Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 208

On weighing evidence regarding near-death experiences

    What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had that flower in your hand? Ah, what then? Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)   The lines […]

Revision 5.7 “Islamic Law” (F)

    This is important because Islamic law covers a far wider range of actions than anything we know of as law in our own experience. After centuries of analysis and refinement, Muslim legal thinkers worked out a system in which all possible human acts were placed into one or another of five classes. Some […]

“Someone is standing here dressed in white clothes. I will not go with you!”

    Some short notes from J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences As Evidences for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2012):   The first known attempt to pull together accounts of people’s deathbed visions was by Sir William Barrett, professor of experimental physics at […]

Can you get there from here?

    Here are some further passages that I marked while reading Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed (New York: HarperOne, 2016).   Douglas Axe studied engineering and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he earned his doctorate.  He […]

Revision 5.6 “Islamic Law” (E)

    Of course, there was always the danger that an irresponsible, ignorant, or incompetent judge might misapply a Qur’anic rule or see an analogy where in fact none existed. So a new principle, “con­sensus” (ijma‘), came into play. This principle represented an effec­tive insurance against the whims and odd ideas of isolated individuals. But […]

Were the Whitmers marginal social outcasts and weirdos?

    One of the questions that must inescapably be answered with regard to the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon involves their character, their personalities, their sanity — which inevitably comes down, at this distance in time, to the question of their public reputations.  Now, of course, their public reputations suffered considerably from their […]

Revision 5.5 “Islamic Law” (D)

    Over the course of many years, students of the traditions about Muhammad and his companions worked out a complex and sophis­ticated system for testing and classifying hadith. Some hadith reports were ranked as sahih, or “sound,” which is to say that all of the links in their isnads, their chains of transmission, were […]

“The Expanse of Joseph Smith’s Translation Vision”

    New, today, in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:   “The Expanse of Joseph Smith’s Translation Vision” Brant A. Gardner Review of Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 314 pages. $34.95 (hardback). Abstract: Samuel M. Brown opens up a new and expansive view of Joseph Smith […]

Reconsidering the emotions of God, with the help of Moses 7

    Don’t forget the Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses Conference, which begins on Friday evening, 18 September 2020, and continues on Saturday, 19 September 2020.  You can watch it at no charge.   In honor of the conference, I share again a column that I first published in the Deseret News on 30 […]

“The Design Inference” (Part 4)

    I share, here, something of a preemptive response from the Evangelical Protestant philosopher Douglas Groothuis to critics of the notion of “intelligent design” and, specifically, to skeptics of William Dembski’s “design inference”:   [S]ome reject design explanations in principle, claiming that they use the failed “God of the gaps” strategy — invoking the […]