Is this future possible in a Mormon context?
Discuss.
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Cross posted at BCC Here is the second part of Blair’s interview of me and evolution! Enjoy!
In which the wondrous Blair Hodges interviews me for FAIR about Mormonism and Evolution. My favorite subject. Well I’ve been silent a while. Part of it this semester several creative projects are launching, I’ve got an NSF grant application due, and two papers back for revision. And my blogging has suffered, but get ready this semester we held faculty a seminar sponsored by the Faculty Center on Darwinism and I will . . . → Read More: Monsters and Mormons launches Let’s think about Creationists (and let you remind you that by creationist I mean those who demand a literal reading of the scriptures as scientific texts–all the LDS members of my Biology Department at BYU believe evolution is the way life on earth emerged, and the way the human body was formed, yet believe in a Creator. However, literalist creationism, where it exists in Mormonism, is a leak from sources other than the Restoration that misunderstands the scriptures’ purpose. More on that in what follows.) Creationists love to talk about ‘macroevolution’ as if it was some mysterious magical thing that is problematic for evolutionary biology—science’s dirty little secret we don’t want you to know about. Continue reading Macroevolution and the argument from ignorance This is a repost from bycommonconsent.com, July 2009. I’ve got something coming that requires this context, so rather than link to it (which no one will read), I’m going repost in its fullness. There are some fundamental misunderstandings by the science attackers (and make no mistake an attack on evolution is an attack on science as such). What’s at stake is the rational inquiry that has driven the successful scientific advances of the last few centuries. But these new perspectives can be hard to contextualize. This can be devastating. It requires new ways of thinking. Sometimes, when one of our youth enters the university to study the modern life sciences, and some well meaning, but basically biologically uniformed, person throws up strings of out of context quotes from general authorities to attack the solid and well-founded life sciences, they give the impression that the student must choose between the gospel and science. Because these new students have not developed the resources to handle such logically and spiritually flawed approaches, they wander away. Some never to return. People who conflate the role of science and religion do immense damage to both faith and science. Let’s start here and talk about what it takes to sometimes reorient in a new world in which a fundamental restructuring of simplistic creationist literalism is necessary. I’ve been thinking about evolution of late. Not so much about evolution as such, but about people’s resistance to it. I’ve been thinking about the fear that some experience as they face the prospects that a new scientific age is bringing to an end their way of seeing the universe. The simple creationism of a Harry Potter-like God that was appropriate in the Seventeenth Century, and which we borrowed from the Greeks, is giving way to more complex conceptions and more Mormonism-informed perspectives. Continue reading Plenty Coups and Believing in Evolution (repost from BCC)
Here is the tale. It is a story about fear actually, but I’ll get to that. On a Thursday back in March we drove to Sally. A small costal city in Senegal where there was a company that flew mini-helicopters that we were thinking of using to drop sterile male tsetse flies over wide areas (you know—to make it hard for a female tsetse to find a good man). Continue reading Don’t eat puffer fish Check out my guest post at Jana Riess’ Flunking Sainthood! From BYU Studies 35(1) 1995. Companion to BCC post. |
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