Tuesday, January 18, 2005

A new page is up in Bede's Library containing several book reviews by Chris Price (and one by me) on the Jesus Myth. The highlight is Chris's review of Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle. It is an odd fact that very few critical reviews of this book exist so a new one is always a good idea. One book we will not be reviewing, on a ccount of it being just too loopy to bother with, is Acharya S's The Christ Conspiracy. Luckily though, Dr Robert Price, late of Duke University and the closest you will find to a Jesus Myther with a relevant PhD, has written an entertaining article on this book. It was published a few years back and Dr Price has now kindly put it on his own website.

Speaking of Dr Robert Price, he has been in correspondence with our own Chris Price (no relation) over one of Chris's blog entries. It was entertaining a few weeks ago when the Internet Infidels found that their hero (that's Dr Price rather than Chris Price) voted Republican. It would appear that as far as the Infidels are concerned, supporting George Bush is even more insane than believing in God.

I agree with the commentators to my last post about the 'multiple universes' hypothesis. While many atheists try to simply deny that fine tuning exists, those who know their stuff, like Martin Rees, have to think up another explanation. The 'multiple universes' hypothesis does seem to be appallingly ad hoc however. Surely it is more rational to believe in one God with whom we feel we have a personal relationship than to believe in an infinite array of universes for which we have no evidence at all and furthermore, for which such evidence will almost certainly never be forthcoming. It was also useful that Gardner differentiated between the quantum mechanical 'many worlds' hypothesis as this is frequently confused with the 'multiple universes' postulated to explain fine tuning.

1 comment:

Daniel Clark said...

Skimmed through the library page.
Would like to suggest that reference to the passing away of Ian Howard Marshall is slightly premature.

The University of Aberdeen: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/staff/index.shtml
still has him down as a staff member and as far as I am aware he is participating in an EA debate with Joel Green on the subject of the atonement in July this year.