Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 214

“The extremes of small and large upon which we depend”

    From Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), some passages on very, very basic science.  The information summarized in these passages will be useful to me in some future writing toward which I’m working:   In our day-to-day lives, […]

Revision 4.14. “Prayer in Islam”

    There are essentially two kinds of prayer in Islam. The one with which we in the West are most familiar is, paradoxically, the one most foreign to us. This is the formal prayer known as salat.[1]  Five times daily—at sunrise, midday, afternoon, evening, and night— pious Muslims prostrate themselves before God, bowing low […]

Nature and “Natural Theology”

    Here’s a passage from Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), that I found interesting in several respects.  It concerns natural theology, which, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “originally referred to (and still sometimes refers to) the project of arguing […]

Attacking Other Faiths

    The 2020-2021 BYU academic year has begun.  My own classes will begin tomorrow (Tuesday).  They are:   Introduction to the Religion of Islam Classical Arabic Texts Introduction to the Humanities of Islam   In all of them — and, for obvious reasons, especially in the first — considerable attention will be paid to […]

“Baptized for the Dead”

    An article by Kevin L. Barney has just gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation.  It will appear in Volume 39 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:   “Baptized for the Dead” Abstract: This thorough treatment of the mention of baptism for the dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29 […]

Ewan Harbrecht Mitton (1929-2020)

    Many out there will recognize the name of George Mitton, who has been a friend of mine for years now, and who has made many contributions, as both author and editor, to the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS); then to the pre-2012 Maxwell Institute; and, since its founding in 2012, […]

Revision 4.13 “The Five Pillars of Islam” (Part 1)

    President Spencer W. Kimball used to speak of the thirteen Articles of Faith, encouraging members of the Church to memorize them so that they would have in their minds a simple and orderly outline of some of the basic teachings of the restored gospel. There is nothing in Islam that is precisely comparable […]

Must one first believe in the supernatural in order to regard near-death experiences as real?

      This 2.5-minute-long video vividly introduces an astonishing fact:   “The Mind-Blowing Mathematics of Sunflowers …From Scientific American Magazine on Their 175th Birthday”   And even seemingly simple little animals still pose surprising puzzles:   “High-Tech Tracking Reveals ‘Whole New Secret World of Birds’: A study of Kirtland’s warblers found that some continue […]

Revision 4.12 “The Treatment of Women”

    In terms of their prospects for going to either heaven or hell, there is no distinction between men and women in Islam. “All human beings are equal,” the Prophet Muhammad taught, “equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no superiority of a white over a black nor of any male over […]

An exceptionally stupid argument against the Restoration

    In my experience, theistic anti-Mormonism is largely (though not entirely) a conservative Protestant or evangelical enterprise.  (Secularist anti-Mormonism is increasingly visible and influential, but it’s another story completely.)   There is some Catholic anti-Mormon activity; I picked up a little pamphlet attack the faith of the Latter-day Saints in the Colorado Rockies just […]