Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 206

“He was perfectly rational”

    Simon Smith, a Latter-day Saint bishop in Utah , wrote an 1880 letter to President Joseph Smith III and Mark H. Forscutt, of what was then known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, responding to their inquiries.  He told them of his visit with Martin Harris shortly before […]

Revision 5.14 “What the West Owes the East” (Medicine and Other Sciences)

    In medicine, the Western debt to the Arabs is every bit as great as in the fields already mentioned. The illustrious Montpelier medical school in France, for instance, was founded by Arab doctors fleeing from Spain during the Reconquista. Up to the end of the sixteenth cen­tury, the medical curriculum of European universities […]

Did David Whitmer heft the golden plates?

    Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2014), cites one of the earliest newspaper reports about the experience of the Book of Mormon witnesses.  It appeared — perhaps republished from elsewhere — in the Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph on 29 March 1831, not quite a month before […]

“God is a mathematician of a very high order”

    Carlo Rovelli, in his Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), offers a fascinating though brief portrait of the English theoretician Paul A. M. Dirac (1902-1984), who, he says, is “considered by many to be the greatest physicist of the twentieth […]

Revision 5.13 “What the West Owes the East” (Mathematics)

    Arab and other Muslims had very practical reasons for their interest in mathe­matics. The calculation of the precise direction of the qibla (the direction of prayer to Mecca), something that was required for the proper orientation of mosques, relied upon rather sophisticated mathematical operations. So did the calculation of the exact date of […]

Hiram Page and His Seer Stone

      For whatever it’s worth, I’m scheduled to participate in Sunday night’s Interpreter Radio Show and, on Monday night, to speak via computer to elders and sisters in the Ukraine Dnipro Mission.  Technology is a wonderful thing.   ***   I share here some notes from Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of […]

“Reckoning with the Mortally Inevitable”

    Newly posted today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation, the introduction (by Daniel C. Peterson) to Volume 39 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:   “Reckoning with the Mortally Inevitable” Abstract: Every human enterprise — even the best, including science and scholarship — is marred by human weakness, by […]

Revision 5.12 “What the West Owes the East” (Take Two)

    In the ninth century, translation from Greek into Arabic devel­oped rapidly. Since possibly the middle of the eighth century there had been periodic translations, but the ninth century saw the estab­lishment of a systematic, organized effort. The caliph al-Ma’mun, son of Harun al-Rashid, founded a translation bureau called the Dar al-Hikma (“House of […]

Atheism as Wonderfully Good News . . .

    I confess that I’ve never understood the exultation and evangelical zeal that some claim to feel as atheists.   Let me be clear:  I can easily understand coming to the conclusion that there is no God.  The world is full of seemingly pointless suffering, painfully unanswered questions, dubious religious claims, historically shaky scriptural […]

“Robust” fine-tuning in chemistry and biochemistry?

    A passage from Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), by the Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, who holds Oxford doctorates in both divinity and intellectual history — which he earned after he had first received an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics:   Yet it is not […]