A very good hammering of Carrier there Mr O'Neill. I was going to suggest Barnes' piece on Carrier's mathematical - ahem - skills, rather than that one by Hendrix, but I see the good Dr Barnes has already spoken for himself. Carrier's inability to comprehend basic probability properly is presumably due to his lack of training in the subject - although he has repeatedly claimed to have training in mathematics, statistics and probability as well as electrical engineering (for example
here) he is curiously reticent about identifying the place and type of this training. According to his own CV, a copy of which I have downloaded as we all know how he likes to emend his qualifications when he is tripped up over them, the only place this may have been covered is in his training as a sonar operator, which happened as long ago as 1991 and was presumably only a short course of a few days.
I should perhaps add a few more details of my own. I am also a doctor of philosophy, and like Carrier, was unable to find employment in academia so currently work as a schoolteacher while continuing to research and publish when I have time. I came across Carrier a few years ago when working in my own field of modern European history, including Hitler and the Holocaust. His article on Hitler's religious views based on his private monologues, known as
Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier or
Table Talk in the Leader's Headquarters, in 2003, is I believe one of only 2/3 items he has ever had peer reviewed. It was also immediately apparent that there are serious problems with it.
For example, he claimed that 'David Irving has never denied the Holocaust, only that Hitler knew of it' (apparently based on a reading of Irving's 1977 version of
Hitler's War or an uncritical reading of Christopher Hitchens' polemics in support of Irving). This was used in an attempt to prove that Francois Genoud, the source of one manuscript, was an unreliable source (which incidentally, is true, but not for the reasons Carrier gives). He also claimed to have a translation competency in German, but then required the services of a translator called Rheinhold Mittschang, whom he did not further identify, and whom after much patient research I tracked down as a second violin player in the Orchestra of the State University of Ulm. Of course, that does not make him a bad linguist - look at all these sports stars at home in about 50 languages - but it is and remains surprising that Carrier did not consult a bilingual historian (e.g. Peter Longerich or Richard Evans, both of whom had previously expressed strong misgivings about the
Tischgesprache in published work). He claimed that his version of the
Table Talk was newly available, but in reality the manuscripts he was using were available to scholars for decades and a published version had been produced with some omissions as long ago as 1980. They were in fact used extensively by Kershaw and Steigmann-Gall before Carrier came around, and even by David Irving (although Irving cherry-picked the editions and interpretations that best suited his own fraudulent arguments). For all these reasons, it is generally ignored by scholars although they might sometimes cite it fleetingly as a reason why
Table Talk's English versions are not to be uncritically trusted.
However, the fact that Carrier's work has had nil impact does not stop him claiming otherwise. For example two years ago he republished it in one of his self-published works, 'Hitler Homer Bible Christ'. On page 188, he claimed it had been 'broadly influential, being cited by Richard Steigmann-Gall' (in his book '
The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity', also published in 2003). In this Carrier is correct, but he apparently deliberately fails to mention that Steigmann-Gall actually rejected his conclusions and, in his own words, 'ultimately presumed the Table Talk's authenticity' (Christianity and the Nazi Movement.
Journal of Contemporary History 42 (2): 208). In fact, the only historian I know of who has endorsed Carrier's article more than fleetingly is Miklas Nilson, a history lecturer at the University of Stockholm and an expert in gender studies who mostly works on the Cold War, who suggested that Trevor-Roper collaborated with Genoud to put forward a fraudulent version so that Genoud would be happy to publish more material with him (available
here: requires payment). I haven't had a chance to read a full version of the article yet, but Carrier claimed to have been consulted on the article so even though it is in the JCH I have strong misgivings about its accuracy. That's how toxic Carrier is becoming.
Why have I written such a lot? Well, the key point I am making is that Carrier's recent problems with mathematics and New Testament Studies are not some kind of recent aberration. They have been there all the way through his career, such as it is. He did, undoubtedly, obtain a doctorate from Columbia (his doctoral thesis is in their library, and is finally to be published next year by a minor atheist publishing house called Pitchstone, who appear to specialise in apologetic literature along the lines of that written by the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair). But in every piece of published work of any sort, look hard and you discover 'mistakes' that it is difficult to believe somebody of Carrier's undoubted intelligence and skill could make by accident. To be sure, we can find things that may be sloppiness (this was Stephanie Fisher's thesis in her damning review of Proving History) but taken all in all, they look a lot more sinister. Yet he uses his doctorate and his personal abusiveness to deflect criticism, as noted in the review, which is certainly a grave misuse of his qualifications and risks bringing Columbia into disrepute.
This was where my report into his work was coming from, but since he could easily be stripped of his doctorate now anyway if Columbia so wishes for these other allegations it doesn't seem worth continuing even though I'm about halfway through. I'm not sure discrediting a discredited figure is worth the effort when there are many other things I could be doing.