Carrier on Science and Medieval Christianity

HT: John Loftus 

This is Carrier's blog entry, from a few years back, on the negative role that Christianity has played in the development of science. The combox is worth reading, since he faces some challenging discussion from J. D. Walters and J. L. Hinman.

A couple of things off the top of my head. First, the major advances of modern science, when it became clear that science could really make a difference not only in the way we view the world, but also the way in which we live our lives, happened in Christian Europe, not Hindu India, or Buddhist Japan, or Islamic Arabia. To say that it would have arisen in Ancient Greece if things had been different strikes me as sheer speculation.

Second, it seems to me that a polytheistic view would have made it impossible to formulate, say, a law of universal gravitation. If Zeus is in control of the sky, but Poseidon is in control of the sea, then to me it just wouldn't make sense to say that the same law of gravity operates in both realms. I suppose if someone accepted modern naturalism, then you could just affirm that the laws of physics are just there and that's all, but even here I wonder if should expect stable laws of nature on naturalistic assumptions. It's always been my view that there is no reason to believe that the laws of nature will remain stable unless there's a God.

Richard Carrier Replies on Lydia's Blog

With some concessions and apologies. The fundamental disagreements, of course, remain.

Less Wrong on the McGrews' Essay

Luke, at Common Sense Atheism, thinks that the these criticisms of the McGrews' Essay are more substantial than those put forward by Carrier.

Pride Goeth

Here's what Carrier says about his chapter of The Christian Delusion. 


Two of The Christian Delusion's fifteen chapters are mine. The first is Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable, which is the most definitive refutation of warranted belief in the resurrection I have ever composed. It's a deliberate tour de force, such that I doubt I'll ever have to write another. It even takes down recent attempts to use Bayes' Theorem to argue for the resurrection, and it contextualizes everything so there just isn't any rational basis left for claiming the resurrection is historically proven.


In the next paragraph he refers to both of his contributions as tours de force. 


When you talk like that, you had better be able to take out the McGrews. In my brainwashed opinion, that's a chess game he has no chance of winning. 

Lydia McGrew rebuts Richard Carrier.

I understand that the current atheist meme on this, which shows a rather striking lack of understanding of probability, is to say that if one does not argue for a particular prior probability for some proposition, one literally can say nothing meaningful about the confirmation provided by evidence beyond the statement that there is some confirmation or other.


This is flatly false, as both the second of the quotations above from the paper and my rather detailed explanation to Luke M. show.

Richard Carrier on Bayes' Theorem

I don't know if Tim McGrew is going to call this crappy. But he has told me he has numerous objections to it.

Where will YOU spend Eternity?

This is from David Wood's review of Richard Carrier's Sense and Goodness without God.

Richard’s chapter on “The Secular Humanist’s Heaven” (in which he declares his hope that humans will spend eternity inside computer programs) would be comical, even to secular humanists, if it weren’t obviously meant to be taken seriously. 

And I thought atheists all thought that everlasting life would be boring.  

Pratt on Pervo on Theudas

Following up on a dialogue that began here at DI, Jason Pratt has now finished his seven-part critique of Pervo's claim that Luke's way of using Theudas's name, as it appears in Gamaliel's speech, shows Luke's dependence on Josephus (and hence the late date of the work).

My central interest in the controversy surrounding late-dating Acts was the question that, given their apparent recognition of how so much accurate information about places and times and governmental systems that seems to be recorded in Acts, it is odd that they do not even ask the question of how that information could have been preserved into the early second century. Having looked at this essay by Richard Carrier, it looks as if he recognizes the amount of accurate content in Acts. He then points out that this was just means he was good with public information, as opposed to having a good idea of, say, whether the apostles might have hallucinated the risen Jesus. But he makes no attempt to explain how Acts came to have so much accurate detail, and given the fact that he holds a position like Pervo's on the dating of Acts, this is a dismaying omission. In other words, it looks as if Carrier doesn't even ask the question that I asked about Luke's knowledge.Does he really think this information would have been easy for someone in the second century to get?

Anyway, Pervo's book, along with Colin Hemer's, await me at the Glendale Community College library. I will see if he addresses the problem I posed.

