Unifying Moral Philosophy

 

If you're new to philosophy, you'll get told that there are loads of moral theories to consider, and you'll end up entangled in a complex web of interrelated and competing propositions that take you far off course from fundamental principles. Here I’m going to show that you only really need the big four, and I'm going to radically simplify things by showing that the big four moral theories in philosophy are really just partial rational reconstructions of a unified moral reality whose fullness is revealed in Christ. In other words, the fundamental moral theories we engage with in moral philosophy are partial, distorted, or truncated apprehensions of a deeper moral reality that finds its unity in Christ.

First, I’ll briefly summarise the big four moral theories. Consequentialism judges actions by their outcomes: the right act is the one that produces the best overall result. Deontology is underwhelmed by outcome-based morality, insisting that some actions are inherently right or wrong because of moral duties and principles that must be followed regardless of consequences. Virtue ethics shifts the focus from isolated acts to the formation of character, arguing that morality is about becoming a good person whose habits naturally produce right action. Natural law provides the deeper foundation for all of this by asserting that morality is grounded in the purpose and structure of human nature, so the good is what fulfils the kind of creature we were created to be, and moral rules are practical guides to flourishing.

To see how the fundamental moral theories are embedded in a deeper Christ-centred reality, we must first recognise that Christ is the moral telos: the final purpose toward which all moral action is directed. Creation has a purpose - relationship with God - and moral norms are ordered toward that end. Outcomes matter in worldly terms, but they matter primarily because they shape us toward or away from that end. Likewise, God’s commandments are truthful expressions of the good life for creatures made in God’s image.

From this perspective, each of the four moral theories presents a genuine aspect of moral reality, but each is but a subset of the full picture - the moral perfection of God. Let me try to lay it out. Consequentialism correctly insists that the consequences of our actions matter; God cares about results, because results shape the moral formation of the world and the flourishing of individuals. But consequentialism becomes incomplete when it treats outcomes as the sole criterion of rightness, inadequately capturing the wrongness of actions even if they produce good effects.

Deontology corrects this by insisting that moral duties are binding, but it can become rigid when it divorces duties from the moral telos and the real effects of action, treating rules as if they are extricable from human flourishing, which scripture confirms is untrue. Virtue ethics rightly returns us to character, arguing that morality is about becoming a person who naturally loves well; but it can become incomplete if it fails to specify the objective good toward which virtue aims, or if it ignores the need for moral rules in a fallen world.

So, here we could say that natural law provides the missing foundation, in that it explains why moral norms bind, why virtues are ordered toward human flourishing, and why outcomes and duties are not ultimately mere human construct, but in fact rooted in the purpose God built into human nature.

Thus, when seen most truthfully, the “big four” are not competing systems, as many philosophers think - they are more like four lenses we use to view the same horizon. Consequentialism highlights the moral importance of results, deontology highlights the binding authority of duty, virtue ethics highlights the formation of character, and natural law supplies the metaphysical and theological grounding that makes all three intelligible. When they are properly understood, they complement each other, and they all point toward the same moral reality revealed in Christ.

We are nearly there, but while I think everything above is correct - it won’t quite do by itself, because we now have to frame this though God’s love (agape) as the inner power that explains why telos, duty, consequence, and virtue all cohere. Because at the very deepest level, the unity of these moral perspectives cannot be explained by abstract teleology alone, only by Divine love. To offer a musical analogy, the telos explains the intended harmony of the piece, but only love explains the Divine unity and expressiveness of the performance. In other words, one can play some of the correct notes and still miss the music; love is what binds the timing, tone, cohesion and emphasis into something intelligible as music rather than mere notes and chords.

Or to put it another way, the telos explains where the journey is going, but love explains the call to undertake it, persevere through it, and be united with fellow travellers along the way - because the whole journey and the final destination is all about love really. If we could peep behind the stage door and see the full production scenes for the grand cosmic narrative, we’d see that every human motive, aspiration, connection, desire and decision - from the clothes we wear, the career we pursue, the friendships we cultivate, the families we form, the sacrifices we make, the approval we seek, the meaning we chase - was really a reaching out for love rightly ordered and finally fulfilled in God.

That is why I think Christ names love of God and love of neighbour as the two great commandments, because in doing so He reveals love not merely as one moral value among others, but as the true form of all moral goodness. Love explains why consequences matter, because to love another is to seek their true good; it explains why duties bind, because love respects the dignity and inviolability of persons; it explains why virtue is central, because love must be learned, habituated, and embodied in character; and it explains why natural law has authority, because love is ordered toward the flourishing of the kinds of creatures God created us to be. Detached from love, consequentialism becomes a mere calculus of instrumental optimisation, deontology becomes mere legalism, virtue ethics becomes mere self-cultivation, and natural law becomes mere biology. Rooted in love, however, these are revealed as distinct but harmonious ways of articulating what it means to live rightly before God and with one another.

Why There Is No Such Thing As A 'Cultural Christian'

 

Strident atheist Richard Dawkins has made the headlines recently by referring to himself as a ‘cultural Christian’. In a recent social media post, I stated that there isn’t really such a thing as a cultural Christian – it’s just special pleading, to excuse a lack of real faith and obedience yet associate yourself with Christian virtues. And after a discussion ensued, I wrote a few more things, so thought I’d turn it into a blog post, in case it’s useful to any of my readers.

I went on to say that you either accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour and seek wholeheartedly to live in accordance with that belief, or like a branch cut from the vine, you bear no fruit and remain far from the source. Jesus is clear; discipleship is full commitment – and while genuine faith can be immature, inconsistent, or still forming, discipleship ultimately entails real allegiance to Jesus as Lord, expressed in repentance and a transformed direction of life. There is no ‘cultural’ middle way there.

One or two Christians took issue and said they do believe there is such a thing as a ‘cultural Christian’ – but I think much of the defence of ‘cultural Christian’ here rests on a category error. The proper definition of a Christian is somebody who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour – it’s a clear cut demarcation line (see 1 Corinthians 12:3, John 3:3, John 1:12, Romans 10:9, 2 Corinthians 5:17). This isn’t to deny, as I said above, that genuine Christians may be immature, inconsistent, or still growing - but those are questions of discipleship, not definition. One cannot be a “Cultural somebody who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour” if they haven’t accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. Similarly, one cannot be a ‘cultural Christian’ by virtue of merely living in a Christian country, any more than a man who is not legally qualified to offer advice about the law can call himself a lawyer, just because he mixes in circles in which lawyers mix. In using the lawyer illustration, I do not, of course, mean to imply that one has to be qualified to be a Christian. Quite the contrary.

Consequently, then, the two most vociferous arguments presented in support of there being such a thing as a ‘cultural Christian’ actually had it backwards, where the objection actually strengthen my case and weakens theirs. I’ll take them in turn:

1. The faulty ‘salt’ metaphor objection
One commenter claimed the ‘salt’ metaphor (from Matthew 5:13) argues in favour of a ‘cultural Christian’, although he has subsequently deleted that comment, so hopefully he now sees it is faulty. Here’s why. Let’s simplify it in set-theoretic terms. Let the set of Christians mean those who have accepted Christ as Lord, as per my proper definition. And let the set of people influenced by Christianity mean all those whose thinking, behaviour, or moral intuitions have been shaped by Christianity. It is obviously true that the set of Christians is contained within the larger set of people influenced by Christianity. But it is not true that the set of people influenced by Christianity is contained within the set of Christians. Being influenced by Christianity does not make someone a Christian. The “salt” metaphor describes how Christians affect those influenced by Christianity. It does not claim that those who are affected by this influence thereby become Christians themselves. So, to infer the existence of “cultural Christians” from the “salt” teaching is therefore a non sequitur - it illegitimately moves from the fact of influence to a claim about identity, without any logical justification. Salt seasons meat; it does not turn meat into salt.

The salt metaphor describes the effect Christians have on the world, not the definition of who is a Christian. One must comprehend that influence does not equal membership. In fact, we can take it further, when we see Jesus warn that “If the salt loses its saltiness, it is no longer good for anything” (Matthew 5:13). That is, salt that becomes indistinguishable from meat ceases to be salt. A “cultural Christian” category actually describes unsalty salt in Jesus’ terms - so the metaphor actually cuts against the commenter’s argument, and strengthens mine.

