I will be giving two talks at the University of California, Irvine, next Wednesday (April 17th, 2013). One for the Classics Department (in conjunction with the Interdisciplinary Program in the History and Philosophy of Science), and one for the campus chapter of the Secular Student Alliance (homepage on Facebook). Both talks are open to the public (parking and other details available here), with Q&A. I will definitely be selling and signing my books at the SSA event (not sure yet if that will be possible at the earlier departmental event).

The first talk will be at 2pm in Humanities Gateway room 1010 on Bayes’ Theorem and Historical Reasoning: How Historical Methods Can Be Improved and Why They Need to Be:

Drawing from his new book Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Prometheus, 2012), Dr. Richard Carrier will explain what Bayes’ Theorem is (in terms anyone in the humanities can understand), how it underlies all valid historical methods even when we don’t realize it, and why knowing this can improve historical reasoning and argument in all fields of history.

The second talk will be at 5pm in Social Science Lab (SSL) room 122 on Can Morality Be a Science? in which I’ll summarize my findings in The End of Christianity and Sense and Goodness without God regarding the prospect of science actually taking over the job of discerning moral truth (which means, not just studying morality descriptively, but prescriptively), in the same way it has taken over many other domains of philosophy (from cosmology and anthropology to psychology and cognitive science).

 

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