The Dying Messiah

This article has been superseded by a complete revision, The Dying Messiah Redux.  The following is retained for historical purposes only. Readers interested in its argument should proceed to the new version.

As a bonus for those who funded my research on or are anticipating the publication of my two volumes on the historicity of Jesus, I have decided to summarize one of the many things I have discovered and will include in that work, making it public early, particularly as it seems important to recent scholarly debate (in a sense making this a sequel to my earlier Ignatian Vexation). Indeed, I have heard one particular claim several times recently in conversations with Jesus scholars that simply isn't true.

It is frequently claimed, even by experts in the field, that no Jews expected their messiah to be killed, nor ever would, that all of them expected a militarily triumphant übermensch. And therefore Christianity went totally off-book when it came up with the idea that their "failed" messiah was the "real" messiah. But this is actually demonstrably false. Some Jews did expect a dying messiah, or would easily have done so. 

Epistemological End Game

This article has been rewritten, updated, and superseded elsewhere as Epistemological Endgame. The following remains only for archival purposes.

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In September, Chris Hallquist raised an objection to my epistemology on his blog The Uncredible Hallq. For those not up on the jargon, an epistemology is your "theory of knowledge," it's what you believe about what it means to know something, how we know anything, and when it's right to believe or disbelieve one thing or another. I described my epistemology in my book Sense and Goodness without God (2005), especially on pages 49-62 (building on the necessary preliminaries on pages 27-48), although I add a great deal more in later sections of the book, especially where I discuss mind, reason, and science and the supernatural (pages 135-49, 177-92, and 213-52 respectively).

One of the big issues in epistemology is the problem of infinite regress. "I believe the sun will rise." "How do you know that?" "Because it always has." "How do you know that?" "Because my memory and human records confirm it has." "How do you know that?" "Because I've examined those memories and records." "How do you know that?" And so on. It looks like this could go on forever. It seems like any answer you give can be doubted. We can always keep asking "How do you know that?" And this isn't the only line of regress. "I believe the sun will rise." "How do you know that?" "Because it always has." "How do you know something that's always happened will continue to happen?" And so on.

The difference between these two lines of questioning is that the first is about the facts, while the second is about which rules are valid when interpreting those facts. Every rule is doubtable, because exceptions are always possible, and every fact is doubtable, because we could always be mistaken, someone could always have made an error, or lied, or our memories could be inaccurate or false, and so on. Thus, the problem of regress is just this: Where is it reasonable to stop doubting, to stop asking questions? When should we just shut up and believe?

Chris says "I do not think that Carrier has escaped the problem of regress" because "no line of reasoning can ever get us out of skepticism regarding memory, because in order to reason we must be able to remember the previous steps of the line of reasoning" and therefore, Chris concludes, "I think [Christian apologist Alvin] Plantinga has hit upon the only real solution to the problem of regress." Chris acknowledges but doesn't say enough about my refutation of Plantinga's proposed solution in Sense and Goodness without God (especially on pages 43-47 and 184-85).

What is Plantinga's "solution"? Simply to assume Christian Theism is true, and that we are fully justified in assuming this without needing any evidence Christian Theism is true. "I don't need a reason to believe it." Silly, you might say, but a number of Christians agree with him and are marching along to the same tune. In his own attempt at a solution (on a subsequent blog entry), Chris says "though one belief may be occasionally traced to another, there must always be givens, or else we fall back into the problem of regress," which I likewise argue. Yet I could not find any actual solution to this problem on his blog.

Chris seems to say that all we need do is just arbitrarily assume some things, but he never explains what things we are allowed to assume, or why it is okay to assume those things, and not others, or a smaller set of things to begin with. He recognizes this as a problem for Plantinga--as Chris says, if we get to assume Christian Theism is true, then we could just as easily assume Great Pumpkinism is true, so where does that get us? But if we can't just start with assumptions like those, because they are dangerously and irresponsibly arbitrary (and they are), then what assumptions can we start with? Chris doesn't say. That's not a solution.

In contrast, I did offer a solution. And it works. Chris thinks it doesn't, but he seems to have missed several elements of my epistemology, although not everything he missed is adequately explicit in my book. So here's a clearer exposition on the subject.

Goal Theory Update

Here is the latest update on my moral theory work, for those keen on following it in-depth. This post is deliberately long, so those not so keen can skip this one. It assembles notes I've been sitting on for a while for lack of time to get them up.