2. The faulty ‘connotational /notational’ objection
The second objection was that since natural language is connotational rather than notational "cultural Christianity" does have utility, and that in denying there is such a thing as a ‘cultural Christian’ I am attempting to use natural language as if it were notational alone. To which I say, it’s strange that the objector would use the connotational/notational language distinction on their side of the discussion, as this one also weakens the opposition’s case and strengths mine. Here’s why. Defining one’s terms and precision of language is the bedrock of a discussion, and that is why I reject the notion of a ‘cultural Christian. That is, connotational language is still not extricable from meaning - and because natural language is connotational, misleading connotations matter more, not less. So when the commenter said “The phrase has utility because natural language is connotational”, they are getting it backwards. I think the phase ‘cultural Christian has less utility because natural language is connotational – and whether one is a Christian or not belongs in a much more precise category of language, in that one either is a Christian or one isn’t. 

So, ironically, I think the objector’s comment is actually conceding my concern. The primary issue is about whether a term that grammatically predicates “Christian” of people or societies can do so without implying some form of Christian identity. That implication is not something I’m inventing; it’s carried by ordinary usage of the word “Christian” as a noun. So, because language carries connotations, attaching “Christian” to a person or culture inevitably suggests belonging, not merely influence. That is why the phrase does not remain neutral, even when someone hedges it with quotation marks.

In closing
Being ‘born again’ and having the Holy Spirit is a binary distinction (see 1 Corinthians 12:3). So, this is a discussion about semantic scope. I am not denying that Christianity has cultural effects, of course, or that people may identify with those effects. I am denying that the word ‘Christian’ can be detached from allegiance to Christ without losing its meaning. If all people mean is “culturally influenced by Christianity,” then that phrase already exists and is perfectly clear. Introducing the noun “Christian” does no additional explanatory work - so precision of language and definition is key here. Once we are talking about individuals, “Christian” is not a loose cultural or sociological descriptor. In both Scripture and ordinary language, it names allegiance to Christ, because that’s how Christ defines it. Therefore, culturally influenced by Christianity does not equate to 'cultural Christian' because, as I said clearly above, a Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Saviour and has received the Holy Spirit as a result. If you accept that definition (and proposition) - and I can't see why you wouldn't - then one either is or is not a Christian. And therefore, the term 'cultural Christian' is a bogus distraction. A British Muslim who has lived in the UK all his life might be "culturally influenced by Christianity", but we wouldn't be helping matters of clarity much if we called him a 'cultural Christian'.

And this applies to Richard Dawkins too. However much one may admire aspects of Christianity or acknowledge its cultural influence, the New Testament uses the word Christian to describe those who have come to personal allegiance to Jesus Christ. That invitation remains open to everyone, at any stage of life, and Christianity has always insisted that becoming a Christian is not about heritage or admiration, but about response. And there’s always time for Richard – my dear mum became a Christian at the age of 79, and is now 80, and has been totally transformed by her new relationship with God. The invitation remains open to all.

Journeys & Destinations

 

“What we call the beginning is often the end;
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
T. S. Eliot

I was thinking about our pursuits towards achievement in life, and how it is a cycle of journeys and destinations. The journeys of striving lead to destinations of success, but those destinations beget further journeys towards other successes. We know that Camus suggested the struggle is part of the prize, but I think T.S. Eliot is the best writer we encounter at revealing how beginnings and endings fold into one another. Every time something ends - a stage of life, a relationship, a project - something new is beginning, often imperceptibly, because the “end” is not a terminus, it’s a threshold (and highest of all, in Christ’s “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”, Matthew 16:25, where the “end” of the self is the “beginning” of spiritual rebirth).

So, when I think about something like my writing journey over the past 35 years < or insert your own equivalent here >, I find that the gain from striving for a good end is probably at least as formative as the end itself. In other words, any successes I’ve had that contribute to my well-being should be embraced at least as much as the end of the successes, because if “to make an end is to make a beginning”, then in most cases the journey is more valuable than the destination, because each journey encompasses every end, and every end encapsulates each part of the journey - and also because the journeys make up far more of the adventure than the destinations.

Consequently, the value of success in writing lies not primarily in the moment of achievement, but in the vitality and meaning it gives to the act of striving itself, just like the anticipation of a luxury meal often nourishes the soul’s appreciation of fine dining more than the sensation of having eaten the meal. You know what I mean, I think; like how, for those inclined, the seasonal tending of a garden can bring more joy than the brief periods of bloom; or how, if you’re a lark, the fresh dawn often feels more wondrous than the day it foretells. And it’s almost always the case that the effort of learning shapes us more deeply than the end knowledge itself.

All that constitutes the sense in which the striving for good things in general ensures that creation itself is part of the principal reward, where the primary gift of success is not the success, but who you became in pursuit of it. And those who have been disenchanted by a false source of fulfilment will be the first to tell us how pursuing anything valuable merely for its own sake proves to be a hollow endeavour that merely leaves us yearning for more.

Help! My Children Aren’t Christians!

Or alternatively: “Help! My Children Aren’t Christ-centred!” I’m sure we all know many Christian parents of young people who are not in an active relationship with Christ, who show little interest in coming to church, and who currently show no sign of wishing to fully engage with the Christian faith. Let’s analyse some possible reasons why. First, let me draw your attention to this Bana article Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church - which is over ten years old now - but indications from my searches online today suggest the same multifactorial pattern is still prevalent in 2025. The six reasons are, in summary: 

1 – Churches seem overprotective

2 – Teens’ experience of Christianity is shallow

3 – Churches appear antagonistic to science

4 – Church teaching on sexuality feels simplistic, judgmental

5 – They wrestle with Christianity’s exclusivity

6 – Church feels unfriendly to doubt

Now, if you see the world in the way I do, you might already sense that this is quite a mixed bag, and that it evokes the Nietzschean problem (it’s not always easy to tell vice from virtue, and virtue from vice), in that from the perspective of many of those outside the church, some of these I think are virtues being confused with vices; and from the perspective of many of those of us inside the church, some of them are vices being confused with virtues. Let’s take each in turn, where I’ll elaborate on what the findings are, then make a comment:

Reason #1 – Churches seem overprotective
“Today’s teens have unprecedented access to ideas and culture. They want faith to connect with the world, yet experience Christianity as stifling, fear-based, risk-averse. One-quarter say “Christians demonize everything outside the church” (23%). Others feel the church “ignores the problems of the real world” (22%) or is too worried about “movies, music, and video games” (18%).”

My comment: This is the one I find most ambiguous. Christianity has always been, in one sense, radically protective of its truths and virtues, especially in the sense that it has the power to expose and diminish falsehoods. And when the faith is put into proper practice, as per scriptural teachings, it guards the soul against idols that masquerade as freedom but quietly enslave too – so there is probably a lot of virtue being confused with vice here in Reason #1, especially in a world full of people wanting to be gods of their own lives. Yet, on the other hand, when young people in church experience what they deem overprotectiveness, it’s often their particular church’s defensive crouch, in which the leadership behaves as though culture is primarily a contaminant rather than a mission field, so there is mileage in the concern too. But I think a profound truth that always abounds – and especially in the modern era, with floods of competing falsehoods and distractions, more prevalent than ever before - is that a Christian faith that cannot trust its own truths and robustness in the open air of any society and culture will struggle to retain those not rooted in relationship with Christ.

Reason #2 – Teens’ experience of Christianity is shallow
“Many feel something is lacking in church. One-third say “church is boring” (31%). A quarter say faith isn’t relevant to their careers or interests (24%), or that “the Bible is not taught clearly or often enough” (23%). One-fifth say “God seems missing from my experience of church” (20%).”

My comment: Hmmm, okay, but remember that boredom is rarely about a lack of stimulation; it is almost always about a lack of depth within a mind not fully pursuing the adventure of truthseeking. When young people say church feels shallow, I believe that what they are really coveting - often inarticulately - is a faith so much more truthful, powerful and transformative than anything that the weight of life alternatives can hope to offer them. Acquire a relationship with God of such depth and growth that it transforms your heart and mind, reorders your desires, and draws you into the gravitational pull of ultimate meaning, and do all this with the consistently devoted mindset required, and the chances of it appearing boring or shallow are zero. If young people do not encounter this level of exhilaration, it is not surprising that it seems absent in many typical church services or congregations. The places I’ve visited where God appears to be somewhat absent or diluted is often because, for the members, He has been reduced to a comforting abstraction rather than proclaimed as the living centre of reality.

Reason #3 – Churches appear antagonistic to science
“Young adults feel tension between Christianity and science. Many say “Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%) or that churches are “out of step with the scientific world” (29%). Some see Christianity as “anti-science” (25%) or were “turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate” (23%). Science-minded believers struggle to stay faithful in science careers.”

