By , on July 18th, 2009%
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
By , on June 25th, 2009%
The LDS movement was founded on a premise that the Bible is neither complete nor inerrant. As LDS Apostle James E. Talmage wrote, “The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science, or man-science.” Further, Mormonism, from its founding, has traditionally seen God as working within the realm of natural law. As LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt wrote, “Among the popular errors of modern times, an opinion prevails that miracles are events which transpire contrary to the laws of nature, that they are effects without a cause. If such is the fact, then, there never has been a miracle, and there never will be one.” This notion immediately suggests a truce in the age-old “war” between science and religion: God works within, rather than without, the realm of natural law. Continue reading Creationism, Postmodernism, and Mormonism — A Guest Post by David H. Bailey!
By , on May 25th, 2009%
Most of us have watched at least one episode of the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” show. The rules of the show specify that the subject be allowed to take as much time as he/she wishes to ponder his answer, may consult one of his/her “lifelines” if desired, and may even think out loud on the camera. But no response is considered official until the subject answers in the affirmative to the moderator’s question “Is that your final answer?”. After that, there is no going back. Continue reading “Is That Your Final Answer?” Guest Post by David Bailey!
By , on May 17th, 2009%
To command that the very professors of astronomy themselves see to the refutation of their own observations and proofs as mere fallacies and sophisms is to enjoin something that lies beyond any possibility of accomplishment. For this would amount to commanding that they must not see what they see and must not understand what they know, and that in searching they must find the opposite of what they actually encounter. Before this could be done they would have to be taught how to make one mental faculty command another, and the inferior powers the superior, so that the imagination and the will might be forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands. I am referring at all times to merely physical propositions, and not to supernatural things which are matters of faith….
Galileo’s Letter to the Church (1632)
Conflict between science and religion runs deep. Continue reading Galileo says, “You go scientists!”
By , on April 9th, 2009%
I’d like to welcome my guest today at the Mormon Organon studio: Henri Bergson. As many of you know Henri died in 1941 but the indefatigable Frenchman will not stay down and has agreed to be my guest today, channeled trough the help of the Psychic Channel Medium “Hectaba”
Continue reading Interview with dead Henri Bergson: Part IV (and last)
By , on March 31st, 2009%
So somewhere, somehow some chemicals started replicating. It’s no shame that science hasn’t cracked this yet. There are some great hints starting to become manifest, maybe RNA started it, but how is actually irrelevant to our metaphysical quest. Somehow it got started, is a perfectly acceptable beginning to our quest at this stage of the science. But we want to be careful about just saying “God did it” because when science figures this out we don’t want to have hung our hat on this lack of explanation as a coat hook for our belief. (See my “God of the Gaps” post for more on this.) Continue reading Life: Keeping you safe from a deterministic universe, Part III
By , on March 14th, 2009%
So you’ve read Origin of Species and you want to learn something about modern evolutionary biology (or you’ve decided to save the classic for later, but you still want to get the low-down on modern evolutionary studies). There is a cornucopia of new books on evolution, so which do you choose? Which one should you start with? Now I’m going to make some daring assumptions. Continue reading So you want to learn something about evolution
By , on February 26th, 2009%
Science
It should be abundantly clear that the Bible was never intended to be a rigorous scientific treatise in our modern sense. Talmage, for instance, wrote, “The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science.” Nonetheless, many today insist on a literal reading of the Genesis, holding that the earth (or even the entire universe) was created a few thousand years ago over a 6-day (or 6,000-year) period, that there was no life or death on earth prior to this, and that species are unchanged since creation. Needless to say, these notions are at odds with modern science, and lead to the blasphemous notion that God has planted evidence to mislead us.
Continue reading Latter-day Biblical Literalism (Part II) Guest Post by David H. Bailey
By , on February 25th, 2009%
Introduction
The eighth Article of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reads (in its current form) “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.” Some in the LDS Church today interpret this to mean that the entire King James Bible, possibly excluding a few mistranslated verses, is the literal, inerrant word of God.
Yet the LDS movement was founded on a rejection of biblical inerrancy. Continue reading Latter-day Biblical Literalism (Part I) Guest Post by David H. Bailey
By , on February 9th, 2009%
Job and his buddies have been trying to figure out how God works in the world. Job is being tried, well, like Job. His friends insist he must of have done something wrong. Job says no, Continue reading The Depth of Darwin
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