The Postmusical Age

I'm massively preoccupied this month getting my dissertation in, but I took a few hours this weekend relaxing and updating my music collection. It's something I do every few weeks. I haven't the time to build any heavy blog topics this month, so I thought I'd pass on some of my musings on music instead. If you're keen to know what I listen to, this post's for you. But there's also a tiny bit of music philosophy, too, for those who are curious. Because something strange and wonderful has happened to music in the 21st century. More on that later...

Factual Politics (4)

(This is Part III of III of the conclusion to a crazy debate on political philosophy. For the back-story to what follows, jump back to Factual Politics to start the whole thread. Or click here to jump back to Part II)

Silly Questionnaires

Okay. So it's now 2007. I've decided to welcome in the New Year with something fun. My family often sends around "questionnaires" with odd personal questions that are often silly. So I usually make fun of them by sending back half-bogus answers, although I mix them in with real answers. Just see if you can guess which is which! Oh, it's not like that's hard.

Warning: expect colorful language and sexual situations!

Here are sixty of my favorites:

Atheist or Agnostic?

Personally, I don't care all that much if nonbelievers prefer to call themselves agnostics rather than atheists. I think by now most everyone knows these are the same thing (after all, either way, you don't believe in God). And eventually the social stigma attached to the latter will float over and latch onto the former anyway, leaving no place left to hide. Well, okay, maybe the squeamish atheists will once again invent some new word to call themselves, so they can confuse a prejudiced society into not realizing they are (gasp!) really atheists. But that will just go the same way. In the end, the advantage will be lost, yet another word will have to be invented to hide behind, and 'round and 'round it goes. Good luck with that.

For me, this is all just a social game, semantic trickery, that is hard to have sympathy for, but I can't honestly criticize nonbelievers who want to avoid the social stigma falsely attached to a maligned word. Prejudice in this country, in some places and situations, is certainly real and harmful enough to justify a desire to dodge it. If black people could pretend to be white, I'm sure some of them would. This is frequently enough true for gays that they have a whole terminology of social disguise (like "in the closet" and "beard"). You can't condemn this until you've walked a mile in their shoes.

There is also a silly and heated debate (even so far as to cultivate outright rage) between atheists and agnostics as to who is really what. Of course, these terms don't even have a single meaning. Just as "atheist" can mean "denier" or "unbeliever" (generating the rather lame, confusing, and misleading terminological distinctions of "hard" and "soft" atheist or "positive" and "negative" atheist), so can agnostic mean "undecided" or "dunno!" The latter is more etymologically and historically correct, since agnosticism is supposed to be the formal position that one cannot know whether God exists or not (whether by definition or as a contingent fact of a particular agnostic's limited access to relevant evidence), but the former meaning is still very common in actual use, and both have crept into other contexts (so, for example, you can be an "agnostic" now, in either sense of the term, as to whether Robin Hood actually existed).

Moral Ontology

Ontology is the study of “being,” i.e. what it means for something to “be” or “exist.” I have discussed on other occasions the ontology of time and the ontology of logic and mathematics (among other things, in numerous places). A couple weeks ago for a Christian youth group (Stand to Reason) I was asked to discuss the ontology of moral facts, expanding on questions that remained after last year. A crucial section of my Sense and Goodness without God on all this is III.5 (pp. 119-34), esp. III.5.4-5 (pp. 124-34).

From the questions that I heard this year I can provide a new summary of my view on this subject, which I will support with formal, peer reviewed arguments and references to the leading scholarship in a chapter soon to appear in The End of Christianity, edited by John Loftus (the sequel to The Christian Delusion), which I'll blog about as soon as it is released. Of course much of the informal argument and bibliography already appears in my book Sense and Goodness without God (and I've blogged about this subject colloquially before: see the amusing Darla the She-Goat).

Moral realism is the view that there are moral statements that are meaningful and true, and true independent of your opinion or culture. I am a moral realist. That means I must be able to ontologically ground the existence of moral facts, and in things other than popular opinions or merely cultural facts. When I say they "exist" I have to explain what I mean by that: in what sense, and in what way, do they "exist," particularly as I am a first-order physicalist (I believe everything that exists is solely and entirely caused by physical things and events: see Defining the Supernatural), so I must be able to reduce moral facts to physical facts in some way.

The Postmusical Age II

Last year I wrote about what I mean by our living in a Postmusical Age, and then listed a lot of my favorite new music to exemplify the trend. I have a really hectic month coming up and won't have much time to blog (indeed I won't even be home most of the time), so one thing I thought I'd do is talk about some more new music I'm loving lately. Light fare, you know. Just consider this an appendix to my earlier blog on this same subject...