My comment: Yeah, well I’m sure my views on this are crystal clear by now. Christianity has nothing to fear from science, and science says very little about the most important questions that belong in Christianity’s domain. When both are apprehended properly, they are no more in conflict than T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is in conflict with Watson and Crick’s The Double Helix. Yet when the church speaks as though faith were threatened by honest empirical inquiry, it inadvertently implies that truth it is trying to defend is fragile. And in cases when religious fundamentalism distorts empirical facts, it actually cannot tolerate external questions because it knows deep down in the recesses of the conscience that it may not survive them. The bogus, humanly-constructed conflict between faith and science has undoubtedly been one of the most damaging things to the Christian faith – it’s all such a shame, and so entirely unnecessary.

Reason #4 – Church teaching on sexuality feels simplistic, judgmental
“In a hyper-sexualized culture, young believers struggle with chastity and delayed marriage. Research shows many are as sexually active as peers. One-sixth feel judged for their “mistakes” (17%). Among Catholics, two-fifths say church teachings on sexuality and birth control are “out of date” (40%).”

My comment: This is often a case of virtue being confused with vice. Christian sexual ethics are costly, demanding, and countercultural, but entirely necessary and beneficial - and one can easily see the mass harms caused by their abandonment, which is what has happened in much of modern culture has largely abandoned. On the other hand, judgemental Christianity is also a malady, especially when mercy is low. In a world already saturated with shame, anxiety and identity crises, young people who come smack against the church’s failure to accompany them patiently through failure and mistakes, are likely to see even Christianity’s most profound truths and virtues as vehicles of condemnation. If that happens to you, please do find a more loving and gracious church - there are plenty out there.

Reason #5 – They wrestle with Christianity’s exclusivity
“Shaped by values of openness and diversity, young adults want common ground. Three in ten say “churches are afraid of other faiths” (29%) and feel “forced to choose between my faith and my friends” (29%). One-fifth say church feels like a “country club, only for insiders” (22%).”

My comment: Here again, the vice–virtue confusion is acute. While exclusivity without humility or invitation is prohibitive to community, Christianity is exclusive in the same way that truth is exclusive: not because it wishes to exclude, but because it cannot be two contradictory things at once. To say that Christ is the way, truth and life is a claim about reality. Truth precludes falsehood in a healthy and beneficial way, a bit like how medicine deals with our sickness in order to heal. So one cannot come to a full life in Christ except on His terms, which also happen to be the best terms we will ever encounter.

Reason #6 – Church feels unfriendly to doubt
“Young adults say church isn’t a safe place for doubts. They feel unable “to ask my most pressing life questions” (36%) and many have “significant intellectual doubts” (23%). One in six say their faith “does not help with depression or emotional problems” (18%).”

My comment: Yes, this is a big problem – and runs counter to Tennyson’s great observation that “There lives more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds”. One of the best lessons to be learned is that doubt is not the opposite of faith; indifference is. As we see in so many Biblical figures, doubt is often the sign that faith is alive enough to contemplate, to wrestle with, and to pursue God with even greater depth. When churches treat doubt as a moral failure rather than an intellectual and spiritual journey, they unintentionally teach young people to either pretend or leave – which probably engenders a near 100% hit rate because churches that treat doubt as a moral failure are places one would be advised to leave anyway. If the church cannot be a place where questioning, uncertainty, and intellectual struggle are spoken aloud, young people will seek other spaces that at least allow them to tell the truth as they see it, even if it takes them off course for a while.

In closing, I will mention something from a previous blog post that might be useful as an adjunct to the above. A friend of a friend, a researcher called Dave Fenton, did some research on young people who had fallen away from the church at a young age and were no longer following Jesus or on a close walk with Him. The researcher found that the most common reason given was that they felt their parents weren’t living a very Christian life at home, outside of the church – and that their outside conduct didn’t live up to the messages being preached in the church.

So, if the title “Help! My Children Aren’t Christians!” is relatable (and similarly for other young people you know, not just your own children), then I think this taps into one of the all-time most important questions about Christianity – one that never goes away: What kind of faith are people being invited into? Because one thing we can always say with confidence is that young people are exquisitely sensitive to what is real. They may not always be quite ready to give their life to Christ (I know that feeling when I was on the cusp of becoming a Christian), but they can usually embrace authenticity, honesty, mystery, difficulty, and cost that offers genuine transformation. But they rarely forgive boredom, fear, inauthenticity, dishonesty, false humility, false confidence, exaggerated certainty, judgementalism, artifice or pretence.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a hard balance for Christianity to strike, because too much cultural compromise or cultural insulation creates barriers. But Christianity can truly flourish when it is lived as a truthful, honest, life-changing, exhilarating encounter with the living God, and parents and elders who manufacture relevance or dilute conviction will only end up dissuading in the long run. They need only to embody a faith worth exploring and acquiring - one that trusts truth, welcomes honest struggle, and radiates a joy proportionate to the transformative reality it proclaims. If we get back to that, then all the signs are that, for young people, Christianity can be irresistibly caught and sustained.

 

Job Vacancy: Low Skill, High Pay

 

The value of labour is conditioned primarily by two things; the knowledge, skills and experience required to do a job - and related to that, how easy it would be for the next person in line to come in and fill a vacancy. That is why lawyers don't earn £19,000 a year and waiters don't earn £70,000 a year. That is also why you are unlikely to obtain a job with a £70,000 a year salary without the skills and experienced required.

There are, however, one or two exceptions to this near-ineluctable law - the most obvious one is being a Member of Parliament, where you can be ludicrously uninformed, with no real skills or experience in anything that equips you to do your job competently, and yet still find yourself earning an annual salary of £93,904.

Apart from perhaps the paid social commentators who earn their living writing similar guff to what most politicians come out with (and most of them aren't on such a high salary), being an MP really is one of those ultra-rare cases where you can earn a reasonably large salary without having much of a clue about what you're talking about.

And if you happen to find yourself fortunate enough to be in a safe seat, whereby enough of the electorate in your particular constituency are pliable enough to keep voting you in, it's a well-paid job in which you can get away with riding on your public-funded gravy train of confusion for decades.

Only in jobs whereby the salary of such incompetent people is forcibly funded by people with no choice in the matter could such highly paid low skill workers earn over three times the average UK wage and get away with being so confused about so many basic principles related to their roles in society.

Ways Not To Believe Part II

Having argued that non-belief is probably the best term to describe people who are not Christians (see here), it’s probably worth considering whether disbelief is just belief in the negation or a distinct cognitive standpoint. If we think that to not believe q = to believe not-q, then we contend that If Jack believes p, then he automatically believes not-(not-p), which is equivalent to believing p again.

But if not believing is a distinct cognitive standpoint, in at least some way independent of belief in negation, then it’s more akin, say, to how distrust is not identical to belief that someone is untrustworthy, or how dislike is not identical to belief that something is bad. On this view, one can believe p without actively disbelieving not-p. Under this condition the distinction of not believing constitutes a more robust, attentive, or attitude-laden response than simply believing the negation.

Logically: belief(p) → disbelief(not-p) – but whether in the case of rejecting Christianity that feels to the sceptic like it applies may be a matter open for debate with the beholder.

I think if I were to probe the sceptic and take it to its natural course, I’d conclude that whether disbelief is really just shorthand for “belief in the negation,” or whether it is a distinct cognitive standpoint in its own right, depends a lot on whether we are dealing with professed disbelief, unbelief or non-belief. And I wonder, if you asked most non-Christians, would they instinctively know straight way which of the three applies to them? For many, under the terms above, they may not have given it much thought.

If disbelief is simply the flip side of belief - nothing more than affirming not-p when one denies p - then the distinction I’ve drawn collapses neatly into classical logic. On that account, to believe Christianity is false just is to disbelieve it, and the psychological texture of that rejection is irrelevant. But I have argued before that disbelief is more like a worldview in itself, and is a more intentional state than mere logical complement, and far more than most sceptics would like to acknowledge.

Taken with my part one article, it seems quite a compelling case that disbelief occupies a firmer, more deliberate space than either unbelief or non-belief - not because logic requires it, but because lived cognition and behavioural values exhibit it. It’s not quite the same for, say socialists vs. capitalists, because in that case, once we understand human minds as packages of values, economic assumptions, moral priorities, and social aims, socialists are actually capitalists pretending not to be (see here). 

 

Ways Not To Believe

 

I was thinking about how one should express a lack of belief in Christianity’s truth, in terms of the difference between disbelief, unbelief and non-belief. I don’t know if my definitions accord with yours - and please do say if you interpret your lack of belief differently to this - but I take disbelief to be the firmest and most deliberate form of not being a Christian, where a person with disbelief thinks Christian doctrines are not true and responds with a kind of cognitive rejection. In other words, the person has considered Christian teachings and rejects them.

