Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Intelligent Design: Coming to a Theater Near You

Get Religion has a nice post on the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It stars Ben Stein, the face you instantly associate with the following phrase: "Bueller? Bueller?" The point of GR's post is that the media is largely ignoring the documentary despite a strong showing at the box office — apparently because the message of the documentary doesn't resonate with the left-leaning media, whereas any stupid thing Michael Moore or Al Gore puts out gets instant coverage and even critical acclaim. I'm no fan of ID, but I think rabid evolutionists that want to shut down discussion of alternative ideas don't deserve the deference they get from the media. Anyone seen this movie yet?

Augustine Contra Fundamentalism

I'm about halfway through Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief (2006). Collins is a brilliant geneticist who is also the head of the Human Genome Project. I checked the book out from the local library about six months ago but couldn't get into it at all. This time I'm actually listening to the CD version during the daily commute so there's nowhere to hide, and I'm enjoying it much more than I would have anticipated. Maybe God's Universe got me warmed up to scientific apologetics. Anyway, I'd like to share a choice quote that Collins offers from the sophisticated St. Augustine.

God's Universe

Just finished God's Universe, a short book by Owen Gingerich, a noted Harvard astronomer. The book reprints the author's three lectures at the William Belden Noble Lectures, an annual event at which a noted scientist or public intellectual addresses Christian issues of the day. The book is much like the recent Francis Collins book The Language of God, except that it is much shorter and it is written by an astronomer rather than a biologist.

Biblical Cosmology

One problem with trying to understand the Bible is that its writers thought about the universe in much different terms than we do. This point comes out quite clearly in a couple of passages in The Future of Christianity, a modernist religious critique of conservative Christian beliefs. Here's the author's description of what we can call the biblical cosmology, although it wasn't unique to what became the books of the Bible:

The biblical view represented most clearly in the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a is that of a flat earth, covered by a dome to which the sun, the moon, and the stars are attached. The waters of heaven are above that dome or firmament. In fact, it is the opening of the windows of that dome that results in the falling of rain or snow upon the earth below.

Beneath the earth are the waters upon which the earth rests and the underworld, basically a tunnel through which the sun travels on its nightly journey from the west, where it sets, to return to the east in time for the next sunrise. The heavens are beyond the dome of the sky and serve as the permanent abode of God and his angels.

This biblical cosmology raises some interesting questions for modern believers.

Evolution Sunday

Today is Evolution Sunday. I didn't hear an evolution sermon in my LDS congregation this morning and I'm guessing you didn't either, but if you need one there's a list of thirty of forty evolution sermons posted online. LDS resources you might consult should you prefer something less sermon-like: the BYU Evolutionary Biology page; the article Seers, Savants and Evolution: The Uncomfortable Interface by Duane Jeffery; and, at All About Mormons, several articles drawn from McConkie's Mormon Doctrine and from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism.

A Scientist, Two Popes, and a Prophet

For this week's online essay, go read "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," a widely-cited 1997 essay by Stephen Jay Gould. Here is its central thesis:

The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains ...

Science Is Good For the Soul

A science article reports the latest estimate of the age of the Universe as 13.7 billion years, "give or take a few hundred thousand years." Now that's a long time. In addition, this news has now penetrated the Jello Curtain, as I'm quoting this AP story from the SL Trib. The story summarizes cosmic inflation and pre-inflationary quantum fluctuations as a key to the present lumpiness of the Universe as we know it. Not only are stars clumped into galaxies, but galaxies come in clusters or sheets too — a fact that was particularly hard to explain at one time. As summed up by a Columbia physicist quoted in the article, "Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky.''

DN on Evolution

Since ID and evolution are Big News this month in Utah, you might enjoy this: The Deseret News weighed in with a nice article summarizing the position of various denominations and religions on the suddenly topical evolution question. It starts by noting the very recent publication (by a couple of LDS scientists) of an expanded version of the notorious 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, which was (according to the article) also distributed to all CES teachers in 1999. I wonder if there was a cover memo that said, "Ignore all statements on evolution by Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie, and restrict your remarks about evolution to the substance of the authoritative statements reproduced in this packet." Just curious. Oh, about those other denominations ...

Evolutionary Psychology

Just finished Evolutionary Psychology (2004), a textbook on a new approach to psychology that has been on my "Now Reading" list (now banished far down the left sidebar) for about a year. Evolutionary psychology might revolutionize the field. It is a new subdiscipline that attempts to understand human psychology in all its varieties in an evolutionary context, considering the many facets of human thought and behavior in light of their adaptive contribution to human survival (i.e., reproduction). For those with some knowledge of and sympathy for evolution, the book makes psychology understandable, even reasonable. I don't have time to write a lot, but I'll throw out a couple of teasers, then end up with this interesting question: Is there a Mormon view of psychology?