist himself, takes the so-called new atheists to task for their “notion that religions are erroneous hypotheses.” Treating religion this way, as if it were a kind of “primitive science,” is a mistake, he says. Rather, we must understand it as allegory and myth, as a way of imparting truths about the human condition. “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” As evidence, he mentions St. Augustine’s fourth-century view that the Bible need not be taken literally, as well as Philo of Alexandria’s first-century description of Genesis as “an interweaving of symbolic imagery with imagined events.”

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Christian Corruption Deserves Scorn and Ridicule

Let the satirists and cartoonist sharpen their knives

At the end of God Comes Out of Retirement to Distance Self from Catholic Church we find this quote:

“I mean honestly,” continued God, “who’s going to believe you’re the arbiter of all that is good in the world if you can’t even see that being on the side that’s defending pedophiles is bad. Really it makes me want to smite the lot of them and let Satan sort them out, but I think that would probably be more a punishment for Satan.”

How did the Catholic Church manager to combine the ultimate misogynistic Old Boys Network (the Vatican) and the World’s Largest Gay Community in strident denial (the Vatican)? That is a formula for disaster on so many levels, including blaming pedophile on homosexuality. Here's an eyeopener:

In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy


This 550-page book by Frédéric Martel was published last month in eight languages, based on four years of research and interviews with Vatican insiders.

Of course Christian corruption is not confined to Catholics. How about those Baptists (Southern or otherwise) and mean-spirited Methodists.

Maybe the most corrupt practice of all, however, is blatantly selling a product you don’t have: the promise of eternal life. When you’ve got that gimmick you can get away with a lot and still hold your audience. The faithful don’t even notice, don’t even care, that the concept of God peddled by the churches doesn’t make sense.

Christianity Is Not Too Big to Fail, 5

Helping it along…off the cliff

While claiming the moral high ground, Christians keep shooting themselves in the foot. Are they showing off that their brand of magical thinking is toxic? The Debunking Christianity blog has been amassing the arguments against this malignant religion for a long time. There are so many great articles in its archives that deserve to be kept front-of-mind.

 I asked John Loftus to nominate some of his own favorite articles from the last few years, and we will be re-presenting them, a few at a time. This installment includes:

• Getting God Off the Hook for Natural Disasters

• Does the Scale of the Universe Undercut Belief in a Tribal Deity?

• Can God Do Perpetual Miracles?

• 
Does Mythological Naturalism Presuppose Its Own Conclusion?

• On Stigmatizing Left-Handed People: Science Is Eliminating What Faith Produced

Installment One of this series can be found here. Installment Two is here. Installment Three is here.

Installment Four is here. Please feel free to share these articles on social media. Keep them going! David Fitzgerald has said that Christianity not too big to fail. Let’s help that process along.




David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. In 2016 he was invited by John Loftus to write for the DC Blog.




The Cure-for-Christianity Library can be found here.

When a Nasty Piece of Work Writes Scripture

Making Christianity Even More Cringeworthy

Before the Bible came under serious critical scrutiny—i.e., historians decided to analyze the texts as they do other documents from the ancient past—traditional beliefs about authorship were assumed to be true. Thus, the Pentateuch was written by Moses and the psalms by David; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were folks mentioned in the gospels and/or epistles.

These traditional certainties have faded or eroded completely, because of evidence in the documents themselves. It turns out that most of the Biblical documents were penned anonymously, and many are now recognized as forgeries. But there is one standout author whom we can identify without a doubt, because a few of his own letters have survived. We know for certain who he was: the apostle Paul, who wrote some of the letters credited to him. Thus we can try to figure out his thought, and we have a pretty good idea of his character.

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What Strain of God Virus Was Spread in Your Home?

I was raised in a genuine American cult. The made-in America kind of religion that is unique to the spirit of this country. If you don't fancy the religious offerings of the day, invent a new one. Eventually, people will begin to follow you if you've got the courage to preach your truth and the intestinal fortitude to stick it out until the right group of people stumble across your church and decide to cast their lot with you.  

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Christian Apologist Vincent Torley Says I've "rendered a service to philosophy"

We've been discussing private miracles. [See tag below]. I’ve argued private miracles must pass the same tests that third parties require. People—I didn’t say children—who claim to have experienced a private miracle—I didn’t say a mere extraordinary event—can only say it was real after rigorously verifying it, by asking a whole slew of honest questions. They need a sufficient amount of third party independent corroborative objective evidence for them. This is what reasonable adults should require when it comes to a miracle of the private kind, just as they should require with a miracle claimed by a multitude of people—which happens never.