I take unbelief and non-belief to be softer form of not being a Christian, and the distinction between the two is subtler than the distinction between either one of them and disbelief. I take unbelief to be a lack of belief, without specifying whether it's due to rejection, doubt, indifference, lack of exposure, and so forth. We can therefore think of unbelief as a broader term used to mean anyone who does not believe in Christianity’s truth, and non-belief as simply a purely descriptive distinction of lacking belief. So, in summary, as I see it, it’s roughly this:

Disbelief = “I believe Christianity is false.”

Unbelief = “I do not believe in Christianity’s truth” (but reasons vary).

Non-belief = “I lack the belief in Christianity’s truth” (pure description).

Consequently, the set of disbelief is contained within the set of unbelief, and both sets, disbelief and unbelief, are contained within the set non-belief. That is, the terms can be understood as nested sets: disbelief is a subset of unbelief, because anyone who rejects Christianity (disbelief) also lacks belief (unbelief), and both of these are subsets of non-belief, the broadest category describing anyone who simply does not hold Christian belief for any reason.

I have brought this consideration to bear on my editing of books I’m going to send to publishers, because I have been deliberating on the best term to use when describing non-Christians. It may vary in some contexts, but in broad application, non-belief/non-believer, therefore, appears to be the best option. 

Creationism Is Rooted In Fear

A chap I know has started sharing some daily posts on the subject of creation. It became apparent right away that he is a creationist whose posts contained frequent scientific errors and faulty interpretation of scripture. So, being the dutiful and well-meaning citizen that I am, I left some comments (which, in a cowardly, dishonest and, as we'll see below, fearful manner, he deleted from public viewing), then offered him some further gentle encouragement and advice after he sent me a private message. But I also expressed concern that his errors would mislead the very people he said he hopes will get saved. He said science isn't really his thing, so I even offered to look at his drafts prior to posting, and advise on any suggested adjustments beforehand, to help him produce accurate posts. Alas, after a few more messages between us, it became clear that my creationist acquaintance has inadequate interest in ensuring what he is posting is correct, and has proceeded to carry on posting inaccurate and misleading information on his daily offerings. 

What strikes me most about conversations like this with creationists is how they are so rigidly closed, lacking humility and curiosity, and how they maintain an unhealthy indifference to whether their beliefs are true or not. Which is why I want to say that there are lots of factors at play in creationism (evolution-deniers) - closed-mindedness, dogmatism, confirmation bias, misinformation, etc - but the two primary traits that both underpin the others and run through them are, I believe, ignorance and fear (unless they are a Hawk, see my Hawks, Pigeons & Sparrows blog here - in which case it's usually power and control). Fear because they are beset by religious fundamentalism that threatens their black and white identity, and ignorance because it’s the safest place to remain to assuage their fears. Like in many other walks of life, fear is utterly crippling to an individual’s ability to be liberated by truth, free enquiry, critical thinking, relationships, adventure, travel, personal development, self-awareness and intellectual curiosity.

And if you’re a creationist reading this thinking “Huh, I don’t feel particularly fearful about my creationism”, well that probably just means that your fear has been so deeply ingrained and normalised that you don’t even recognise it as fear - it falsely masquerades as confidence or denial to keep the fear in check.

The above shows why classic psychological literature says that the opposite of most fear is knowledge and understanding. Some elements of fear, of course, have their initial opposite in courage (courage to step out of your comfort zone and dare to try something) but it is the knowledge and understanding of that pursuit that brings it to fruition. For example, if you’re socially anxious and require courage to go to a social gathering, courage might get you there, but it’s the familiarity brought with knowledge and understanding (repeated experience) that will assuage your fears in the longer term.

Most people who have not been ensnared by creationism understand that the opposite of the fear that drives their creationism is knowledge and understanding; of why there is nothing to be fearful of accepting evolution as consistent with their Christian faith; of why smarter scriptural interpretation would expend their theological comprehension; of why embracing reality leads to a deeper, more meaningful engagement with both the natural world and their spiritual journey, and so on. The opposite of being afraid is embracing knowledge and understanding, because courage leads to curiosity, which leads to learning, and ultimately, to wisdom and liberation.

We could even apply this to one of the most important Biblical truths, but perhaps in reverse; "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). Remember, “fear of the Lord” here means deep reverence, awe, and respect for God's greatness, standards goodness and truth – so it is a healthy fear that is likely to increase with the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. In other words, seeking God is a healthy fear and desire to be everything you can be, and rejecting God is an unhealthy fear of what you could be if you were courageous enough to seek. That’s why the unhealthy fear that underpins the creationists’ mindset is also stopping them being the Christians they have the potential to be in places they can't yet realise.

Writer's Update: On Whether To Consider Self-Publishing

 

When I think about whether to self-publish my work on Amazon or look for other publishing routes, I often come back to a simple truth: writing a book is an enormous investment of time, focus, and heart - but once it’s written, sharing it costs almost nothing. In economics terms, book-writing has a large fixed cost and low marginal cost. A print-on-demand can be acquired with the touch of a few buttons, and a Kindle file can reach readers anywhere in seconds. Given that the price will have to be at least average cost, potential customers who value it at less than that but more than marginal cost won’t end up buying it - and this is even more problematic with my epic works, which contain so many words that to break even with self-publishing (say, on The Genius of the Invisible God, which is currently a whopping 275,000 words) I’d have to charge £30-£40 per book - which, even though it would be obviously worth it once you open it and discover how scintillating every page is 😊- at that price, it is a hard proposition to sell.

And then we should consider deadweight losses, which are the loss of total economic efficiency that occurs when the equilibrium outcome (where supply meets demand) is prevented (usually through some tax, regulation or unnecessarily imposed cost - and in this case potentially caused by pricing constraints and cost structure). Because every potential reader is likely to have to pay the same price for a book, that price has to cover both the creation and distribution costs, meaning some readers who would have paid more than it costs to deliver the book but less than the average cost are left out. And as a result, the book might never get published. Obviously, when pricing can adjust to different consumers’ willingness to pay, as per price discrimination, creators can reach more people while still covering their total costs - but it’s probably not easy in self-publishing.

Beware Richard Carrier: Don’t Fall For His Deceptive Methods

 

Perhaps the best thing that’s ever happened to slippery grifter and unpleasant manipulator Richard Carrier on the Internet is my set of articles in which I try to help him reason better, be more honest, and become a kinder person (see here, here, here and here). But, alas, he got totally triggered and decided to write a horrendous dismissal of my critique of his terrible article on using Aristotle’s existence to undermine Jesus’ existence.

Now, I normally wouldn’t waste this sort of time on discredited people like Carrier – he’s the young earth creationist of the world of mythicist history. But as regulars will know, I do use the exposing of fraudulence and bad reasoning to showcase deeper psychological and philosophical tools at play in how masses of people can be manipulated, in the hope that it will help others see through the cheat. So, blog posts like these can serve as useful tools in aiding readers in critical evaluation and spotting bad arguments, even when they are - and perhaps especially when they are - presented with the outward appearance of sophistication.

Carrier’s modus operandi is a classic case in point – and while he’s not taken seriously by virtually all credible professionals in any of the subjects about which he writes extensively, he does seem to have assembled a small micro-cult following from a few thousand people who he’s duped into thinking he’s someone worth following because he’s onto things that even most experts have missed. Spoiler alert: he’s not; he’s a crank, and, from my personal experience, a deeply unpleasant one at that – which I’m going to expose, in a moment by showing how he manipulates the subject matter to sound like he’s offering sound refutations, but first, on the psychology of how his readers could possibly fall for such a blatantly untrustworthy front man.

I don’t care if Carrier reads this – he is almost certainly never going to change. But I do want his readers to read this, because they deserve better, and should want so much better for themselves, just as I want so much better for them. I’ll use Carrier’s own words from his article criticising me to show you every element of his deception, in the hope that it will help his readers see through him, and in the hope that it will give my readers a lesson more generally in how to see through people like Carrier.

Because the first thing that makes people like Carrier interesting for all the wrong reasons is how it can be the case that his readers can’t see through him, when it should be so much more obvious to them that he’s not to be trusted.

As a case in point, let me state right here that I’m going to submit this on the comments section of his blog post, but I’ll bet you don’t see it appear – because he won’t allow anything in the comments that shows him up at this level.

Before I get to Carrier’s errors of reasoning and mistaken arguments, I’ll first expose the primary psychological cheats he employs. 

