Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 200

“Textual Criticism and the Book of Moses”

    A new article — this one by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and Ryan Dahle — has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.. I commend it to your attention:   “Textual Criticism and the Book of Moses: A Response to Colby Townsend’s “Returning to the Sources,” Part 1 of 2” […]

“Altogether universal”

    A passage that I extracted from Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith [Downers Grove: IVP and Nottingham: Apollos, 2011], 335-336.   One society may stigmatize homosexuality while another condones it.  And so on.  Therefore, if different societies have made differing moral judgments (and if moral judgments depend inextricably on contingent cultures), […]

“Improbable Planet”

    First, I share a few links that I’ve been accumulating in my files, to things that caught my interest:   “Will Natural Herd Immunity End the Pandemic?  Is natural herd immunity a viable path to controlling the pandemic? Here is why that is a terrible idea.”   “There is no ‘scientific divide’ over […]

Revision 6.11 “The mission civilatrise”

    However, in the interest of historical accuracy I must say that the Islamic fundamentalist response to the dominance of the West is not the only response that the Islamic world has offered. And it is only comparatively recently that it has become the most obvious one. In the early days of the Modern […]

“An event of zero probability”

    Another passage from Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999):   Cosmologists who study the origins of our universe via this micromoment tell us that the specificities of this present cosmos and not some other one — that is, with its precise distribution of galaxies […]

Latter-day Saints and the Apocalypse

    Tom Kimball, formerly affiliated with Signature Books as its marketing director and formerly a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved some years ago to the vicinity of Kirtland, Ohio.  Tom didn’t exactly consider himself a friend of mine, nor of my religious beliefs.  I was saddened, though, to […]

Revision 6.10 “The West achieves dominance”

    As Muslims began to realize the extent of Western technical and material superiority, they were often appalled. Islam was no longer at the cutting edge, no longer triumphant. Islam, it seemed, was los­ing ground. The impact was as if, not at merely one general confer­ence but at one after another after another, the […]

“How to be a Good Apologist,” Revisited

    Tarik LaCour has responded to me over at his blog, The Mad Dog Naturalist:   “Clearing the Air”   He’s right.  If we disagree at all on the general task or tasks of apologetics, the disagreement seems very slight.  I agree that the “heavyweights” of sophisticated philosophical atheism merit response, and he agrees […]

Revision 6.9 “Entering the Modern Period”

    Why was Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt so important? A West­ern nation had managed to take control of one of the central and largest of Islamic states. Cairo, the greatest Arab city, was under the command of foreigners. Foreigners, of course, had been ruling Egypt for some time. Indeed, they had been ruling […]

The benefits of practiced religion and ancient South American immigrants to Polynesia

    Dr. Lynn Johnson kindly alerted me to this 2014 article from Frontiers in Psychology.  It was written by Anne Berthold  and  Willibald Ruch of the Department of Psychology (Personality and Assessment) at the University of Zürich, in Switzerland — which I can testify (having served as a young missionary in the Switzerland Zürich Mission and visited […]