Torley is arguing that there are private miracles people should believe despite the requirement for sufficient objective third-party evidence. In the course of this debate Torley rewards me with a backhanded slap instead of praise when saying I've "rendered a service to philosophy". He wrote about an Indian Prince who experienced frost for the first time:

There's a famous passage in Hume's Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777) where he writes:

The Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly; and it naturally required very strong testimony to engage his assent to facts, that arose from a state of nature, with which he was unacquainted, and which bore so little analogy to those events, of which he had had constant and uniform experience. (Section X, Part I.)

Hume was willing to "bite the bullet" and acknowledge that people following his epistemic principles would sometimes reject as absurd things that later turned out to be genuine - nevertheless, he insisted, they "reasoned justly." Perhaps John is willing to "bite the bullet," or perhaps he wishes to reconsider his views. But what he has done, albeit inadvertently, is show that Humean skepticism, when taken to its logical conclusion (for that's where John's epistemology is derived from) leads to a reductio ad absurdum. And for that, I thank him: he has rendered a service to philosophy. Cheers.

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Private Miracles Must Pass the Same Tests That Third Parties Require

In a previous post I made the claim that private miracles must pass the same tests that third parties require. People who claim to have experienced a private miracle can only say it was real after rigorously verifying it, by asking a whole slew of honest questions. They need a sufficient amount of third party independent corroborative objective evidence for them. If there's no objective evidence to convince others, there would be no objective evidence to convince oneself either. Rather than being an experience of a real private miracle, the experience could come from an accident, hallucination, brain malfunction, wish-fulfillment, sleep deprivation or a drug. So whether private or public all miracle claims should be able to show a sufficient amount of third party independent corroborative objective evidence.

Consider an example of an extraordinary kind, one that might be within the realm of possibilities. Let's say you experienced an alien abduction while walking home from a birthday party, in the afternoon on a clear day. The aliens take you to their planet in a different solar system of the Milky Way Galaxy to do experiments on you, 10 light years away. When done with you they bring you back. You are convinced this really happened. So you immediately run to tell everyone what you experienced. But no one saw the alien space-ship pick you up, or drop you off. No one has aged either. No astronomer can confirm the solar system with its star exists. You have no scars from their experiments. You have no scientifically advanced artifacts from your travels. You have no scientifically advanced information to share.

Should YOU continue believing it?

'Great' Bible Texts…that Really Aren't So Great

Extreme religion in disguise

So, be honest now: How many Christians cheerfully open their doors to Jehovah’s Witnesses who come knocking? It’s not so easy to knock on doors in Manhattan, so it’s common to see these intrepid missionaries at their literature tables in the New York City subway. I have yet to see passers-by interacting with them, so their hit ratio (getting people to hear their pitch) is probably no higher than when they ring doorbells.

The irony, of course, is that Christians who rebuff or ignore Jehovah’s Witnesses are on the same family tree of faith; they share belief in the ancient Jesus cult. It’s just that the JWs are more aggressive about it. And, of course, there are now thousands of variations on the old cult, as Christianity has splintered endlessly. This fragmentation can be traced to endless Christian fighting about theology, but above all to the disagreements in the original source documents, i.e., the gospels and epistles.

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Another Case Study In How To Defend Obfuscate The Christian Faith, Part 2

Previously I had written a post titled, Subjective Private Religious Experiences Prove Nothing! Randal Rauser objected to it, so I wrote another one titled, Another Case Study In How To Defend Obfuscate The Christian Faith, Part 1. I'm finally getting around to Part 2, where I offer four tests for the veracity of private subjective miracle claims.

Darren Slade wrote an Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion entry on Miracle Eyewitness Reports, containing a wealth of information packed into a small entry. It speaks to what remains of any attempt to say someone experienced a private miracle. There are way too many distortions and psychological variables that the so-called witness himself should question his own judgment on the matter. If the so-called eyewitness himself cannot find any independent third party objective corroboration of the alleged miracle, not even he should believe it occurred.

Quotes from Slade on weighing the accuracy of miracle reports:

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Dr. Paul Copan: "De-Conversion: Why People Leave the Christian Faith and (Re)Turn to It"

Paul Copan is a friend of mine. Like me, he earned a master's degree under William Lane Craig. Then like me, he went on to study at Marquette University for his PhD. He also wrote a few books, as I have done. See his Wikipedia page for more.

Recently Paul gave a talk with the above title. Apparently he's feeling the heat from polls showing what appears to be the demise of evangelicalism. In his talk he discusses several important ex-Christians and why they left the fold. He includes me at 8:10, and then again when discussing The Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) at 22:10.