1) The dismissive insult
Carrier’s tactic of insulting dismissals, the one he employs most often (“C.S. Lewis may have been the worst philosopher of the twentieth century”, “AI Is garbage“, “Jordan Peterson is a crank”, any expert who disagrees with him is a ‘buffoon’, ‘doofus’, ‘bozo’ etc ), is a deliberate strategy employed by many manipulators of his nature. Because Carrier’s worst fear is being exposed, his ‘go to’ strategy is to try to intimidate readers and critics into thinking disagreement = stupidity. It’s an attempt at psychological dominance and frame control, where his own followers are made to feel judged for even contemplating someone is onto him, and encouraged to dismiss not just all the experts who have exposed his work as wrong and his arguments as sub-standard, but be dissuaded from checking it out for themselves. That is what cult leaders do – it’s as old as the hills.

Of course, it can only work on people either too uniformed or too malleable to spot the cheat. I’ll give you an example which appears in literally the first thing he says in introducing his critique of me; he says “Today I make an example of an internet buffoon”. Now wait. Just stop and ask yourself several things about that. Any of his readers could look at my blog and find exactly who I am. I’m someone with over 1000 blog posts on the Philosophical Muser site to which he linked, and hundreds of articles of mine for other institutions. In that body of work you would find some of the most comprehensive and consistent in depth analyses of most subjects out there – there is no way anyone with half a brain could look at my material and write me off an as ‘Internet buffoon’. Moreover, Carrier knows I’m not an ‘Internet buffoon’, so why did he lie and say I am? In other words, why is the very first thing he said a lie? It’s easy, because unless he lies, he can’t get his readers on side, and by starting with a blatant lie he can lay the foundation down to have them fall for his nonsense reply to my article.

Think about what that means if you’re one of his readers – he just lied to you, knowing that if you searched through my work you’d know he’s lying because you’d know I’m not an ‘Internet buffoon’ – I’m actually much more on top of these subjects than Carrier (which is why he refused to debate me live on video – see below). But it also shows something else telling; it shows that Carrier has contempt for his readers – he doesn’t care that you could find out the truth really easily – he’s just expecting you to swallow it without care because he has so little regard for you. And if you think about it, that’s exactly what you’d expect. He can’t really value his readers beyond your merely as serving as props for his arch manipulations, because he thinks most of you are so gullible you’ll just swallow it up hook, line and sinker. How can he respect people who he knows fall for his cunning deceptions, and thank him for it afterwards?

It reminds me a bit of the Nigerian prince scam, where virtually nobody falls for it, but the scammers still use the Nigerian prince method on the basis that if you're one of the few gullible people left in the world who hasn't been apprised of the Nigeria scam and are likely to fall for it, you will be of those for whom the uniformity of the 'Nigeria' email won't be alarming and prohibitive. With the simplicity of using Nigeria each time, the scammers save having to waste time with all the false positives, and they will continue to catch in their net the few gullible fish still in the sea. Carrier has contempt for his followers because the fact that you’ve become one of his followers has already showed him how gullible you are. As said, I want so much better for you.

By the time he’s moved on to his next line in the article, he’s already told a second big lie: saying my private messages to him reflect “someone painfully immature and emotionally irrational, with no interest in learning or understanding or engaging in any kind of intellectual discussion”. Well, yes, they do – but they reflect those things about Carrier, ironically – and I have screen shots of them to back that up if ever needed. I won’t labour on that point, but suffice to say, Carrier wasn’t willing to take up my offer of a live debate – where he knows there’s nowhere to hide and where the fraudster is forced to think on their feet, and can’t hide behind carefully manipulated, long-winded written texts – he showed a firmer desire to have a written debate, but when I left a voice message to explore this, he said, ‘I don’t listen to voice messages’ (which is ridiculous in this context, but expected from a narcissist like him) – and then when I sent him a written message giving some suggestions about what we could debate, he simply brushed it off with ‘tl;dr’. He’s an absolute joke of a man.

I mentioned that he’s a narcissist – which you can probably sense by his own words on his Facebook profile:

Yes, I'm the real Richard Carrier. Sadly, I'm much too busy to hang out here much. But I have to maintain a FaceBook page to prevent malicious hacks from pretending to be me.

What a scream that is – compounded by the fact that most narcissists have no idea how deep their own narcissism runs. Virtually no one outside his cult knows who Richard Carrier is, yet he has the audacity to assert “Yes, I'm the real Richard Carrier”, who’s “much too busy” to hang out with the likes of you lot, but I’d better have a page to “prevent people from pretending to be me”. Haha, I honestly can’t think of a single scenario in the world where someone would have the even a flicker of inclination to pretend to be Richard Carrier. Hilarious. 

2) Deflection through projection
Now, let me show you another tactic employed my manipulators like Carrier – he chooses terms of insult, like ‘childish’, to shift attention away from his deceptive methods and onto a manufactured image of his critic as the villain. It’s one of the oldest psychological tricks that insecure thinkers like him play. He wants you to think I’m childish so you don’t take my criticisms seriously - in fact, he uses this accusation that I’m childish EIGHTEEN times in the article, no less. Again, it’s another fat lie that shows utter contempt for you, his readers, because you can quite easily find out for yourself that I’m not a childish person. What I do have, as evidenced from highlights of what I sent Carrier in messenger over the past few months, is the measure of him, and a desire that he no longer gets away with his manipulations online. That is the opposite of childishness. Here are some examples of what I sent to him: 

I've looked at some of your writings today, and two of the primary things that stand out are this: 

1) You pretty much always conjure up in your head what you want the conclusion to be, and then use any squalid method possible to argue for that. 

2) Your body of work is similar to that of a young earth creationist, except with the signs reversed. You leave out so much of the vital material, you distort the arguments of your opponents, you argue dishonestly, and your operate on counterfactual peripheries in the hope of forging a niche reputation, where any expert in the field would easily show your ideas to be wrong, and you  produce material that relies on the ignorance and pliability of your audience, where your only recognition comes from people too intellectually lightweight to see through you. 

Your writings don’t come across that way – the most important thing to you is how others perceive you, and your asset or non-assent to truth is driven by how you think you can get more popular and regarded, which means claiming to hold positions that are niche enough to give you a certain type of following. You also claim to care what people who disagree with you think, but that is not backed up by your policy of limiting comments on your page/articles – which is exactly what one would expect of someone about whom the above agenda applies. 

Have you not noticed that you always write off people as cranks, when you're the crank? Have you also noticed that cranks, like YECs, almost never do live debates either, because they don't want to be exposed? 

Even though I was being friendly, the reason you reacted unpleasantly is because all narcissists do this when they are deeply insecure and have been found out by someone who has the measure of them. Biting back aggressively is a classic sign of being found out - it’s what Waugh referred to in one of his letters as “the concealed malice of the underdog”. All that you said in your hostile response is undermined by the fact that you don’t have the courage or intellect to debate me live, where you would have to display your mind, think quickly on your feet, and not hide behind walls of manipulative text within the cosy self-incarceration of your echo chamber.  What you do, sir, is not truthseeking, and nor does it show good character – it’s a cliched Promethean cheat that will only bring you shallow and transitory pleasures – not ultimate joy, fulfilment, contentment or wisdom. When you reach the age of realisation of this, I’ll be happy to have a civilised conversation with you.

The fact that you dismissed all that in a few minutes shows me you can't be taken seriously, and just want to believe what's convenient for you.

And the same with all the attention-seeking about being godless, polyamorous, etc. The big contradiction at the heart of polyamory, I think, is that a person who is not mature and cultivated enough to comprehend how their needs can be fulfilled in the right monogamous relationship with one beloved, will also not be mature and cultivated enough to realise that their needs cannot be fulfilled through multiple relationships or sexual unions, however plentiful the number and varied the experiences. Things can still be much better for you, but not until you change and become wiser. And if those comments induce rage in you, that's because you know how much force it takes to defend a fragile house of cards.

See what I mean? Not childish at all, is it? It’s hard-hitting, sure, but it’s hard-hitting because people like Carrier need to be told that they won’t always get away with things. And there’s nothing in any of my public works that is childish or immature. It’s only what Carrier needs you to think to put the guard up against his being exposed. Carrier, on the other hand, does appear childish in virtually all his conduct – private or public. He is the one who writes off people with crass dismissiveness; peppers his blog posts with puerile Americanisms like ‘doofus’ and bozo’; isn’t even mature enough to sustain a faithful, monogamous relationship, and insults anyone who doesn’t let him get his own way. That is the epitome of childishness. 

The arguments
Let’s look further now at his attempted rebuttals, because they serve as a good lesson in how to ‘sound’ clever and competent when really it’s a litany of further errors of reasoning, bad arguments, and YEC-like distortions of data and fact. His attempted rebuttal fails at every critical level the first article does, but to an even greater extent, because this time he is trying harder to dig himself out of a bigger hole. 

