Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1228

There is beauty all around

    Time for a thing of simple but profound beauty:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ch7...   Posted from Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii      

What am I doing here?

    Well might you ask.   Suffice it to say that I’m working.  I brought a pile of books and papers and my laptop.  I’m going to be putting in my usual quota of full-plus work days.  Reading, editing, writing, planning, and scheming.   But why here?   Why  not?  I can read and [Read More...]

2 Nephi 5

    Critics of the Book of Mormon have often criticized the idea, contained in today’s reading (2 Nephi 5), that Nephi built a temple in the New World.  I saw a video two or three years ago for which a rabbi had been recruited to mock the notion.   No good Jew, they say, [Read More...]

Sometimes, he says, skeptics him regard rather suspiciously, as something like a vegetarian butcher.

    I find that I’ve stumbled onto a theme recently, having to do with the demonstrable compatibility — empirically beyond dispute in the people to whom I’m calling attention — between scientific rationality at a very high level and religious belief.   One of the foremost exponents (and examples) of their compatibility is the English [Read More...]

A tale with many applications

    Here’s a story with which you’re probably familiar.  It originated in India, but one of the most famous retellings is that of the thirteenth-century Muslim poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی), in his classic work the Masnavi:   Some Hindus had brought an elephant for exhibition and placed it in a dark house. [Read More...]

Intellectual fads

    “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” G. K. Chesterton, in the Illustrated London News (19 April 1930)    

Where does Utah rank among the happiest or unhappiest American states?

    Some critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are already suggesting that the Church must have bribed or, somehow, unduly influenced the people who produced this report:   http://wallethub.com/edu/most-least-h...   That’s one way of reducing the cognitive dissonance, I suppose.   Another explanation that I’ve seen is that this is [Read More...]

Seeing God? A Note on the Qur’an

  One of the interesting things about this passage from the Qur’an is that, when Moses asks to see God, he’s not told that seeing God is a flat impossibility. Instead, it’s suggested that seeing God would be lethal—as it was in this account, even to a mountain. Which seems to imply that, although not [Read More...]

Can a religious believer, a slave of superstition, legitimately participate in modern technology, which is a product of rational thought?

    It’s a limited point — it proves no point of anybody’s religious doctrine true — but it’s a point that sometimes needs to be made.   So, as further evidence of the fact that first-rate scientific competence and understanding isn’t intrinsically incompatible with religious faith, I offer the example of Charles H. Townes, who [Read More...]

2 Nephi 4

    In the wake of the spectacular 2 Nephi 2, it’s easy to pass over the next few chapters without paying much attention to them.  After all, 2 Nephi 9, another very popular and rich chapter, is just ahead.   But that is to do these chapters something of an injustice.  There are, for example, [Read More...]