Richard Carrier
| Richard Carrier | |
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| Born |
Richard Cevantis Carrier December 1, 1969 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A. (History), M.A. (Ancient history), M.Phil. (Ancient history), Ph.D. (Ancient history) |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University |
| Website | www |
Richard Cevantis Carrier (born December 1, 1969) is an American historian, atheist activist, author, public speaker, and blogger. He has a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University where his thesis was on the history of science in antiquity. He originally gained prominence as an advocate of atheism and metaphysical naturalism, authoring many articles on The Secular Web, and later defending his basic position in his book Sense and Goodness Without God.
His blog appeared on Freethought Blogs, and he has frequently been a featured speaker at various skeptic, secular humanist, freethought, and atheist conventions, such as the annual Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, the annual Skepticon convention in Springfield, Missouri, and conventions sponsored by American Atheists. In 2016, he left the Freethoughtblogs network.
Carrier has frequently debated with Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig and David Marshall both in person and online. The Craig debate was broadcast on Lee Strobel's television show Faith Under Fire.
His recent books on the Historicity of Jesus have established him as a leading supporter of the Christ myth theory, which claims that neither the Historical Jesus nor the Biblical Jesus existed in reality. Carrier asserts that in the context of his Bayesian methodology, the ahistoricity of Jesus and his origin as a mythical deity are "true" (i.e. the "most probable" Bayesian conclusion), arguing that the probability of Jesus' existence is somewhere in the range of 1/3 to 1/12000, depending on the estimates used for the computation. Nearly all contemporary scholars of ancient history and most biblical scholars have maintained that a historical Jesus did indeed exist.
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