Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 218

Of reductionism, “meat wads,” and “cockroaches”

    “I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. . . .  We have to recognize that we are spiritual […]

Revision 4.2 “Can the Qur’an Be Translated?” (Plus a Note on Religious Bigotry and Me)

    This Muslim emphasis on the words and style of the Arabic Qur’an was vividly illustrated for me once on a trip, many years ago now, to Cyprus. That island, of course, is divided between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks. I found myself, one day, driving with my wife and others in the Turkish […]

On “The Witnesses: Variety and Complexity”

    Last night (Tuesday, 18 August 2020), I gave a little class or fireside presentation via Zoom to a group connected with the Latter-day Saint Institute of Religion adjacent to the campus of Stanford University.  It was titled “The Witnesses: Variety and Complexity.”   It was a chattier, less formal, and, therefore, somewhat less […]

Latter-day Saint intellectuals, plus a note on education and Jehovah’s Witnesses

    I’ve just been looking at an early-2015 blog entry from Kirk Magleby entitled “Top 10 LDS Intellectuals (1969)”  Among other things, he mentions the following list, based in 1969 on a survey undertaken by the late historian Leonard Arrington to identify the most prominent intellectuals in Latter-day Saint history to that point:   B.H. […]

“All we see is order and symmetry of pristine mathematical purity.”

    Two quotations from Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, by Stephen M. Barr, a cosmologist and theoretical particle physicist who recently retired from the University of Delaware:   “Science has given us new eyes that allow us to see down to the deeper roots of the world’s structure, and there all we see is order […]

Revision 4.1 “Islam and the Qur’an”

    Muslims believe that the Qur’an as they have it today is an actual transcript from a heavenly volume known as the “Preserved Tab­let,” or the “Mother of the Book.”[1] They believe that Muhammad did not write it and that it contains no admixture of his own per­sonality or individual idiosyncrasies. He was merely […]

“Did Joseph Smith Rely on Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary? Forthcoming Article Says “No.””

    This heads-up appeared a short while ago on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   “Jackson Article Preview — Did Joseph Smith Use Adam Clarke?”   And this appeared today, as well:   Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 34 “Remember the Lord” (Helaman 7-12) This Interpreter Radio Roundtable (for Come, Follow Me Book of […]

The “shaky foundations of reality”

    Scientism, in at least some of its manifestations, is the close cousin or sibling if not indeed altogether the Doppelgänger of the once-fashionable form(s) of philosophy known as logical positivism, logical empiricism, and/or neopositivism.   Very popular, especially in Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s, logical positivism, as I’ll call it here, argued that only […]

Revision 3.16 “The Passing of the Four Orthodox Caliphs”

    These were astonishing conquests, rapid and seemingly without end, and it was not only the ancient Christians who saw them as fortunate (indeed, perhaps even as God-ordained). Parley P. Pratt was enthused about them as well. “Now,” he said, if we take Mahometanism during those dark ages, and the cor­ruptions that are so […]

Life in Community

    If not entirely surprising, still quite important to note:   “Study of more than 100 modifiable factors for depression identifies social connection as the strongest protective factor”   With that topic in mind, I append three passages (in my rough translations) from Christiane Tietz, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologe im Widerstand (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, […]