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 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 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 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 Suppose someone handed you five random playing cards and you wanted to sort them in numerical order. What would you do? Why, you would use the Shell Straight Insertion method of course. Which means you take out the i_th (1st, 2nd, so on) card and place it in order relative to the card next to it. You repeat this until all your cards are in order. It always works. If you follow this procedure, you will have sorted cards in your hand in no time. If you doubt me try it. You’ve probably done it unconsciously if you play cards and you wanted them ordered in your hand. It always works, not because it is a law, but because it’s something even more fundamental. It’s an a priori principle. One can imagine a universe where different laws held, but one cannot imagine a universe where this did not work. This algorithm is based only the properties of integers and what it means to order them. Like sufficient reason, it underlies logic, not the physical facts of the universe. You can imagine a universe where gravity did not exist, but it would be hard to find one in which 2 + 2 did not equal 4. Continue reading Evolution by natural selection: as fundamental as 2 + 2 = 4 |
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