Copan considers the challenges that ex-Christians present for the Christian faith. He considers mine to be challenge #1. He does not object to the OTF in his talk. He's embracing it, so it seems, just as Dr. Wallace Marshall has done. That's very significant since Copan served for six years as the President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Here are his slides on the OTF:

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Christianity and the Witch-Hunt Mentality

It’s alive, potent, and dangerous

It isn’t hard at all to come up with a hundred verses in the gospels and epistles that would shock Christians. We would hear, “How can that be?” or “Well, I don’t believe that!” or “That’s not part of my religion.” Robert Conner doesn’t exaggerate: “The overwhelming majority of Christians know bupkis about what’s in the New Testament.” Even if, at one time or another, they’ve come across the alarming texts, they become masters of denial; their ‘nice religion’ remains invincible. Jesus too remains intact, despite many of the despicable things he (supposedly) believed and said.

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Why Do Humans Crave Domination?

Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. 
— John 15:14 

Anyone who embraces the above scripture as the central theme to their relationship with a god must be a submissive at heart. The kind of friendship described in the verse has never appealed to me, but then I have a fairly dominate personality. 

They say the world can be divided into cat lovers and dog lovers, beer drinkers and wine drinkers or dominants and submissives.

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Another Bible Chapter that Wouldn’t Be Missed

Somebody please get the scissors

My challenge to Christians—my plea, actually: Read the gospels and epistles carefully, meticulously, critically. Bring to these texts the same due diligence that you would apply when reviewing a mortgage or employment contract; you don’t want to be cheated or fooled. Let’s face it: pastors and priests are paid propagandists; yes, I keep saying this, because their urgent concern is to make all the stories come out right and banish doubts. Christians, you can do better than that: do the tough homework. The pews might empty fast—except for the folks who want to be conned, and don’t even notice that it’s happening.

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Debunking Christianity, One Graphic at a Time! (Installment 2)

What Richard Carrier said!

What Guy Harrison said!

What David Madison said!

For Installment 1, click here.

Hey, feel free to copy these and spread them around!

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Could You Think Your Way Out Of These Religions?

Here are some more religion photos of the week. Let's say people who don't believe in Jesus go to hell when they die. Then how would you go about convincing yourself you were born into the wrong religion? Try the Outsider Test for Faith. If your faith is the true one then your god should make it pass the test while others will fail it.

Debunking Christianity, One Graphic at a Time!

What John Loftus said!

What Robert Conner said!

What David Fitzgerald said!

Hey, feel free to copy these and spread them around.

"The most charitable thing we can say about faith is that it's likely to be false."

The title quote above comes from a talk by Peter Boghossian. He also said "We are forced to conclude that a tremendous number of people are delusional. There is no other conclusion one can draw." In this week's religion photos of the week you should see why. LINK. Christian, just ask what if you were them? You could've been.

When True Christians Beat Up on True Christians

A review of Tim Sledge’s Goodbye Jesus

How was it possible? How did I fall from grace so totally, i.e., go from being a Methodist pastor—with a PhD in Biblical studies no less—to denying the reality of God? Well, that’s no mystery according to some devout folks. One Christian blasted my story of how it happened: “‪If he can write a book this full of lying opinions, he could never have been a Christian to begin with! Answer to God if your book leads even one soul astray!”

‬‬‬‬ We can assume that this irate believer hadn’t actually read the details of my departure from the faith, but, had she done so, she would have said, “Aha, I knew it!” From the get-go, as a youth, my approach to Christianity was bookish, and I never had anything like an alter-call moment, ‘giving my life to Jesus.’ Eventually, when I saw through the Christian version of the cosmos, I was able to walk away from it—without too much anguish. I had never ‘belonged to Jesus.’ So by that measure, I admit to the snobbish True Christians, “No, I wasn’t a ‘Christian to begin with.’”

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Did Jesus Predict the Resurrection?

Believers claim that the resurrection not only happened, but did so in accordance with what Jesus taught his followers about himself and his mission. And there are several passages in God’s supposed autobiography that back up this claim. For example, Matthew 16:21 states that Jesus told the disciples he must go to Jerusalem to be killed “and on the third day be raised.” And in 27:63-64, the priests tell Pilate about the prediction, and suggest that the Romans guard the tomb lest someone steal the body to make it look like it came true. Supposedly, then, Jesus’s followers expected the resurrection, and many of his enemies knew about this.

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God and the Wizard of Oz are One and the Same

Dorothy: We want to see the Wizard of Oz. 
Gatekeeper: That’s impossible. No one has ever seen the great wizard. 
Dorothy: Then how do you know he exists? 

And, as it turned out, he didn’t exist. Dorothy was on her own, as we all are, and responsible for her own actions and consequences as well as how she treated others. No one has ever seen the great wizard.

Was this a movie with a hidden message — a great atheist or humanist tale?

