Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 221

If you’re looking for easy, black and white answers, you need my Miracle Elixir™

    All truth, it is said, passes through three stages:  First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is passionately and sometimes even violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.   Something similar happens, unfortunately, with certain falsehoods.   The reputations of Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler don’t rest upon their acceptance of the […]

Muhammad frowned.

    For all that it criticizes the unbelievers of Arabia, though, the Qur’an does not spare Muhammad either. He was never allowed to forget that he too was human. At one point, for example, despite all the Qur’an’s denunciations of the wealthy, Muhammad seems to have shown too much deference to a rich man. […]

“Intellectual inebriation”?

    A small sampling of additional passages that I marked during my reading of John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998):   The history of the interaction between science and theology, says Professor Polkinghorne, is not susceptible to simple characterisation, either in terms of conflict […]

“Everyone Else Makes Such Lonely Heavens,” Reprised

    I wrote the little mini-essay below in response to a request connected with the bicentennial of the birth of the Prophet Joseph Smith.  It can be found online at the website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I view it, here, as a companion piece to my blog entry from […]

Revision 3.8 “From Prophet to Prophet-Statesman”

    Nevertheless, Muhammad’s transformation from prophet to prophet-statesman had profound consequences for the nature of the religion that was developing—Islam. This is because the nature of his example to the Muslims changed along with his change of role. Chris­tians who want an ideal model to follow look naturally to Jesus of Nazareth as the […]

Answers to questions that were submitted after my presentation at FairMormon last Friday

    I pre-recorded my remarks to the 2020 FairMormon conference.  On Friday afternoon, when my talk went up, I was sitting at home.  (We’re trying to be very careful about the COVID-19 virus, not least out of concern for a father-on-law in his 94th year, a 90+-year-old woman that my wife regularly visits, and […]

A scientist/theologian reflects on science and theology

    Among the very most valuable of thinkers on science and religion — unlike many writers, especially perhaps unlike many anti-religious ones, he actually knows a great deal about both — is Sir John Polkinghorne, now in his ninetieth year, who is both a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) and a Fellow of the […]

Revision 3.7 “Muhammad’s Reception Among the Arabs” (Part 2)

    In 622, the Prophet and his followers emigrated from Mecca to Yathrib. This emigration, or hijra, as it is called in Arabic, now serves to mark the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Notice that the calendar does not start with the Prophet’s birth, nor with the beginning of the Qur’anic revelation, but with […]

My Hope for the Eternities

    It’s always weirdly fascinating to see how how I’m currently being attacked on a mostly-ex-Mormon-atheist message board that has been significantly devoted to attacking me for its entire roughly fifteen-year history.  (To an astonishing degree, I’m their raison d’être.  If I didn’t exist, they would have been obliged to invent me.  Which, in a […]

Wonderment at the Structure of Cells and the Life-Friendly Universe in Which We Find Ourselves

    Reacting dismissively (of course) to my recent post here under the title of “Was a human-life-permitting universe monumentally unlikely?” the vocal resident atheist in the comments section to my blog has repeatedly pointed out that Douglas Groothuis is not a scientist.  Which is true.  Groothuis is a philosopher.  But John Barrow, whom he […]