He still rigs his Bayesian model from the outset by inventing reference classes that already assume Jesus is fictional, still assigns precise-looking likelihood ratios that are wholly uncalibrated, empirically ungrounded, and indistinguishable from personal intuition dressed up as mathematics; he still compounds this by multiplying dependent, culturally and textually interconnected evidence streams as if they were probabilistically independent, grotesquely inflating his results in violation of basic Bayesian requirements; he still, in classic Carrier style, responds to criticism by redefining dissent as ignorance of Bayes; and yet again, his ultimate proof of failure is that his method reliably produces fringe conclusions rejected by the historical discipline at large, not because historians fear probability theory, but because his model fundamentally misunderstands how historical evidence, sources, and uncertainty actually work.

To save wasted time going through dozens of his errors, I will just pick the ones I think come across as his best attempts at rebuttals – which are still sub-standard – but they are the ones that I think will most fool his readers, because on the surface they look like the most sophisticated. Again, I’m doing this to expose the subtle art of squalid manipulation, and show how it can easily come across as highly sophisticated, intellectual criticism. We’ll start with his comments first, then my comments underneath.

Richard Carrier 1#: Muser confuses the fact that we have evidence specific for Alexander the Great that keeps his posterior probability high with meaning his prior probability should also be high. It’s the other way around: if all we had were the wild myths of Alexander, his prior and posterior probabilities would be low, and all historians would agree—as they do for Hercules and Osiris, for example. The only reason we conclude Alexander existed is because of the evidence specific to him. Therefore, mathematically, his prior probability, which is the probability prior to considering all that evidence, cannot be affected by that fact. It therefore would not go up. It would stay low. It would remain in fact exactly what it would be if that evidence didn’t exist. That’s literally the point of the prior probability.

My comment: Oh wow, boy is this man slippery in his confusion. Most extreme people online either speak cleverly and competently or they speak foolishly and incompetently – whereas Carrier is one of those rare beasts who tries to perfect the art of sounding clever and competent while misleading you with hollow claims. I believe that’s why he draws in a certain unsuspecting following. Carrier’s claim sounds confident, but it is conceptually mistaken, and the mistake reveals exactly where his Bayesian reasoning departs from how priors actually function in historical inference. It’s basic stuff; a prior is not “what you would believe if you erased all relevant background knowledge and pretended only myths existed.” That is not what a prior is in Bayesian reasoning, and it is certainly not how priors are set in any applied field, including history. A prior is the probability of a hypothesis before considering the specific evidence under adjudication, given all relevant background knowledge. Background knowledge is not “the evidence being tested,” but the wider contextual facts that frame what kinds of hypotheses are plausible in the first place.

Carrier’s hypothetical - “if all we had were the wild myths of Alexander” – is a high school category error. If all we had were myths, then those myths would themselves become part of the evidence under evaluation, and the background knowledge would change radically. In that imaginary world, historians would also lack knowledge of Macedonian kingship, successor states, administrative continuity, geopolitical causation, and the normal sociological patterns of royal propaganda. That is not a legitimate way to define a prior; it is a counterfactual that strips away the very background conditions that inform rational priors.

For Alexander, the prior is higher than for Jesus not because of later literary attestation, but because the background facts already make his non-existence implausible (that is, empires do not appear without founders, successor states do not arise from fictional conquerors, and administrative and political continuity does not emerge from pure myth, that sort of thing). Those facts belong in the prior because they are not the disputed evidence; they are the historical context that constrains what explanations are reasonable. Ignoring them is methodological carelessness.

Moreover, Carrier’s statement that “that’s literally the point of the prior” reverses the concept. The point of a prior is not to simulate epistemic ignorance; it is to encode justified background expectations before updating on contested evidence. The problem is not that Carrier uses priors - obviously; it is that he defines them in a way that excludes precisely the kind of background knowledge historians are obligated to use. If you Google research Carrier’s historical disputes with others, you’ll see this plays out repeatedly in his tactics. And please do the research and see for yourself.

Carrier’s other repeated mistake here is the category error of treating priors as if they must be set in a historical vacuum stripped of all contextual background knowledge except “myth vs non-myth.” That is not how priors work in applied Bayesian reasoning, and it is certainly not how historians reason. A prior is not “what you would think if you pretended no contextual evidence existed at all”; it is what you assign before evaluating the specific evidence under dispute, given all relevant background knowledge. Carrier’s attempt to freeze the prior at a myth-only baseline misunderstands that priors legitimately incorporate historically grounded context, not just genre labels. In short, Alexander’s prior is higher than Jesus’s not because of the later literary evidence, but because the background conditions surrounding Macedonian kingship already make non-existence unlikely.

Richard Carrier 2#: Only when we add that evidence does it go up, but that’s then the posterior (not the prior) probability; and all of the change from the one to the other is in the likelihood ratio, not the prior. Alexander’s prior stays the same as for Jesus, which I set at 1 in 3 in my article on Aristotle, same as my original study (it has since been reduced to 1 in 4, as I there explain, but I set that aside to argue a fortiori). That Muser doesn’t know this shows he has no actual understanding of Bayesian reasoning or mathematics, and thus is not at all qualified to critique any application of it.

My comment: Look how he uses forceful rhetoric to make a statement that laypeople probably wouldn’t spot is just flat out conceptually wrong. Carrier is correct about one narrow point of formalism – that likelihood ratios are what update priors. But he is flatly wrong to insist that Alexander’s prior “stays the same as for Jesus.” That claim only follows if one defines priors in an artificially stripped-down way that excludes historically relevant background knowledge. Bayesian reasoning does not require identical priors across hypotheses; it requires justified priors given what is already known before examining the specific evidence at issue.

The crucial mistake is that Carrier treats the prior as though it must be set before any historically meaningful differentiation is allowed. But priors are not epistemic blank slates. In historical inference, they legitimately encode background asymmetries such as political context, sociological plausibility, institutional continuity, causal footprint, and what have you. Alexander is embedded in a well-understood class of phenomena - Hellenistic kings, imperial conquest, succession crises, and administrative aftermath - that rarely, if ever, arise from fictional individuals. Jesus, by contrast, belongs to a class of itinerant religious preachers in a highly myth-making environment where symbolic invention and theological personification are known mechanisms. These asymmetries belong in the prior, not forcibly suppressed until the likelihood stage. The fact that Jesus is so well attested is what shifts the posterior, but it does not retroactively inflate his prior; the background context keeps his prior lower than Alexander’s, even before examining the evidence.

By insisting that all differentiation must occur through likelihood ratios, Carrier is not following Bayes neutrally; he is imposing a modelling constraint that artificially equalises starting positions in order to push all discrimination into later stages where he can manipulate likelihood assignments. That is not honest work.

Finally, Carrier’s accusation that disagreement here shows “no understanding of mathematics” is equally dishonest. The objection is how he creates the parameter. One can fully understand Bayesian updating and still reject a model that defines priors in a way that deliberately excludes relevant background knowledge. That is methodological disagreement – and the fact that he thinks it’s a mathematical disagreement shows he doesn’t really understand what is being debated here, never mind where his errors lie.

In fact, I’m probably being too charitable still – because this is where Carrier’s Bayesian formalism detaches completely from historical reality. He is correct mathematically that updating happens via likelihood ratios - but he is wrong to insist that priors must therefore be equalised across radically different historical contexts. Bayesian reasoning requires justified priors, not identical priors. Treating Jesus and Alexander as starting with the same 1-in-3 prior simply because both later acquire mythic narratives ignores massive asymmetries in background knowledge: political structures, documentary cultures, social incentives for invention, administrative continuity, and the presence or absence of motive and mechanism for fabrication. Bayesian models that flatten these distinctions are not neutral; they are distorted. Carrier’s accusation that disagreement here shows “no understanding of Bayes” confuses what I would call mastery of a formula with competence in model construction. He can’t see this because he’s not on top of this subject. The sleight of hand trick is in deliberately stripping priors of historically relevant information in order to force all differentiation into the likelihood stage – well, I say ‘sleight of hand trick’, but with Carrier it’s not always evident whether he’s being deceptive or just confused, because he is both so often.

That is not principled Bayesianism; it is model engineering - and I see the same thing with so many other guru figures that the question of honest ignorance or deliberate deception continually looms large. Carrier is more like the equivalent of YEC’s Grady McMurtry than Ken Ham. I’m convinced that Ken Ham is a simpleton as well as dishonest. I’m not sure Grady McMurtry is that simple – but he’s cunningly deceptive, and Carrier strikes me as more like the latter.

