Here are few pictures from my talk to show some of the evolutionary convergences I was talking about: Continue reading The implications of evolution for key LDS Doctrines: My SMPT paper part IV
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Continuing . . . Below are the points seem to cause some confusion and may need the most work in framing a detailed reconciliation. Here I sketch of where I think these pivot points lie. I’ll start where I feel there is little tension between science and our religion and that the hermeneutics of each seems not to pose any major difficulties in providing narratives that are comfortable lying side by side. Continue reading The implications of evolution for key LDS Doctrines: My SMPT paper part III The relationship between Science and Theology I begin with a controversial claim from Haught,
Continue reading The implications of evolution for key LDS Doctrines: My SMPT paper part II So during the last month because of trips to Indonesia and Senegal and the SMPT conference, I’ve been rather inactive on my blog. Time to repent. The following is the text from my SMPT paper. It will be posted in four parts. Just this week, researchers reported the results of the DNA analysis of a 40,000 year old finger fragment. It was a previously unknown species of human. It’s last common ancestor with humans and Neanderthals was over a million years ago. This forensic reconstruction and the skull going around are from Homo erectus, a hominin that lived about 1.5 million years ago. Our last common ancestor with the Neanderthals was about a half million years ago. Do such things have implications for Mormon Theology? Continue reading The implications of evolution for key LDS Doctrines: My SMPT paper part I Here to whet your appetite are the first few paragraphs of my Dialogue article in the Spring 43 (1) issue called “Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution.” If you want to read the rest, pick up the new issue! In this paper I try to take a stab at identifying the tensions that appear as one tries to reconcile LDS theology and Darwinian evolution and gesture toward some possible solutions to these quandaries. Also, I will speaking at the SMPT Conference on March 26 on “The Implications of Evolution and Consciousness for Key LDS Doctrines.” From Peck (2010): Wesley J. Wildman, a liberal evangelical Christian, contributed this issue’s sermon as part of the ongoing “From the Pulpit” series. Provocatively titled “Narnia’s Aslan, Earth’s Darwin, and Heaven’s God” (see pp. 210–17), it details some of the waste and brutality of natural selection that are inevitable accompaniments of evolution. “Surely such a loving, personal Deity would have created in another way,” he queries, “a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, fewer mindless species extinctions, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit” (214). In conclusion, he poses the far-from-rhetorical question: “What sort of God could, would, and did create the world through evolution?” (217). He shows that evolution has striking implications for theology—including LDS theology, I would add. Continue reading A peek at my paper attempting to reconcile evolution and LDS theology Arguments about ‘design’ in creation have been around a long time. The earliest one I’ve been able to find that explicitly explores it is from Xenophon, 4th Century BC, (and diligent readers if you know of earlier texts I would love to be directed to them!). Xenophon was a sometimes-student of Socrates and, like the wise teacher’s more famous student Plato, wrote a series of dialogues featuring Socrates and various interlocutors. One of these, from his Memorabilla, sounds like it was lifted right out current intelligent design creationist debates. Continue reading Theological Arguments about ‘Design’ Fall on Hard times It’s fun to watch fundamentalist creationists descend into Humean skepticism. Hume, the most hardboiled skeptic of all time (since the eighteenth century anyway), pointed out that we can’t really say that anything caused anything else. You can doubt anything. Did that billiard ball cause that other one it just hit to move? No. You can’t prove it. It could be just a startling coincidence. There is no proof ever for any empirical causal effect, anywhere at anytime. Bummer. Of course, creationists love that fact, because they get to use that method against evolution! (They only use Humean skepticism when it’s quite convenient of course—unlike Hume they would never apply it to their own interests)! Continue reading Creationists: the greatest skeptics of our age {A note on thought experiments: OK, some of you good folk keeping trying to ‘kobayashi maru’ the conditions of the test and rearrange it, or say you would never believe the conditions would hold, or end run the solution. In a thought experement all of the conditions are stipulated and held ‘as if’ they are true to force you to think through the implications of a particular problem. That’s why Enstein’s famous thought experiment of riding bukaroo style on a light wave worked even though it was quite impossible.} This thought experiment comes from philosopher Stephen Law. It is worth reading in its original form, but I will summarize: Continue reading Thought-experiment August: (5) The God of Eth and the problem of good Continuing my Summer break I offer this: I keep hearing that fossils came from some other creations out there in the far reaches of space–that our Earth is a conglomerate of the remnants of these previous creations. My kids have actually heard this in seminary. Apparently the story goes something like this: God made lots of worlds though special acts of creation. Then to make this Earth he took all these other creations and put them together into this one. This story is nice because it explains why we have fossils millions of years old on a earth that is just a few thousand years old. It answers the age old question, “How do we get rid of Godless evolution.” So dinosaurs lived in these extra solar planets which furnished the material for this earth. The great thing about armchair speculation like this is that you don’t have to deal with any messy things like data and evidence. Continue reading Explaining Fossils (reprise): Many worlds smashed together to make this one In 1911, The Superintendent of Church Schools, charged three Brigham Young University Professors with Heresy. They were charged with (a) “including man in the process of evolution,” (b) “Joseph Smith’s vision were described in terms of their psychological, and therefore subjective, aspects,” and (c) “In regard to the Bible, teaching from the standpoint of the ‘Higher Criticism’” Continue reading The Student Response to the 1911 BYU Heresy Controversy |
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