What's New Archive ● 2012 ● December
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December 30, 2012
Added Empty Defense of an Empty Tomb: A Reply to Anne A. Kim's Misunderstandings (2012) by Jeffery Jay Lowder to the William Lane Craig page under Christian Apologetics and Apologists and Resurrection page under Christianity in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
William Lane Craig has argued for the historicity of Jesus' empty tomb on the basis of ten lines of evidence. In response, Jeffery Jay Lowder argued that Craig had not yet shown that any of his ten items of evidence make the empty tomb more probable than not. Anne A. Kim has attempted to defend some of Craig's arguments against Lowder's objections, but as Lowder shows in this response to Kim, Kim has repeatedly misunderstood his points and attacked caricatures of his arguments rather than his actual arguments.
December 29, 2012
New in the Bookstore: Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith (2012) by Richard Carrier.
Richard Carrier explains the four reasons he rejects Christianity, describing the four facts that—were they different—he would be a believer. Those four facts are God's silence, God's inaction, the lack of evidence, and the way the universe looks exactly like a godless universe would, and not at all like a Christian universe would—even down to its very structure. Carrier addresses all the usual replies to these claims in ways you might not have heard before. He is brief, clear, and down to earth, covering the whole topic in under ninety easy-to-read pages. A perfect book to introduce yourself or your friends to the reasons that fewer educated people are embracing Christianity than ever before. Ideal for door-to-door missionaries.
December 24, 2012
New in the Bookstore: Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012) by Richard Carrier.
In this in-depth discussion of New Testament scholarship and the challenges of history as a whole, historian Richard C. Carrier proposes Bayes's theorem as a solution to the problem of establishing reliable historical criteria. He demonstrates that valid historical methods—not only in the study of Christian origins but in any historical study—can be described by, and reduced to, the logic of Bayes's theorem. Conversely, he argues that any method that cannot be reduced to Bayes's theorem is invalid and should be abandoned.
December 14, 2012
New in the Kiosk: Job Reconsidered (2012) by John J Ray
Job is the ultimate biblical hero. His long-suffering and unflinching faith is legendary and the stuff of great sermons and Sunday school lessons, and in the end Job is rewarded for his continued faith in the face of adversity. The standard interpretation of Job is that we should use him as a role model, accept adversity unquestionably, and never question God. But a critical interpretation reveals that God was the villain of the book, undeserving of Job's—or anyone's—devotion.