Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 219

Divine Wisdom at the Foundation of the Universe?

    One of the most interesting contemporary writers on religion and science is the Israeli-American Gerald L. Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew who earned his B.Sc., his M.Sc., and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics and earth and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and who currently teaches at Jerusalem’s College of Jewish […]

Revision 4.3 “The Qur’an and the Doctrine and Covenants”

    But there is a deeper theological reason for the claim that the Qur’an cannot truly be translated, that what results from the pro­cess of translation is something related to the Qur’an but that it cannot properly be said to be identical with the Qur’an.  I have said that Muslims believe the Qur’an to […]

“Nephi’s “Shazer”: The Fourth Arabian Pillar of the Book of Mormon”

    It’s Friday, so another new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.  This one is by Warren P. Aston:   “Nephi’s “Shazer”: The Fourth Arabian Pillar of the Book of Mormon” Abstract: Many Book of Mormon students are aware that several locations along Lehi’s Trail through the Arabian […]

A ten-minute video on “Evidences of the Book of Abraham: Historicity”

    The official magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for adults is, and will be until the end of this year, the Ensign.  The September 2020 issue of the Ensign contains a brief and quite simple article that I wrote at the request of the editors.  It’s possible that some […]

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 […]