Richard Carrier trashes Bart Ehrman's book on the Historical Jesus.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

"Putting these factors together, we have to weigh odds of 100 to 1 for Carrier’s reality against the combination of other factors, which tip the scales at 40,000 to 1 against. These considerations alone leave us with odds of 400 to 1 against, or a probability just a bit in excess of 0.9975 that Richard Carrier is not a real person.

"We might go on in this vein for quite some time, noting further incongruities in the Carrier myth. How many trained historians would misread Plutarch’s “On Isis and Osiris” 19.358b as declaring Osiris’s physical resurrection from the dead here on earth? How many mathematicians would bungle basic probability calculations? How many philosophers, world-renowned or otherwise, would endorse the position that the laws of logic “obviously” derive from the laws of physics? Yet such blunders are what we might well expect to crop up as the community feigning Carrier’s existence attempted to demonstrate his expertise in one field after another.

"So the calculation given above seriously underestimates the probabilities in the case. Almost certainly, by strict Bayesian reasoning, Richard Carrier does not exist.

"And yet, I venture to predict that the vast majority of Carrier-believers will pay no attention whatsoever to Bayesian reasoning when it is applied rigorously to conclusions that they hold sacred."

Read more... http://www.beretta-online.com/wordpress/...ier-exist/

I'm not familiar with Carrier's Bayesian reasoning. But my initial reaction is that this seems like a very weak analogy. We have plenty of evidence of Carrier's existence: photographs, videos, birth certificates. You can even go meet the guy in person. It's not at all like that with Jesus. This use of Bayesian reasoning reminds me of Creationist's misuse of carbon dating (but perhaps I myself am making a weak analogy but I can't see how).