Six Days in August has been out in theaters for approximately ten days now. It’s impossible to guarantee or to predict how long its theatrical run will continue. So, if you haven’t yet seen it, or if people whom you would really like to see it haven’t done so yet, now — now — is the time to act.
The last time that a positive view of Brigham Young was offered on a commercial theatrical screen was in 1940. If that rate of production continues, you and I most likely won’t be around for the next such film. And I don’t expect that the pace of creating favorable Hollywood treatments of Brigham Young and/or of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to pick up very noticeably in the foreseeable future. So don’t squander this rare opportunity.
Two new books have just become available from the famously dying Interpreter Foundation. Christmas is rapidly approaching, and these would make excellent holiday gifts. In fact, if you’ve been naughty and have no realistic hope of receiving a gift from Santa Claus, they would make superb gifts to yourself. And you don’t even need to wait for Christmas. (Santa can’t really stop you from that. Not legally, anyway.). The two books are:
The Temple: Plates, Patterns, & Patriarchs: Proceedings of the Sixth Interpreter Foundation Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference, 4–5 November 2022 (Temple on Mount Zion Series 7), edited by Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
Table of Contents
- The Sacred and the Temple in Ancient Christianity — C. Wilfred Griggs
- The Lead Books — Margaret Barker
- Comments on Margaret Barker’s Presentation — Samuel Zinner
- She Took the Veil and Covered Herself — T. K. Plant
- Temple Themes in the Book of Abraham — Stephen O. Smoot
- The Cosmic Temple of Divine Names: Sapiential, Nomistic, and Numerical Properties — Samuel Zinner
- Qumran Reflections on the Coming Messiah and the “True Service” of the Temple — David J. Larsen
- Jacob’s Temple Journey to Haran and Back — Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and Matthew L. Bowen
- “Eastward” in Genesis 2–4: An Exercise in Visual Discovery — Rebecca Stay
- From Jared to Jacob: The Motif of Divine Ascensus and Descensus in Genesis, the Book of Moses, and the Enochic Tradition — Matthew L. Bowen and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
- Temples beyond Jerusalem — Stephen D. Ricks
- Ancient Israelite Temple Ritual through the Telescope of Restoration Scripture — David Calabro
- “That I May Lift Up My Eyes”: Bartimaeus as a Temple Petitioner before the Veil — Spencer Kraus
- How Luke’s Gospel Portrays Jesus as the Exodus or Way of the Temple — John S. Thompson
From the editors: “The book in front of you introduces the first eighteen chapters of the Book of Mormon, recounting the epic journey made over 2,600 years ago by Lehi and Sariah’s family from Jerusalem to Bountiful.
“As long-time researchers of the Book of Mormon, our earnest hope is that this book will unfold to every reader Lehi and Sariah’s journey, one made in a world far removed in time and distance from our own. The chapters that follow represent the most current research into that journey and build upon the foundational studies of earlier scholars, Hugh W. Nibley and Sidney B. Sperry, the more recent explorations of Lynn and Hope Hilton and George Potter, and insights from researchers such as S. Kent Brown, Robert F. Smith, and Stephen D. Ricks. We are further delighted to have contributions from John W. Welch, Noel B. Reynolds and Jeff D. Lindsay, each of whom have also contributed significantly to bringing this ancient text out of obscurity.
“Come with us now on a journey in the days of Lehi, Sariah, Nephi, and the others of their group; see where that great odyssey took place—places in Arabia seen with their own eyes—and examine evidences that support the reality of that journey.”
I’m pleased to see that a video recording of the excellent remarks that Dr. Samuel Wilkinson delivered at BYU’s Wheatley Institute on 18 October, last week, is already available online. I interviewed him the following day, and that interview — along with a companion interview of Dr. Ben Spackman — will eventually go up on, I believe, the Interpreter Foundation website. (But only, of course, if Interpreter doesn’t die first!). Professor Wilkinson’s presentation can be viewed here: “Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence.”
After our interview, Professor Wilkinson was kind enough to send me an electronic copy of an interesting albeit brief note by my late friend Frank B. Salisbury, a Caltech-trained plant physiologist who taught at Colorado State University and then eventually, for many years, in the Plant Science Department at Utah State University in Logan. The note is “Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene: Conflict between the idea of natural selection and the idea of the uniqueness of the gene does not seem too near to a solution yet,” Nature 224 (October 25, 1969): 342-343. Professor Salisbury mentioned his note to me shortly before his death, but I had not yet actually seen it. I mentioned it to Dr. Wilkinson, and he found it. Dr. Salisbury’s short little essay opens as follows:
Modern biology is faced with two ideas which seem to me to be quite incompatible with each other. One is the concept of evolution by natural selection of adaptive genes that are originally produced by random mutations. The other is the concept of the gene as part of a molecule of DNA, each gene being unique in the order of arrangement of its nucleotides. If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into bcing by chance mutations. Therc will be nothing for natural selection to act on.
The problem was discussed at a symposium of mathematicians and biologists in 1966 , but they failed to solve the difficulty.
He concludes with the following words:
Special creation or a directed evolution would solve the problem of the complexity of the gene, but such an idea has little scientific value in the sense of suggesting experiments.
Perhaps some fallacy in the concept of natural selection will give us a way out. The problem of this article arises because of the assumption that variability is produced by changes which are purely directed by chance. Is there some inherent interaction between atoms and molecules which might raise the percentage of useful mutations by many orders of magnitude? Could there be a feedback mechanism, for example, in which a precursor molecule interacts with protein and DNA, in some way controlling the order of arrangement of amino-acids and nucleotides and thus the enzyme activity of the protein?
Surely the biological community should apply all its resources for producing creative ideas to some of these problems if our teachings are to remain internally consistent.
Professor Salisbury wondered aloud to me whether he might not have been the first author in Nature — one of the preeminent scientific journals in the English-speaking world — to have at least suggested a possible role for intelligent design in evolutionary biology. And he told me how controversial his proposal was among the journal’s editors. Finally, as I recall his account, it was Nature‘s then editor-in-chief who declared that, if those objecting to the article couldn’t fault its reasoning or its mathematics, he wasn’t going to reject it merely because they were uncomfortable with its possible implications.
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