What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had that flower in your hand? Ah, what then? Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) The lines quoted above from the poet Coleridge are directly relevant to NDE accounts in which the experiencer seems to learn something (e.g., about events in a... Read more
This is important because Islamic law covers a far wider range of actions than anything we know of as law in our own experience. After centuries of analysis and refinement, Muslim legal thinkers worked out a system in which all possible human acts were placed into one or another of five classes. Some were “obligatory” These actions must be done by every person. (Prayer will serve as a good example.) Others were merely “desirable.” It would be good... Read more
Some short notes from J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences As Evidences for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2012): The first known attempt to pull together accounts of people’s deathbed visions was by Sir William Barrett, professor of experimental physics at Ireland’s Royal College of Science. His study was prompted by his wife (who was a physician), who rushed home to tell Sir William about a... Read more
Here are some further passages that I marked while reading Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed (New York: HarperOne, 2016). Douglas Axe studied engineering and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he earned his doctorate. He then did postdoctoral research at Cambridge University in England, followed by a stint as a research scientist there. In the comment below, he mentions Ann... Read more
Of course, there was always the danger that an irresponsible, ignorant, or incompetent judge might misapply a Qur’anic rule or see an analogy where in fact none existed. So a new principle, “consensus” (ijma‘), came into play. This principle represented an effective insurance against the whims and odd ideas of isolated individuals. But when we talk about the “consensus” of the community, we are not talking about a democratic process in which peasants and shopkeepers carried an equal... Read more
One of the questions that must inescapably be answered with regard to the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon involves their character, their personalities, their sanity — which inevitably comes down, at this distance in time, to the question of their public reputations. Now, of course, their public reputations suffered considerably from their association with Joseph Smith and the Restoration. So indicators of what people thought about them prior to their involvement with Joseph and the recovery of... Read more
Over the course of many years, students of the traditions about Muhammad and his companions worked out a complex and sophisticated system for testing and classifying hadith. Some hadith reports were ranked as sahih, or “sound,” which is to say that all of the links in their isnads, their chains of transmission, were good ones going back directly to the purported source of the tradition, who was usually the Prophet himself.[1] A slightly less reliable group of traditions... Read more
New, today, in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “The Expanse of Joseph Smith’s Translation Vision” Brant A. Gardner Review of Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 314 pages. $34.95 (hardback). Abstract: Samuel M. Brown opens up a new and expansive view of Joseph Smith as a religious thinker. Written for an academic audience, Brown is intentionally dealing with what can be seen and understood about Joseph Smith’s various translations, a term that... Read more
Don’t forget the Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses Conference, which begins on Friday evening, 18 September 2020, and continues on Saturday, 19 September 2020. You can watch it at no charge. In honor of the conference, I share again a column that I first published in the Deseret News on 30 January 2014: The scripture John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”) is well known as the shortest verse in the King James Bible. It’s less known, however, as one... Read more
I share, here, something of a preemptive response from the Evangelical Protestant philosopher Douglas Groothuis to critics of the notion of “intelligent design” and, specifically, to skeptics of William Dembski’s “design inference”: [S]ome reject design explanations in principle, claiming that they use the failed “God of the gaps” strategy — invoking the supernatural instead of working out a sufficient naturalistic explanation. Put another way, the God of the gaps brings in God only to cover our ignorance... Read more
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