Living the Good Life!

One of the reasons for the notorious fact that the Interpreter Foundation’s website rarely if ever posts anything new has now been revealed, with his characteristically piercing insight and financial acumen, by my Malevolent Stalker:  The Foundation’s financial resources, you see, are largely if not entirely devoted to paying for my travel and my constant epicurean dining out.  While driving up to Park City this evening, for example, my wife and I found a fine Latin American establishment in Heber City, where — no doubt paying for it with an Interpreter Foundation Centurion card from American Express — I washed down a Doritos Locos taco and un petit bean burrito with an exquisitely smooth Pepsi Zero (Vintage 2025) on the rocks.  As a Frenchman might say, thanks to the lavish stipend supposedly provided to me by the Interpreter Foundation I’m living in the beau monde!

As Blanche DuBois says in the final scene of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire while she’s being taken away to a mental institution, “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.” 

These three new items were posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation yesterday (I’m a bit behind) and today:

• “The Heartland Versus Mesoamerica: Part 12: DNA and the Book of Mormon,” written by Brant A. Gardner
• Nibley Lectures: Come, Follow Me Doctrine and Covenants Lesson 28: “Great Shall Be Their Reward & Eternal Shall Be Their Glory”: Doctrine and Covenants 76.  During 1978, 1979, and 1980, Hugh Nibley taught a Doctrine and Covenants Sunday School class. Cassette recordings were made of these classes and some have survived and were digitized by Steve Whitlock and recently enhanced by Nick Galieti. Most of the tapes were in pretty bad condition. The original recordings usually don’t stop or start at the beginning of the class and there is some background noise. Volumes vary, probably depending upon where the recorder was placed in the room. Many are very low volume but in most cases it’s possible to understand the words. In a couple of cases the ends of one class were put on some space left over from a different class. There’s some mixup around D&C 90-100 that couldn’t be figured out, so those recordings are as they were on the tapes. Even with these flaws and missing classes, we believe these these will be interesting to listen to and valuable to your Come, Follow Me study program.
• “Come, Follow Me — D&C Study and Teaching Helps (2025): Doctrine and Covenants 76: July 7 – 13: “Great Shall Be Their Reward & Eternal Shall Be Their Glory.”  Once again, Jonn Claybaugh kindly provides a concise set of notes as a service to students and teachers of the Come, Follow Me curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Some time ago, I read Ann Gauger, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design (Sophia Institute Press, 2023).  Dr. Gauger received her bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and her Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Thereafter, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where her work focused on the molecular motor kinesin.  Here are some passages that I marked early on while reading God’s Grandeur:

As far back as Socrates in the fifth century BC, we see the father of Western philosophy making an explicit design argument. His student Xenophon records Socrates’s view that we have been most favored by the supreme deity. We are uniquely arranged in body and mind. All other things appear to be here for our benefit. And nature itself seems consistently arranged in the best or finest way. All of this, Socrates argues, bears witness to divine providence. . . .

The opposing narrative came from the Greek atomists like Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus. Humans, they claimed, are intelligent of course. But this intelligence is a late arrival on the scene. Ultimate reality isn’t intelligent. What fundamentally exists are atoms and empty space in which the atoms collide. Just as you hear many today saying silly things like, “Love is just a chemical reaction in the brain,” so too did the atomists believe that all phenomena really reduce down to the properties of material bodies. For the atomists, highly organized beings like ourselves self-organize by accident. There are an infinite number of worlds. So with an infinite amount of time, every combination of atoms must manifest itself somewhere! Sure, organisms look intelligently designed, but poor accidental designs disappeared while good accidental designs survived. . . .

There is truly nothing new under the sun. There are differences, to be sure, but the atomist narrative clearly anticipates not only Darwin’s theory but multiverse scenarios as well. (21)

As even Richard Dawkins recognizes, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”  Like the atomists before him, of course, he thinks this design is only apparent and not real. . . .

With this classical dialectic in view, intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down—a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God. . . .

Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro-and micro-features of living things give evidence of intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe). (22)

Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to stereotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation—a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison. (23)

This is an unhappy story:

Deseret News: “Attacks on religious buildings and communities have been on the rise. Utah’s Krishna Temple is the latest one: ‘This is hate-motivated,’ the temple’s co-founder said”

Religion News Service: “Three shootings at Utah Hare Krishna temple raise concerns about hate, safety — About 20 shell casings were recovered by Utah County police, who stated shots were likely fired from over 100 yards away from the temple property.”

I’m inclined to think that Caru Das Adhikari is correct in saying that it’s “not religious or church people” who carried out the attacks.  I think it extremely unlikely that the shooter (or shooters) had just come from family scripture study or an LDS Institute class or from performing a session in the nearby Payson Utah (Latter-day Saint) Temple.  I hope that law enforcement authorities identify the perpetrator(s) shortly.  For one thing, such knuckle-dragging morons could give my adopted home state  — and the church that is headquartered here — a wholly undeserved bad name.

My late and still-lamented friend Bill Hamblin and I participated in at least part of the dedication ceremonies for the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple, and I know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contributed a modest but not altogether insignificant amount of support to its construction.  We welcomed it to our state and into our community.  We still do.

Finally, as this distressing report from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ clearly demonstrates, meddlesome theists are even attempting to blight the lives of very young children:  “Church Supports Early Childhood Development in Mexico.”

Posted from Park City, Utah