Scholar of Moab wins AML Award for best novel published in 2011

A Short Stay in Hell Launches

My existential horror novella was released today in multiple formats: Hardback, paper back, digital, kindle etc. What is existential horror? Well . . . read the book and you’ll see (I more or less invented the term, because it’s very difficult to describe). Here’s the book’s website.

Read the reviews in the review tab . . . → Read More: A Short Stay in Hell Launches

But Bishop! My Cat’s Parasite Made Me Do it!

It looks like the zombie apocalypse has started. We have seen its effect in the insect world for many years—from fungi that drive ants to the highest plant available, so that its head can explode in a shower of fungal spores that ride the wind to their next anty victim, to amoebae that make insects freeze in place at the top of blade of grass so they can more likely be consumed by their preferred bovine host. Continue reading But Bishop! My Cat’s Parasite Made Me Do it!

Copies of you

Is this future possible in a Mormon context?

Discuss.

The Darwin Seminar at BYU

Cross posted at BCC

This semester over thirty faculty members gathered for a reading group sponsored by the BYU Faculty Center. I led the group in its reading of Conor Cunningham’s book Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong. Cunningham is a Catholic theologian at the University of Nottingham. The thesis of the book is that both the evangelical atheists (e.g., Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc.) are wrong in their attacks on faith and that their arguments are based on a caricature of religion that are largely incoherent. Conversely, he argues the Christian Fundamentalist creationists, including the cleverly-named, but silly, pseudoscience, Intelligent Design movement, is a religious and spiritual disaster. Cunningham argues that we can have a faithful religious embrace of evolutionary biology. In short, we can do both good science and good religion. BCC’s own BHodges gives a wonderful review of the book here so I won’t go too much more into the book, but instead focus on the seminar itself. I think it marks a historic moment at BYU and deserves a little attention. Continue reading The Darwin Seminar at BYU

Even more of Blair, Me, and Evolution at the FAIR Blog: Part II

Here is the second part of Blair’s interview of me and evolution! Enjoy!

 

 

Blair, Me, and Evolution at the FAIR Blog

In which the wondrous Blair Hodges interviews me for FAIR about Mormonism and Evolution. My favorite subject.

Monsters and Mormons launches

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

Macroevolution and the argument from ignorance

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

Plenty Coups and Believing in Evolution (repost from BCC)

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)