“It is hard to imagine all this happening just by chance.”

One of the charges that has been leveled at the Book of Mormon for generations is that, with Nephi’s building of a temple in the New World, the story contradicts ancient Jewish insistence that a temple can only be built in Jerusalem.

The incomparable Jeff Lindsay offers a perspective on that claim in this very brief discussion:

“Ancient Temples, Shrines, and Altars Outside of Jerusalem”

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In an interview regarding some of his recent research, Matthew Grey addresses an interesting topic that unites the study of both Latter-day Saint history and Latter-day Saint scripture:

“Sephardic Hebrew in the Book of Abraham”

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Here’s the well-done 8.5-minute video shown at the “Chiasmus Jubilee” that was held on the campus of Brigham Young University on 16 August 2017.  If you didn’t have the opportunity of being there, you’ll likely enjoy this.  And if you were there, I think you’ll still enjoy it:

“The Discovery of Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon”

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“As a science writer concentrating on mathematics, physics, and cosmology, I have marveled myriad times about what to me is one of the greatest mysteries of all: how, within the immensely hot and dense ‘soup of particles’ that constituted our universe, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the quarks suddenly gathered in threes: two ‘ups’ and a ‘down’ to form protons and two ‘downs’ and an ‘up’ to form neutrons.  How was it ever possible, I have asked myself, that the charges of these quarks turned out to be exactly 2/3 for an ‘up’ and -1/3 for a ‘down’ — with not even the tiniest of tiny errors, so that the proton would miraculously match the opposite charge of the electron (-1) and the neutron’s charge would be precisely zero: just what is necessary to form atoms and molecules?  How did such an incredibly improbable event ever happen without some calculated act of creation?  And further, how did the masses of the elementary particles turn out to have the perfectly precise ratios needed so that our world of atoms and molecules could exist at all?  How did the forces of nature — gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces acting inside nuclei, as well as the mysterious ‘dark energy’ that permeates space — receive just the right strengths they need to maintain a universe that has the required stability and neither collapses onto itself nor explodes before life has a chance to evolve?  It is hard to imagine all this happening just by chance.”

Amir D. Aczel, Why Science Does Not Disprove God (New York:  William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2014), 2-3.