Thanks to my call out last week, I have a host providing me a place to stay, sufficient funds to cover my expenses, and a venue for my book signing on Friday evening, June 6.
If you want to know why I am marching for veterans that day and why it’s important, or even want to link up with me on the march or need a ride up there, see my remarks at the end of last week’s post. Likewise if you can’t make the evening event but still want to buy a book and have it personally signed.
For everyone else:
I will be hanging out in a room at The Queen Vic (at 1206 H Street NE Washington, DC) from 7pm (til at least 10). Grab a drink, have a meal, chat me up. If there is enough interest I might rally an open Q&A. But otherwise, I’ll just be circulating and conversating. And I’ll have all of my remaining stock to sell and sign (including only four left of On the Historicity of Jesus, so that will be first-come-first-serve, but I have a lot of Jesus from Outer Space and Proving History and Sense and Goodness without God and a few other things). I have SquareUp on my phone so I can take all cards or cash, even personal checks (and I have a QR code if you want to pay online through my PayPal window).
This is an extremely rare event. Since covid, I transitioned to digital and don’t do tours anymore (I can’t afford them and audiences are less interested in them). So this could be the only public event I do this year, or near enough (it depends on if any group pulls together funds to have me out). So if you want a chance to hang out, get a personal sig on a book, this is it. And if you are a veteran or family member of a veteran, come join the march as well! I won’t have my books with me then. But I will at the Vic later.
Please do spread the news—tell anyone you know who is in or near DC and may be interested—so no one misses out who could have made it. No reservations, registration, or cover charge needed. Just be polite and give the Vic some business! Buy drinks (for yourself or others), even if only mocktails or soda or juice, and try some food.
I don’t expect a large attendance (in fact likely very few, since interest in these kinds of events is waning nationwide and most people are unlikely to even hear about it). But in the very unlikely event we overrun our space, it will be club rules: first in, first out. So I’ll ask for some folks to shuffle out so others can shuffle in. If the whole Vic gets overrun (an extremely unlikely event), there are some lovely bars adjacent to overflow to, and you can bar hop into the Vic to buy a book or two and hop out.
Dr. Carrier
I was having an online discussion with a theist, and I made a statement along the lines that there have been many “unexplained” things in our world, that we once could not understand.
And to date that knowledge has always came in the form of a naturalistic explanation.
Someone responded as follows:
“We don’t understand how ANYTHING came to exist, including organic life and consciousness, yet we feel entitled to draw lines to what is possible. How can anyone claim “natural” causes for anything, if we don’t even understand how the underlying laws, forces and constraints for nature even came to exist?”
What we be your response to that, given that in fairness consciousness is admittedly somewhat a mystery even to scientists, and abiogenesis is a area of science that still seems to be somewhat of a greenfield (compared to say evolution)?
All knowledge is probabilistic. So we don’t need certainty. We just need to know what is more probable.
Probability derives from two properties: prior odds and likelihoods. See: If You Learn Nothing Else about Bayes’ Theorem.
The prior odds favor natural causes as always far more likely for as-yet-unexplained things. See: Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them.
The likelihoods always favor naturalistic explanations even when we have no conclusive science on it yet. See: Bayesian Counter-Apologetics.
And this includes “frontier zones,” the vanguards of science we haven’t completed yet: the evidence relating to “what causes consciousness” all heavily favors mind-brain physicalism (see The Mind Is a Process Not an Object); the evidence relating to “what causes the laws and particles of physics underlying everything else” all heavily favors physicalism (see Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism); as so does the evidence relating to “what causes beauty” and everything else (see and The Evolution of Awe vs. The Aesthetic Argument for God and The Real Basis of a Moral World).