At his Internet Infidels website and in a number of talks including a debate with Michael Licona on the Resurrection of Jesus, Richard Carrier presents an argument for “Why I Don’t Believe the Resurrection Story.” I have decided to put together a response to the reasons that Carrier offers for not believing in the resurrection of Jesus. This will be a series of three or four blog posts, and when complete I will make it available in the article section.

At his website, his presentation is divided into five sections: Main Argument / Rubicon Analogy, General Case for Insufficiency, Probability of Survival vs Miracle, General Case for Spiritual Resurrection, and Rebutting Lesser Arguments. Actually the section that drew my interest the most was Carrier’s arguments for a “spiritual resurrection.” His position is that the earliest biblical account of the resurrection of Jesus has nothing to say about Jesus actually coming back to life in any bodily sense. Instead, says Carrier, the first disciples of Jesus had either a vision or a dream of Jesus in heaven, and came to believe that in spite of his death, Jesus had spiritually survived in an immaterial form in heaven. I’ll say more about that later.

Out of convenience, I’ll divide my coverage of the arguments into five sections as Carrier did. For what it is worth, I commend to readers the debate that Carrier had with Michael Licona (see the link provided above) for a succinct, clear verbal presentation of Carrier’s position.
Interested? Read the rest.

A conversation I had the other day reminded me of what is now a rather old argument in relation to the question of belief in God (old in terms of twentieth century arguments anyway). Essentially, the issue was this: If my purported experience of knowing God / knowing that God exists via some sort of intuition or any other sort of experience should count as a reason for me to believe in God, then why can’t somebody else’s atheist experience (or at least their testimony of it) count as a reason for me to not believe in God? I say that I have a direct knowledge of God’s existence (let’s say I do). But what about someone who has direct, intuitive knowledge of something like “there is nothing out there, there is no purpose at all to life”? Surely, it was suggested to me, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Interested? Read the rest.

As regular readers may have noticed, I’ve been tweaking the look of the blog lately. When I first started it I didn’t have a picture of my face at the website. Now I’m experimenting with a few ideas.

The current image at the top of the page might not be everybody’s idea of what they should see at a somewhat academic blog (and this may or may not make any sense to you depending on when you’re reading this, given that I may have changed things by then): Flames, guns – a few people have even said that I’m promoting violence. The same goes for the podcast with it’s heavy metal introduction, or the very phrase “say hello to my little friend” and its association with guns, or for that matter, the name of the website even before there was a blog: Beretta (for those who don’t know, the saying “Say Hello to my Little Friend” comes from the classic 1983 Gangster Movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino). The general idea is that I find the image to be fun, and in a way it depicts the way I like to ruthlessly “whack” bad ideas (and hopefully promote a few good ones along the way).

The latest renovations got me wondering a little more what blog readers make of a blog’s image. What sort of influence does it have over how much you like a blog? Does it ever seriously put you off? Do you like it / hate it? (No, I won’t be changing it for you.) Do you think a blog’s image (in particular, this blog’s image, as well as the podcast) can change whether or not you think of the blog as having an academic tone? If you were the head of an academic department, would you look at something like this and think… “Hmmmm, maybe I should ask Glenn to tone things down”?

I’m curious about your thoughts. To give an air of academic respectability to this inquiry, I could say that I’m doing a short study on the noncognitive factors that influence online research preferences.

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brain Auten of Apologetics 315. The main theme of the discussion was the relationship between God (or a lack thereof) and ethics.

Check it out over at Apologetics 315.

Today’s interview is with Dr. Glenn Peoples. Glenn is a New Zealand based Christian philosopher, podcaster, and blogger. He runs the Beretta blog and hosts the Say Hello to My Little Friend podcast. In this interview, Glenn explores moral terminology, objective morality, the difference between ontology and epistemology, the moral argument, the Craig/Harris debate, advice for apologists, and more.