Tim McGrew on Carrier's treatment of Luke and Josephus

Tim's comments are italicized. The Carrier essay is linked.

The list of “generic parallels” between Luke and Josephus is so generic that I was surprised he left out “Both Luke and Josephus mention the existence of Rome.” The list of “story parallels” is even worse, since in many cases it involves torturing the notion of a parallel. Just run through the list and note some of the (non)parallels that he either vastly overrates or twists ’round:

* In Josephus, the census under Quirinius is the beginning of something bad. In Luke, it isn’t. Therefore, this is a parallel where Luke “transvalues” the message of the census, changing “bad” into “good.”

(Um, ... standards ...?)

* Josephus says that there were many men who led revolts, and he names three prominent ones. Luke has passing references to three persons with the same names, though it is not clear that Luke’s “Theudas” is the same as Josephus’s. One of the men is called “the Egyptian” by both Josephus and Luke; Luke links him with the sicarii, whereas Josephus does not. Therefore, Luke was copying from Josephus.

(The argument that this must be copying because there were thousands of Egyptians in Palestine at the time is beyond ridiculous. It would work equally well against two independent references to Jimmy the Greek. (“How many millions of Greeks,” etc.))

* Luke and Josephus both recount the death of Agrippa I in some detail, speaking of his brilliant robe, his acceptance of adulation as a God, and his immediate demise. There are also some details that differ in the two stories. Therefore, Luke must have borrowed it from Josephus.

(It couldn’t just be a notorious fact? Why not?)

* Josephus mentions a rumor that there was an incestuous relationship between Agrippa II and Bernice; Luke does not. Therefore, Luke is inspired by Josephus and intends the entire scene in Acts 25 as comic sarcasm.

(Does it seem like sarcasm? Can it by any legitimate stretch of the imagination be read that way?)

* Josephus reports that Drusilla abandoned her husband for Felix. Luke (Acts 24) portrays Paul as speaking to Felix about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come, Felix becomes uncomfortable. Therefore, Luke must be using Josephus.

(It isn’t enough of an explanation that Drusilla’s obvious abandonment of her husband for Felix was notorious?)

* Josephus portrays Felix as sending priests, “excellent men,” to Rome for trial on petty charges. Luke portrays Paul as demanding to be sent to Rome. So perhaps Luke was using Josephus as a model.

(Huh?)

* Luke and Josephus both mention Lysanius, tetrarch of Abilene.

* Luke records a parable about a hated king who is really a good guy; Josephus talks about Herod, an actual hated king who was really a bad guy.

* Luke contains a prophecy involving the slaughter of children in a siege of Jerusalem; Josephus talks about a mother who cannibalizes her own infant during the actual siege of Jerusalem.

* Both Luke and Josephus mention a famine in the reign of Claudius.

* Luke reports an attack by Pilate on some Gailieans; Josephus reports an attack by Pilate on some Samaritans.

Forgive me, but as I read through this I am irresistibly reminded of an exchange from Sleeper:

Luna: “Do you know that ‘god’ spelled backwards is ‘dog’?”

Miles: “So?”

Luna: “Makes you think!”

The obvious point, which I made in a previous thread, is that Josephus's area of concern seems to have been Judeo-Roman relations. So he's not going to explain the kind of rich, detailed knowledge of Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta that Luke demonstrates, information that would have been difficult to come by in the second century. See Tim's discussion here. 


It is completely unclear to me why it should be assumed that some similarity between Luke and Josephus has to be explained in terms of Luke using Josephus.

The most detailed defense in recent times of Luke's accuracy is, to my knowledge, Colin Hemer's The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, reviewed here.  That would be the book to set up against Pervo. Price, not surprisingly, declares Pervo to be the winner.

It is refreshing to see Pervo spill the insides of apologists Ben Witherington III and Colin Hemer, who otherwise manage to receive way too much serious regard. When Pervo is done with them, they sag like empty piñatas, only his blows reveal that neither donkey ever possessed any candy inside. Just one example: Pervo shows the gross inconsistency between believing on the one hand that Acts’ author knew Paul personally and on the other that he was not familiar with Paul’s letters.

I'd like to see that argued. No one that I know, even in my immediate family, is familiar with all my letters, except, of course, for those addressed to them. Why should Paul be any different?