Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn't even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.

The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe.

It’s the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.

For the assertion that "There is no God" is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that "There is a God." Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does.

What differentiates time from space is that time does have a direction. In that sense it is different from space. I think that's certainly true that whereas spatial dimensions don't have direction or an arrow, time does. It runs from past to future. But I see that arrow of time as rooted in a deeper metaphysical reality, namely the reality of temporal becoming - of things coming to be and passing away. That is why time has this arrow. But it's not sufficient to simply say that time and space are distinct because time has a direction. The question will be: why does it have a direction?

I am an Orangeman first and a politician and member of this parliament [Stormont] afterwards.

But the argument is still unsound, because the first premise is false: there are other unmentioned alternatives, for example, that Jesus as described in the gospels is a legendary figure, so that the trilemma is false as it stands.