Richard Carrier 3#: This is also demonstrated by the fact that he didn’t know my likelihoods for Aristotle not existing already take into account that evidence’s dependency on “a Peripatetic tradition.” He didn’t even know that this is always the case, that it is literally what you are doing when you estimate likelihoods in Bayesian reasoning: you assume the one condition is true (“Aristotle existed”) and then assess how likely the evidence would be dependent on that being the case; then you assume the other condition is true (“it was just a Peripatetic tradition”) and assess how likely the evidence would be dependent on that being the case; and it is the ratio between those two likelihoods that tells you whether that evidence argues for or against either condition (or neither), and the size of that ratio (the difference between those two likelihoods) tells you how weak or strong that evidence is for that conclusion.

My comment: Here Carrier confuses naming dependence with modelling it. While he correctly describes the formal definition of a likelihood ratio, merely imagining an alternative hypothesis (“it was just a Peripatetic tradition”) does not automatically control for evidential dependence. When multiple pieces of evidence arise from the same causal pipeline, they are correlated, and multiplying likelihood ratios still double-counts information unless that correlation is explicitly modelled. Carrier does not do this. He assigns separate likelihood ratios to Aristotle’s writings, testimonies, inscriptions, and later historians, and multiplies them anyway; reducing the numbers does not fix the inflation. Worse, he applies this leniency asymmetrically: dependence is “handled” for Aristotle but used to collapse multiple Jesus traditions into near-total dependence. Again, is it confusion or dishonesty? Either way, it is not principled Bayesian reasoning; it is informal judgment expressed with the appearance of rigour but none of the control. The issue is not whether he conceptually acknowledges dependency, but whether his numerical assignments properly discount correlated evidence streams. In the Aristotle case, nearly all the evidence flows through the same Peripatetic–Hellenistic transmission networks. Treating each as yielding an independent likelihood ratio (even a reduced one) still double-counts shared provenance unless explicitly modelled as conditional on the same causal chain. Carrier never provides such a model; he simply assigns smaller numbers and multiplies anyway. That is not Bayesian rigour, and his readers don’t spot this. Worse, he applies the exact opposite standard to Jesus, collapsing multiple traditions into near-total dependence even when they demonstrably diverge in theology, chronology, and Biblical setting. This asymmetry shows him up for what he is - that he has an agenda, and that his “dependency adjustment” is not principled, it is outcome-driven (which is exactly what my first article expressed too).

Richard Carrier 4#: Every probability in every application of Bayes’ Theorem is a dependent probability. And item by item you can run strict dependency in likelihoods by iterating for each item of evidence in chronological order. But when this has no effect on the outcome, there is no reason to do it, because it requires needlessly complex arithmetic, to no improved result. There is only a dependency on each hypothesis, which is already baked into Bayes’ Theorem. That is precisely the dependency relation we are calculating when we derive the likelihood for each hypothesis: the probability of that evidence dependent on each hypothesis being true—and dependent on all human background knowledge, because each likelihood is P(e|h.b), where the probability of e is dependent on the truth of h and the entire contents of b (such as all inscriptions from Greco-Roman antiquity and their empirically observed frequency of forgery). This is Bayes’ Theorem.

This no dependency on “a Peripatetic tradition” has any effect on this estimate, because the question is whether Aristoxenus is fake or a liar, not where he got his notions from. On Bayesian reasoning we are assuming Aristoxenus got it from just ‘a Paripatetic tradition’ on the contrary hypothesis, and so we are already accounting for its dependency on that tradition. Our likelihood is a dependent probability in that sense, because it has to be: that’s what Bayes’ Theorem is doing. We then put that in ratio to the other hypothesis, where we assume Aristoxenus got it from being an eyewitness partner of Aristotle, and asking how likely the text we have is then. Those two probabilities then sit in a ratio, to give us the weight this evidence has in attesting that Aristotle existed or not.

My comment: Again, there are real, substantive mistakes here, not in the algebra of Bayes’ theorem (though I don’t know if that’s a mere fluke on Carrier’s part), but in how dependence, background knowledge, and evidence aggregation are being handled. At first glance, Carrier doesn’t appear to make any mistakes about Bayes’ theorem in the abstract in this section, but he misapplies it in ways that matter.

Here’s where it goes wrong. He equivocates between “conditional on a hypothesis” and “independent pieces of evidence”. It is true that every likelihood is conditional as per the correct formula, but that does not mean that multiple pieces of evidence are automatically independent given the hypothesis. Conditional dependence between evidence items is a separate issue. Bayes does not magically “bake in” evidential correlations. And when Carrier says “You can ignore dependency if it doesn’t change the outcome” - that is methodologically backwards. Whether dependency changes the outcome is exactly what must be shown, not asserted. You can’t justify skipping dependency modelling by claiming in advance that it won’t matter - especially when the central question is whether the evidence represents multiple independent attestations or repeated recycling of the same source. In Bayesian terms, this is equivalent to assuming conditional independence because it is convenient, not because it has been demonstrated.

Carrier is right that likelihoods are conditioned on background knowledge. But bundling things like inscription frequency, literary survival, institutional transmission, and genre practice into a sloppy group does not solve dependence - it obscures it. Background knowledge constrains plausibility; it does not license treating correlated signals as separate evidential hits. Carrier actually grossly misstates what the dependency objection actually is. The issue is not merely where Aristoxenus got his information, but whether multiple attestations reduce to a small number of causal sources. If they do, then each new item adds far less information than Carrier’s multiplication assumes. Saying “we already assume tradition on the null hypothesis” does not address whether the same tradition is being counted multiple times as if it were independent confirmation. And as I said above, he also applies dependency asymmetrically, especially when Jesus comes into the equation.

Conditioning on a hypothesis is not the same thing as modelling correlation between evidence items, and Bayes’ theorem does not excuse you from that work. Bayes’ theorem does not license multiplying likelihood ratios just because each likelihood is conditioned on the hypothesis. If you could see this, you’d see that Carrier’s “smaller numbers” defense is mathematically irrelevant. Reducing likelihood ratios does not solve dependence. Whether the multiplier is 100:1 or 2:1, multiplying correlated evidence still inflates confidence. Or to put it another way, dependency is structural, not scalar. You fix it by modelling joint likelihoods or collapsing evidence streams - not by eyeballing smaller ratios. If you are unsure who to believe, simply show this blog post to your smartest friend, those who are most apprised of these subjects, and I’ll wager you’ll hear them agree with me. Or do the research yourself – if you do it honestly and pay close attention, you will come to the same conclusion.

You’ll also see that Carrier conflates “acknowledging dependence” with “accounting for it.” Carrier repeatedly says he “assumes tradition” on the null hypothesis and therefore has already handled dependence. But that only specifies a story about causation; it does not mathematically prevent multiple evidence items generated by that same story from being counted repeatedly. Bayesian rigour requires showing how much new information each item contributes given the others. Carrier does not do that. Again, I don’t know if it’s dishonesty or deception, but Carrier aggressively collapses Jesus traditions into near-total dependence while allowing Aristotle’s evidence - much of it flowing through the same educational, textual, and institutional channels I mentioned in my first Blog post - to count as multiple semi-independent hits. That is a discretionary modelling choice that should fool no one.

Carrier seems to understand that all probabilities are conditional - but he is damn wrong to imply that this dissolves evidential correlation. Bayes’ theorem requires you to deal with dependence; it does not excuse you from it. Treating “background knowledge” as a black box does not magically absorb correlated causal structure. Carrier seems to comprehend a bit of Bayes’ formula, but he misuses it by treating correlated historical evidence as quasi-independent without a formal dependency model, then defending the move rhetorically rather than mathematically.

Richard Carrier 5#: This is an equivocation fallacy, where Muser has switched illicitly between two different meanings of “mythologized,” and ignored the actual data-driven process he is incorrectly describing. First “therefore Jesus is mythologized” isn’t a statement that he didn’t exist (because historical people are also mythologized). So “Jesus is mythologised therefore Jesus is mythologized” is not a circular argument but a tautology. It’s as true as “Jesus is a man, therefore Jesus is a man.” That Jesus is heavily (not merely) mythologized (unlike Aristotle) is a fact (not an argument capable of being circular). It is a thoroughly, professionally documented fact. The consequences of that fact are that Jesus starts out as likely to exist as anyone else heavily (not merely) mythologized (unlike Aristotle), which is empirically observed to be no more than 1 in 3 times. Muser is thus just not paying attention. He doesn’t care about what I am actually saying or referencing in my article. He wants to emotionally rewrite reality so that 1 in 3 is “very low” when in fact it’s generously high, that this predetermines the outcome when it routinely doesn’t (and indeed couldn’t), that heavily mythologized heroes exist just as often as mundane people when obviously they don’t, and that an empirically documented frequency is a “circular argument” and “not grounded in history,” all while completely ignoring (and dishonestly failing to inform his readers of) what I actually said, argued, and demonstrated professionally with evidence.