Experimental History

A few weeks ago I teamed up with my friend David Fitzgerald once again to talk about historical method for a gaggle of godless kids at Camp Quest West. David and I dressed up in silly costumes and did a skit or two. One girl loved my hand-made ivy crown so much I was happy to let her have it after the show, but sadly we were so busy we forgot to get any pictures. Oh well. Anyway, the gist of our presentation was that the scientific method also applies to the field of history, and in fact history is really just another science, with its own peculiarities like every other field.

Craig the Annoyed

Many fans have been telling me for weeks about William Lane Craig's childish rant against me on his radio show Dr. Craig's Current Events Audio Blog. Now that my dissertation has been accepted for defense (I'll blog on that in a week or two), I finally found time to listen to it. It is kind of sad. But it's the sort of petty and bigoted belittling I hear many Christians launch against whoever or whatever annoys them. So I'm not surprised.

That Habermas-Licona Interview

Recently I was asked to help Reginald Finley (The Infidel Guy) interview Gary Habermas and Mike Licona on why they believe Jesus was raised from the dead by God. This event went off disastrously, and a few days later I wrote here about why I thought it had, in an entry for Monday, November 6, 2006. Many people responded, and several of them made valid observations that convinced me I was wrong about a lot of things. In my original post I was inappropriately harsh, one-sided, and unfair to all sides, and mistaken on a few points. I felt it was unfair to the producer and the guests of Reggie's show to leave my blog entry as it was, so I am now rewriting it to reflect my change of perspective.

Everything I now believe is relevant and correct is included below. But anyone with gobs of time on their hands who wants to read my original entry and the discussion that followed can download the text of the whole thread by clicking here. That is only a temporary location, but when it goes down, anyone who is still interested can email me a request to send it by attachment.

Factual Politics (2)

(This is Part I of III of the conclusion to a crazy debate on political philosophy. For the back-story to what follows, jump back to Factual Politics)

Penn & Teller's Magic Bullet

I just got back from vacation and have one great story to tell. Everything went well, my sister's wedding, my talk in Vegas, our trip to Hoover Dam, and so on. But most unexpected was my appearance on stage during the Penn & Teller show as a participant in their famous "Magic Bullet" trick. I'll tell you all about that in a bit.

However, I must pause on another oddity. Though it never touched us, our weekend in Vegas was plagued by a bizarre series of disasters, including a spectacular suicide off the thousand-foot-tall Stratosphere, a plane crash on the Las Vegas strip, a boxing champion's death by motorcycle moronity only a few miles away, and two bombings, one a probable case of arson on the seedy side of town and the other a murder at the Luxor. What the hell, did we walk into an episode of CSI or something!? Or is Vegas always like this?

Anyway, my wife and I, and my sister and her new husband, all went to see Penn & Teller's magic show at the Rio. We all love their cable show Bullshit, and Penn is one of the few celebrities who isn't shy about his atheism and actually supports our movement, so this was the only event in Vegas we thought was worth dropping a ton of cash to see. We were right. Cool stuff. And funny. I also got to meet them after the show. They were so great with fans. Teller was awfully quiet so I didn't say much, just got a signature. But I introduced myself to Penn as Richard Carrier, author of Sense and Goodness without God, and he said he was a big fan. Because of the press of the crowd I didn't have time to ask what he meant by that, but I assume he read my book or possibly some of my stuff online. We had no working camera, so sadly I have no photo for you. But the image to the left is the adcard I had them sign.

I won't give away the rest of the show, though there are several impressive things in it, indeed amazing things when you think about the fact that this is live, on stage, right before your eyes. It's not showy magic, like Copperfield's spectacles, but funnier and simpler and all the more impressive for it. The grand finale of these was the quite astonishing "magic bullet" trick. This had us all stumped, especially since I was called up to verify everything, so I can vouch for the fact that they weren't using audience plants (Penn obviously hadn't recognized me and didn't know who I was until after the show).

I'll describe this trick as I and the audience saw it. Then I'll tell you how I think it was done. But I'll give you a spoiler warning before I do the latter, in case you're the sort who thinks knowing the secret "ruins" it or something. That way you can stop reading there, and go on being amazed, or even go see the show yourself and try to figure it out on your own.

Rosenberg on Naturalism

In my previous post I discussed my involvement as a commentator on a recent provocative article by Alex Rosenberg (see Rosenberg on History). At the time I had been asked to cut my word count by moving my discussion of Rosenberg's strange take on history as a science to my blog (which you can find in that previous entry, linked above). It was subsequently decided that my remaining word count is still unfairly high for the forum, so I was asked to summarize my remaining eight points at the forum (see summary), and move the full commentary here as well. So what follows is just a verbatim copy of what had been in comment posts there before, but is now archived here. I have replaced them there with a single summary post briefing all nine objections.