Why I Am Not a Christian Page 7

  We have to do all of these things. Because that is the world we want to live in—and no one else is going to do any of this for us.

  Bibliography for Further Reading

  Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (AuthorHouse 2005)

  Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (Lulu 2009)

  John Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Prometheus 2010)

  John Loftus, ed., The End of Christianity (Prometheus 2011).

  Malcolm Murray, The Atheist’s Primer (Broadview 2010).

  Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know about Them) (HarperOne 2009).

  Israel Finkelstein & Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (Free Press 2001).

  www.richardcarrier.info

  End Notes:

  † I survey the basics of sound method in my book Sense and Goodness without God (pp. 49-62 & 213-52). I will soon provide a formal discussion of sound method in Bayes’ Theorem and Historical Method, but in the meantime you can learn the basics from the experts: E.T. Jaynes & G.L. Bretthorst, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003) and Brian Skyrms, Choice and Chance: An Introduction to Inductive Logic (4th ed., 1999); Hugh Gauch, Jr., Scientific Method in Practice (2002) and Ronald Giere, Understanding Scientific Reasoning (1996); and Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (1995).

  † For some examples of how I could have done that, see Sense and Goodness without God (pp. 222-52 & 273-75), The Christian Delusion (pp. 307-09), and my chapters in The End of Christianity.

  † On the known causes and kinds of religious experience across all religions and cultures see: lkka Pyysiäinen, Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas (2009); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); John Horgan, Rational Mysticism (2003); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2002); Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust (2002); and Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds (1993).

  † Read: G. Veneziano’s article “The Myth of the Beginning of Time” in Scientific American 290.5 (2004): pp. 54-65; Paul Davies’ article “Multiverse Cosmological Models” in Modern Physics Letters A 19:10 (2004): pp. 727-43; and Stephen Hawking’s latest book The Grand Design (2010).

  † On the evil, misery, and torment caused by the Christian religion see: James Haught, Holy Horrors (1999) and Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (1995).

  † See also Bart Ehrman, The New Testament (3rd ed., 2003) and Lost Christianities (2003); Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? (1997); Richard Pervo, The Mystery of Acts (2008); and Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000).

  † In the meantime see: Charles H. Talbert, What is a Gospel? (1977); Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988); Thomas Brodie, The Birthing of the New Testament (2004); Dennis MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) and Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? (2003).

  †For current science on the origin of life see: Richard Carrier, “The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities Against a Natural Origin of Life,” Biology and Philosophy 19.5 (November 2004): pp. 739-64; Geoffrey Zubay, Origins of Life (2nd ed., 2000); Tom Fenchel, Origin and Early Evolution of Life (2003); Andri Brack, The Molecular Origins of Life (1998); Noam Lahav, Biogenesis (1998); Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth (2000); Christopher Wills & Jeffrey Bada, The Spark of Life (2000); J. William Schopf, Life’s Origin (2002); John Maynard Smith & Eors Szathmary, The Origins of Life (1999); and Peter Ward & Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth (2000).

  †Besides my summary and bibliography in Sense and Goodness without God (pp. 165-76), experts have produced many superb books demonstrating evolution theory is true: Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth (2009); Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (2009); Donald Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (2007); Sean Carroll, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution (2006); Eugenie Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism (2004); Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (2001); Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (1995).

  †In ancient times the mortality rate for mothers giving birth varied between 5% and 15% (or from roughly 1 in 20 to 1 in 7): Bernardo Arriaza, et al., “Maternal Mortality in Pre-Columbian Indians of Arica, Chile,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 77 (1988): pp. 35-41. From the dawn of the scientific and industrial revolutions, however, things improved, and mortality varied between 0.3% and 8% (from roughly 1 in 300 to 1 in 12), until the early 20th century, when it began to decline in most nations to the point that fewer than one in several thousand women die because of childbirth (except in the poorest of countries): Irvine Louden, “Deaths in Childbed from the Eighteenth Century to 1935,” Medical History 30 (1986): pp. 1-41.

  †Experts are all agreed on the physical, brain-dependent nature of our minds: David Linden, The Accidental Mind (2007), Joseph Ledoux, Synaptic Self (2002), and William Libaw, How We Got to Be Human (2000); plus: Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (2008); Gerald Edelman, Wider than the Sky (2004); Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open (2004); Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness (2004); Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction (2003); Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme (2002); and V.S. Ramachandran, Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (2004) and Phantoms in the Brain (1999).

  †Lee Smolin, “Did the Universe Evolve?” Classical and Quantum Gravity 9 (1992): pp. 173-192; Damien Easson & Robert Brandenberger, “Universe Generation from Black Hole Interiors,” Journal of High Energy Physics 6.24 (2001). In light of John Barrow’s demonstration that the precise dimensionality of our universe is also optimal for life (John Barrow, “Dimensionality,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 310.1512, December 1983: pp. 337-46), which happens also to demonstrate the same optimality for black hole formation as Smolin proposes, support for Smolin’s theory is thus provided by the plausible link made, by superstring theory, between dimensionality and the numbers and properties of all subatomic particles: i.e. if a specific dimensionality entails a precise set of particles, then Smolin’s demonstration that our precise set is optimal for black hole formation entails that our universe’s specific dimensionality is likewise optimal for black hole formation (when we consider that Barrow’s discussion does not exclude the addition of the collapsed dimensions required by string theory). See: John Gribbin, The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything (2000); L.E. Lewis, Jr., Our Superstring Universe (2003); and Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004).

  †This ancient view of the cosmos and intelligent design can be found in Galen’s extensive demonstration from human anatomy in On the Use of the Body’s Parts, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Aristotle’s On the Heavens, and Plato’s extensive cosmology in the Timaeus, which became his most popular and influential book, as one can see from reading the works of the Greek scholar Plutarch (e.g. On Isis and Osiris) or the Jewish philosopher Philo (e.g. On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses). A detailed example of how Christians thought the universe was designed can be found in the surviving section of Dionysius of Alexandria's 3rd century treatise On Nature. See also Rosemary Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (1995) and Sam Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity (1962).