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The Day Jesus Cursed a Fig Tree

…and followed the deed with bad theology

When the gospels are experienced in short bursts—carefully selected bursts—Jesus comes off as the good Lord he’s supposed to be. But when you read a couple of chapters straight through, there will likely be a few how-can-that-be moments: did Jesus really say that; did Jesus really do that? Theologians and preachers earn their keep by cleaning up Jesus, and artists have helped. The negatives about Jesus don’t usually end up on the stained glass windows, and for centuries painters and sculptors have naturally favored the ‘good Jesus’ stories.

We are often surprised by what the gospel writers felt made Jesus look good. Little did they know that their documents would come under intense scrutiny many centuries later. The average lay person today—hearing the gospels read from the pulpit—has not been tipped off that the gospels are not history. Even devout New Testament scholars (other than strident evangelical apologists) grant that uncovering fragments of history is, to put it mildly, problematic.

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Suffering But Was Afraid to Ask

I'm not a Buddhist nor am I a Christian, but there are a few ideas from the Buddhist philosophy with which I can more easily relate. I recently had a conversation with a devout Christian who was suffering immensely from the tragic loss of an eye. She was clearly depressed and no amount of faith seemed to give her hope, because her prayers had failed to intervene with the god she claimed to trust. 

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How Could God Botch the Bible So Badly?

An epic failure of communication

Confident, enthusiastic believers assure us that God inspired a book to guide humanity. Indeed, since the Holy Spirit has never ceased its work—how could it be otherwise?—this sacred book has expanded continually. Take a look at that Bible on your bed stand; or flip through the magnificent copy on the church alter: Heeding the wisdom of devout theists everywhere, the Christian holy book now includes the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qur’an, and the Book of Mormon.

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Christianity Is Not Too Big to Fail, 4

Helping it along…off the cliff

While claiming the moral high ground, Christians keep making the news for doing nasty things. The Debunking Christianity blog has been amassing the arguments against this malignant religion for a long time. There are so many great articles in its archives that deserve to be kept front-of-mind.

I asked John Loftus to nominate some of his own favorite articles from the last few years, and we will be re-presenting them, a few at a time. This installment includes:

• Just Who Can Be Accused of Having Closed Minds?

• Addressing the Accusation: “You Were Never a Real Christian!”

• On Justifying the Use of Ridicule and Mockery

• Enough of This Utter Nonsense, On Knowing the Supernatural

• On the State of the Case for Christian: It’s Abysmal

Installment One of this series can be found here. Installment Three is here.

Please feel free to share these articles on social media. Keep them going! David Fitzgerald has said that Christianity not too big to fail. Let’s help that process along.


David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. Two years ago he was invited by John Loftus to write for the DC Blog.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library can be found here.

Photos Highlighting Different Rituals and Traditions For Religious People!

This episode of religion photos of the week highlights the different rituals of people sharing basically the same religion. Different rituals. Different traditions. What we see is the result of different histories of basically the same religion. They show us that religion is cultural all the way down. Religious rituals like religious traditions and religious doctrines are relative, just like the cultures in which they reside. Why is this so hard to comprehend? Why do so many people still grip their doctrines, traditions, and even rituals with iron fists? It's both baffling and ignorant.

Religion and Morality

It is often claimed that morality comes from religion — that without the Ten Commandments and such things, we would not know right from wrong. On this view, atheists can be moral, but only because we “borrow” our values from the religious principles that permeate society. Even some who aren’t religious, or aren’t in any sense orthodox about their beliefs, sometimes say such things. Thus, the influential psychologist Jordan Peterson argued not long ago that Sam Harris is “fundamentally” a Christian because “he doesn’t rob banks, doesn’t kill people, doesn’t rape.”

Yet there’s a simple argument that shows morality doesn’t originate in religion: If it did, we wouldn’t find anything in religion to be morally problematic. In other words, if we learned right and wrong from the Bible, then we wouldn’t find any of the moral pronouncements there to be disturbing. The religious wouldn’t struggle with how it could be that God commanded the mass killing of infants, for example. They would simply accept that as yet another instance of God’s perfect justice and goodness.

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“Let Us Pray.” Not, God Forbid, “Let Us Think.”

Faith thrives when curiosity doesn’t

I welcome being called a firebrand atheist, but even so I try to behave on social media. On Facebook, for example, I never visit Christian pages or groups to advocate atheism. It would be a waste of time and keystrokes, but it would also be akin to my walking into a church on Sunday morning to argue with the preacher. Bad manners. I don’t want to be a firebrand troll.

But on the Facebook page for my book, Christians show little restraint. They drop in to vent and, sad to say, spew hate. The subtitle of my book, “A Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith”—combative, yes, intentionally—draws their spleen. They are stunned, moreover, at the suggestion that there are any problems with their faith, let alone ten.

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