By SteveP, on July 15th, 2010%
Due to the extreme busyness of this summer, I’ve decided to replay some of my earlier posts that were not seen by many (less than 10, according to the data). Don’t forget that ‘Thought Experiment August’ is coming up and I’ve got some real delights coming up. Until then enjoy.
While spiders used to terrify me, I’ve never been afraid of snakes. Lots of things are. Especially mammals and birds. Especially mammals and birds eaten by snakes. And especially mammals and birds that snakes can bite with lethally poisonous fangs. Nothing sets a troop of monkeys howling like a snake slithering through their midst. Chimps despise the beasts and become agitated and upset when they find one hanging around the encampment and they will let everyone in the forest know that this dust-eating beast is not welcome. Apparently, even chimps raised without ever having seen a snake will become alarmed when one is introduced for the first time. I don’t know about elephants. Continue reading Summer Classics: Some are born afraid of snakes, and others have snake-fear thrust upon them: Part I
By SteveP, on April 11th, 2010%
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
By SteveP, on April 8th, 2010%
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
By SteveP, on April 5th, 2010%
The relationship between Science and Theology
I begin with a controversial claim from Haught,
“For its part, theology can become reputable in an age of science only if it abandons any attempt to provide information of a scientific sort. It must allow that the Bible and other religious teaching cannot add anything to our store of scientific knowledge. However, scientists for their part must concede that evolutionary theory, or any other set of scientific ideas, cannot provide answers to religious or theological questions either.”
Continue reading The implications of evolution for key LDS Doctrines: My SMPT paper part II
By peckhive, on March 29th, 2010%
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
By peckhive, on March 10th, 2010%
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
By peckhive, on October 26th, 2009%
Last week by some convergence of irony and slapstick naivety the Wheatley Institute at BYU brought Michael Behe to their symposium “Responding to the The New Atheism.” Here’s the write-up in the Studies & Doctrine section of Mormon Times. Why did they report on the only talk not worth hearing?
This is ironic because few people have done more to indirectly support the new atheism than Michael Behe. Continue reading BYU Wheatley Institute brings in “Intelligent Design” expert to combat New Atheism—Alas
By peckhive, on October 8th, 2009%
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
By peckhive, on September 30th, 2009%
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
By peckhive, on September 8th, 2009%
What is science? There is no short answer. It is not, as some, even some scientists, claim just this: Continue reading What is Science? Them ol’ hypo-deductive blues: Part I
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