The pressing need of the age is a system of religion that can recognize, at the same time, the truths of demonstrated science and the doctrines found in the pages of sacred writ, and can show that perfect harmony exists between the works and words of the Creator; a religion that will reach both the head and the heart–that is, will satisfy both the intellect and the conscience… Nothing short of this can satisfy the demands of this... Read more
Simon Smith, a Latter-day Saint bishop in Utah , wrote an 1880 letter to President Joseph Smith III and Mark H. Forscutt, of what was then known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, responding to their inquiries. He told them of his visit with Martin Harris shortly before the Witness’s death: On the 5th day of July, 1875, hearing of his sickness, I visited him, <and> as I entered the room where... Read more
In medicine, the Western debt to the Arabs is every bit as great as in the fields already mentioned. The illustrious Montpelier medical school in France, for instance, was founded by Arab doctors fleeing from Spain during the Reconquista. Up to the end of the sixteenth century, the medical curriculum of European universities was based upon Avicenna’s great textbook al-Qanun (“The Canon”). A brief listing of Arab innovations in the medical and biological sciences should serve to illustrate... Read more
Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2014), cites one of the earliest newspaper reports about the experience of the Book of Mormon witnesses. It appeared — perhaps republished from elsewhere — in the Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph on 29 March 1831. The editor of the Telegraph and the author of the article was Eber D. Howe, who would go on to publish the very first anti-Mormon book, Mormonism Unvailed, in 1834. ... Read more
Carlo Rovelli, in his Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), offers a fascinating though brief portrait of the English theoretician Paul A. M. Dirac (1902-1984), who, he says, is “considered by many to be the greatest physicist of the twentieth century after Einstein” (101). Dirac, who was famously inept, socially speaking, and possibly autistic, was no friend of “religion” and was a vocal critic of... Read more
Arab and other Muslims had very practical reasons for their interest in mathematics. The calculation of the precise direction of the qibla (the direction of prayer to Mecca), something that was required for the proper orientation of mosques, relied upon rather sophisticated mathematical operations. So did the calculation of the exact date of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. (Being a lunar month, Ramadan moves through the seasons. Sometimes it occurs in winter, sometimes summer, sometimes fall or... Read more
For whatever it’s worth, I’m scheduled to participate in Sunday night’s Interpreter Radio Show and, on Monday night, to speak via computer to elders and sisters in the Ukraine Dnipro Mission. Technology is a wonderful thing. *** I share here some notes from Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2014), on a topic that is briefly addressed in the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming Witnesses theatrical film: In... Read more
Newly posted today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation, the introduction (by Daniel C. Peterson) to Volume 39 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Reckoning with the Mortally Inevitable” Abstract: Every human enterprise — even the best, including science and scholarship — is marred by human weakness, by our inescapable biases, incapacities, limitations, preconceptions, and sometimes, yes, sins. It is a legacy of the Fall. With this in mind, we should approach even the... Read more
In the ninth century, translation from Greek into Arabic developed rapidly. Since possibly the middle of the eighth century there had been periodic translations, but the ninth century saw the establishment of a systematic, organized effort. The caliph al-Ma’mun, son of Harun al-Rashid, founded a translation bureau called the Dar al-Hikma (“House of Wisdom”), over which presided a Nestorian Christian named Hunayn ibn Ishaq.[1] (Hunayn’s son eventually succeeded him in the leadership of the institution.) The Nestorians were... Read more
I confess that I’ve never understood the exultation and evangelical zeal that some claim to feel as atheists. Let me be clear: I can easily understand coming to the conclusion that there is no God. The world is full of seemingly pointless suffering, painfully unanswered questions, dubious religious claims, historically shaky scriptural stories, hypocritical pseudoprophets, theologically-motivated wars and oppression, and the like. Moreover, naturalistic theories such as evolution seem (at first glance, anyway) to have undercut arguments... Read more
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