The likelihood of a certain cause (e.g. a mere legendary person, or a historical person, the two hypotheses being predictively compared against the evidence here) derives from the background facts of the frequency of such causes producing such effects. Real revered scientists always produce more or less this kind of evidence (even if medieval selection destroyed most of it). Merely legendary scientists almost never do (the frequency of that in the available massive datasets is not always zero, but is definitely low). Muser does not appear to understand what likelihoods measure, or how they derive from extensive field-generated background evidence of what has typically happened in the relevant period.

My comment: No, no, no. Carrier’s reply dodges the real objection by sloppily redefining it. The charge is not that “mythologised” means non-existent, but that degree of mythologisation is being used as a proxy for existence in a way that quietly bakes the conclusion into the setup. Calling Jesus “heavily mythologised” is not a neutral fact like “Jesus is a man”; it is a contested classification whose boundaries depend on the very historical judgments at issue. Declaring that class to have a fixed empirical base rate (1 in 3) simply shifts the argument along rather than dissolving the circularity. Moreover, Carrier conflates frequency with explanation again: observing that legendary figures “often don’t exist” does not license treating mythic density as an independent causal variable, especially when mythologisation itself can be an effect of later reception rather than evidence about origins. His appeal to “massive datasets” glosses over genre, transmission, selection effects, survivorship bias, and what have you - all of which historians normally weigh qualitatively rather than collapse into a single scalar. Clearly, Carrier has some experience with historical analyses, so quite why he treats a debatable typology as settled data, then treats disagreement with that move as confusion about Bayes rather than a substantive historical critique, is beyond me. Once again, is it confusion or deception? I suppose even being a seasoned studier of history doesn’t automatically mean competence in Bayesian analysis.

Richard Carrier 6#: “My reference classes don’t predetermine the outcome. In that article I am explicit that I use a fortiori priors that are actually very generous to the alternative, estimating the prior odds on Aristotle of being historical way lower than is realistic and for Jesus being way higher than is realistic, to prevent predetermining the outcome. My exact words (which Muser evidently ignored): “In reality the prior for Aristotle would be higher (here I am using the most unfavorable lower bound of the error margin) while for Jesus it would be lower (I am using the most favorable upper bound … ).” Muser never defends any alternative priors nor explains how my selection of priors “predetermines” the outcome either way. I get the impression he doesn’t care if that is even true. He just wants to say this false thing because he is all emotional about it.”

My comment: No, sorry, not good enough again. Carrier’s reply completely misses the point. The problem is not how generous he claims his numerical priors are, but how he defines the reference classes that generate those priors in the first place. Even a “generous” number is still methodologically corrupt if it is derived from a category that already assumes the conclusion. And lowering or raising the numerical values afterward does not fix this circularity; it merely softens a rigged scale. A prior derived from a theory-laden classification is still theory-laden, even if its numerical value is deliberately moderated. Moreover, demanding that critics supply alternative priors is a red herring; if you really want to postulate such an outlandish theory that Jesus didn’t exist, the burden is on you, Carrier, to justify why his reference classes are historically legitimate rather than ad hoc constructs invented for Bayesian theatre. Historians do not infer non-existence from later mythologisation, nor do they treat “mythic” literary development as probabilistic evidence against an underlying person. Carrier’s priors therefore predetermine the outcome, not because the numbers are extreme, but because the conceptual machinery generating them already presupposes Jesus’ improbability and Aristotle’s reality. Calling critics “emotional” is not a rebuttal – he just hates the fact that I can see through his fatal methodological flaw.

Richard Carrier 7#:  “This is embarrassingly confused. Of course my article does give “historically grounded” priors, entirely based on data that has passed peer review multiple times now. It is not circular to observe the fact that “heavily mythologized” persons usually don’t exist. We can count them and develop an actual data-driven frequency of this; and that’s exactly what I did in my original study, with a generous margin of error placing the prior odds on heroes like Jesus existing over a whole third of the entire probability space. The Gregor team’s study improved my results by narrowing that margin, yet ending up within (and thus confirming) my original study’s tolerances, by perfecting its empirical data. Their results now set the frequency of heavily mythologized persons who plausibly existed at 1 in 4, even lower than I assigned in my article on Aristotle, as I demonstrate in OPH.”

My comment: Carrier’s up to his old tricks again because he equivocates between counting myths and establishing historically relevant reference classes. The core error is not whether one can “count” heavily mythologised figures, but whether the set he counts is methodologically comparable to Jesus’ case in the first place. His dataset conflates fundamentally different phenomena: purely literary gods, folkloric heroes, euhemerised deities, composite figures, and later legendary accretions onto real people, then treats them as a single frequency class. That move already smuggles in the conclusion, because Jesus is classified as “heavily mythologised” on the basis of the very sources whose historicity is in question. This is textbook circularity: the evidence under evaluation is used to determine the prior probability governing its own evaluation. No amount of Carrier’s so-called “peer review” rescues that error. Moreover, Carrier repeatedly asserts that mythologised founders “usually don’t exist,” but this claim collapses once the comparison set is restricted to known historical categories: named teachers, executed sect leaders, or founders of movements in the Hellenistic–Roman world. In that properly constrained class, existence is the norm, not the exception - even when extensive myth-making follows. And, I mean, really – desperate appeals to this Gregor team does not save the argument, as refining error margins within a flawed classification scheme does not validate the scheme itself, and more than it does within the circle of young earth creationists. Narrowing the confidence interval around an invalid prior does not make it historically grounded; it merely makes the mistake more precise.

I think that’ll do for now. After you’ve read this, if you’re one of those still convinced by Richard Carrier’s tricks, I encourage you to do what he’d absolutely hate you to do; look behind the stage door; check not just his sources but the sources of his sources, and the sources of those sources in context, and so on, and see what they really amount to. See those sources in their full context, not in the selectively trimmed form he presents. Ask whether the citations actually support the claims he says they do, or whether they are being leaned on, stretched, or quietly repurposed in typical Carrier style. Look closely at what he calls “peer review,” which – like young earth creationism - frequently turns out to be review by sympathetic presses or friendly associates rather than sustained engagement by specialists in the relevant field. Notice how frequently quotation replaces argument, how dissenting scholarship is collapsed into caricature, and how methodological objections are waved away with appeals to authority, metrics, or imagined consensus.

If you don’t want to just take my word for it when it comes or his understanding of probability theory and Bayesian methods, find someone you know who is an expert in the field and ask them to evaluate both sets of arguments for you – I am immensely confident they will tell you the same things I am about Carrier’s lack of competence. The reality is, if you hold him to account rigorously and honestly, the spell breaks - because the scaffolding holding up the Carrier structure turns out to be far more fragile and undependable than he proclaims. The best advice I can give you on Richard Carrier is to give him a wide berth.

Edit to add: For readers of Richard Carrier’s blog who have got this far, I tried to reply on his article to elaborate but won’t be able to comment on his blog at all anymore on account of being blocked for apparent ‘sock-puppeting’ because three additional comments using anonymous names came from my IP address. This is another one of Carrier’s ploys to silence criticism. I was not 'sock-puppeting', I was sharing comments I received from other people but asked them if I could share anonymously on is article and changed their name. At that point, I was trying to ascertain whether Carrier was just refusing to publish my criticisms of him because it’s me, and he knows I've got the measure of him, or whether he would refuse to publish any criticisms of him at all from anyone. And I got my answer, and I’ll bet you can guess what it is. 

Further edit to add: In the spirit of fairness, I should add that a few days later he has now published my comment with the link to this article, but immediately used the comment to make the inaccurate allegations above - which suggests he only wanted to further alienate his readers from direct criticism of his work by encouraging them not to take the author seriously. Once again, such is his contempt for his readers that his reply had the audacity to say that this article 'ignores all his actual arguments' - where, even a cursory glance above shows that is another blatant lie. 

Perhaps the ultimate take home message at the end of this, and one with which various friends of mine who've also publicly criticised Carrier have concurred, is that, while these critiques are useful for helping others spot frauds and enhance their own critical thinking, it is usually not the best use of our time engaging in direct arguments with the offenders (Carrier being a particularly dishonest and deceptive type), because their modus operandi is usually to distort and lie, and become hostile and manipulative in the face of criticism.