Neil Godfrey calls out Richard Carrier over Bayesianism

VERY interesting. Godfrey, surely known to some of my readers as the proprietor at Vridar, says that using Bayesian probability is a sort of violation of Ockham's Razor: It's simply an unnecessary add-on in dealing with the historical Jesus. 

Here's his nutgraf, or the main sentence within:

One can validly use Bayes to judge between competing hypotheses that seek to explain President Kennedy’s assassination, but one does not need Bayes to determine if there was a historical President Kennedy in the first place. There are much simpler ways to check that datum

Well put, especially as someone here, me, who rejects JFK assassination conspiracy theories. 

But, he doesn't stop there. This:

Carrier approaches history the way positivists used to do in the olden days, approaching it like an empirical science that differs only from other sciences insofar as it has comparatively less data to work with.

Is at least halfway spot on, the positivism angle.

Then? 

Followed by a cite from this Aviezar Tucker critique of Carrier:

Historical sciences use evidence to support hypotheses about historical events such as the Big Bang, the origins of the solar system, asteroids hitting the earth, the evolution and disappearance of species, and who committed a crime. Historical sciences rely more on observations than on experiments and infer particularities more than generalities. In Carrier’s view, science and the historical sciences are not identical but are continuous and mutually dependent with a quantitative difference: in his opinion, historiography has less data and so is less reliable.

Is where the rubber really hits the road. 

I forgot how fucking stupid Raphael Lataster is

And mendacious, too.

Other than thinking Richard Carrier is genius-level mythicism, he thinks the same, in this piece, of Earl Doherty.

I've dealt with Doherty before, starting with his attempt to explain away Galatians 4:4 and claim Paul didn't believe in an earthly Jesus. (Unfortunately, the site I linked to is dead.) 

Lataster repeats the same lie on page 18:

Not only is Paul an obviously unreliable historian, he says nothing of a Historical Jesus, at least not anything that could not also apply to the ‘originally celestial’ Jesus proposed by amateur mythicist Earl Doherty.

How does he deal with Galatians 4:4? Doesn't even mention it. 

It's called mendaciousness, and mythicists are good at it. 

The piece is otherwise strawmanning, with Bart Ehrman — who gets strawmanned by mythicists in general — and Maurice Casey presented as the only two traditional critical scholars. 

Lataster himself has even less in the way of relevant education than Doherty.  

Top blogging, first quarter of 2026

As is usual, these were the most read posts of the last three months, per Google stats. Many may be older than that, and the "evergreen" ones will be so noted.

No. 10? "A Lutheran college myth bites the dust" from 2023 connects to my alma mater, a small college within the conservative wing of Lutheranism, and an urban legend (or worse) from my days that kept making the rounds for many years, claiming that Paul Hill wrote or helped write Bill Withers' "Lean on Me."  

No. 9? From 2023, talking about fascism in that same denomination, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, punningly called Lutefash. It will never go away as long as its current president, Matthew Harrison, continues to play footsie with the current president of Merikkka, Donald Trump, all while also lying about certain classes of people (Sixth Commandment), violating various cherished Lutheran principles about the "two kingdoms" and more. As long as both Harrison and Trump are in office, this piece will surely stay evergreen. It's my currently pinned post, too.

No. 8 is from 2012 and rightfully is trending at Easter time. It's my refudiation of a nutter geologist's claims to have proven Jesus' resurrection date (setting aside that while there was surely a crucifixion, there was no resurrection). 

No. 7, from 2013, is my list of overrated and underrated philosophers. 

No. 6, from 2009, sometimes pinned, but perhaps also trending because it talks about Passover and other things, is one of my personal favorites: "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism." 

No. 5, even older, from 2007, was a mini-post about "Patriots, gurus, scoundrels and martyrs." 

No. 4, related to No. 9, is from the last three months. Matt Harrison faces a real problem with a district president arrested on a child porn charge. Given the Lutefash angle, he'll have some wingnuts claiming this was a police sting, and others claiming there's a Comet Pong Pizza secret child porn dungeon inside LCMS headquarters, the so-called "Purple Palace," I have little doubt. 

No. 3: My piece about how Edith Hamilton mistranslated one word in Aeschylus famous saying, and then, how Robert F. Kennedy misquoted her deliberately incorrect translation, talked about how this bowdlerized a thought already bad on the issue of theodicy within classical polytheism and made it even worse within Christian monotheism, and how it also is another reason to question to legacies of both Hamilton and Kennedy. Going beyond the political and sociological angles, I noted how Aeschylus was seemingly writing about corporate, not individual, tragedy and guilt, an angle reflected in Judaism with the first of the ten divarim and Yahweh's inflicting punishment across multiple generations.

No. 2, also within the last quarter, was about the various stupidities of Tim O'Neill. 

No. 1 is a piece that may well remain within the top 10 for every quarter's roundup of top blogging that I put together. "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha."