The “economic quark” and the “immanent quark”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 4:43 pm By Dan Peterson

Sir John Polkinghorne, now in his ninetieth year, is both a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) and a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. Sir John was a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge until he resigned his professorial chair in order to study for the Anglican priesthood. He was ordained a priest in 1982 and, thereafter, served as the president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996. Here are two passages from the text of Sir John’s 1996 Terry Lectures, which he delivered at Yale University and... Read more

Revision 4.4 “Dispensations”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 4:50 pm By Dan Peterson

We’ll now proceed to examine some of the teachings of the Qur’an in detail. Dispensations The Qur’an clearly and repeatedly teaches a dispensational view of the earth’s religious history, in which there have been repeated revelations of God’s truth and repeated human apostasies from that truth that required it to be restored again. There was a time, it says, when men followed a single religion. But then discord arose.[1] God tried to remedy this situation. Every nation has... Read more

Divine Wisdom at the Foundation of the Universe?

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 4:55 pm By Dan Peterson

One of the most interesting contemporary writers on religion and science is the Israeli-American Gerald L. Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew who earned his B.Sc., his M.Sc., and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics and earth and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and who currently teaches at Jerusalem’s College of Jewish Studies. Here are a couple of passages from Gerald L. Schroeder, God According to God: A Scientist Discovers We’ve Been Wrong About God All... Read more

Revision 4.3 “The Qur’an and the Doctrine and Covenants”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 4:37 pm By Dan Peterson

But there is a deeper theological reason for the claim that the Qur’an cannot truly be translated, that what results from the process of translation is something related to the Qur’an but that it cannot properly be said to be identical with the Qur’an. I have said that Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the word of God. We hear such a phrase— “the word of God”—and think that we know what it means. But Muslims take the... Read more

“Nephi’s “Shazer”: The Fourth Arabian Pillar of the Book of Mormon”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 4:24 pm By Dan Peterson

It’s Friday, so another new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. This one is by Warren P. Aston: “Nephi’s “Shazer”: The Fourth Arabian Pillar of the Book of Mormon” Abstract: Many Book of Mormon students are aware that several locations along Lehi’s Trail through the Arabian Peninsula now have surprising and impressive evidence of plausibility, including the River Laman, Valley of Lemuel, Nahom, and Bountiful. One specific named location that has... Read more

A ten-minute video on “Evidences of the Book of Abraham: Historicity”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 4:19 pm By Dan Peterson

The official magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for adults is, and will be until the end of this year, the Ensign. The September 2020 issue of the Ensign contains a brief and quite simple article that I wrote at the request of the editors. It’s possible that some of you might not find it lethally terrible: “The Book of Mormon and the Descent into Dissent” *** In case you haven’t... Read more

Of reductionism, “meat wads,” and “cockroaches”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 5:06 pm By Dan Peterson

“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. . . . We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.” Sir John... Read more

Revision 4.2 “Can the Qur’an Be Translated?” (Plus a Note on Religious Bigotry and Me)

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 5:11 pm By Dan Peterson

This Muslim emphasis on the words and style of the Arabic Qur’an was vividly illustrated for me once on a trip, many years ago now, to Cyprus. That island, of course, is divided between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks. I found myself, one day, driving with my wife and others in the Turkish part of the island. It occurred to me that I ought to buy a Turkish translation of the Qur’an while I was there and use... Read more

On “The Witnesses: Variety and Complexity”

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 5:22 pm By Dan Peterson

Last night (Tuesday, 18 August 2020), I gave a little class or fireside presentation via Zoom to a group connected with the Latter-day Saint Institute of Religion adjacent to the campus of Stanford University. It was titled “The Witnesses: Variety and Complexity.” It was a chattier, less formal, and, therefore, somewhat less complete summary version of the remarks that I presented recently to the FairMormon conference. That FairMormon talk should be viewed, when it’s available, as the... Read more

Latter-day Saint intellectuals, plus a note on education and Jehovah’s Witnesses

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 5:18 pm By Dan Peterson

I’ve just been looking at an early-2015 blog entry from Kirk Magleby entitled “Top 10 LDS Intellectuals (1969)” Among other things, he mentions the following list, based in 1969 on a survey undertaken by the late historian Leonard Arrington to identify the most prominent intellectuals in Latter-day Saint history to that point: B.H. Roberts Orson Pratt Joseph Smith, Jr. Sterling M. McMurrin James E. Talmage John A. Widtsoe Lowell L. Bennion Hugh W. Nibley Parley P. Pratt E.E.... Read more