First, I share two quotations from two very vocal atheists. The first comes from Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, popular author, and emeritus Professor for Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. The second comes from one of the co-winners of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, Steven Weinberg: The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing... Read more
I share, here, a couple of passages that I marked during my reading of Charles Kurzman’s very counterintuitive (and therefore very important) book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford: 2011). Professor Kurzman is also the compiler and editor of the seminal anthology Liberal Islam. He uses the term liberal not in the sense of contemporary American disputes between Democrats and Republicans but in the older sense of “classical liberalism”: Around the world, .... Read more
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), the famous Swiss-American physician, psychiatrist, and author of, among many other things, the pioneering 1969 book On Death and Dying, was very well-known and quite influential during her lifetime — not so much for her views on life after death as for her study of the dying process, which led to new thinking in the health care profession about how to treat terminally ill patients. But she believed strongly in life beyond the grave. In... Read more
Notes from a book that I picked up in England several years ago: Daniel Clark, Dead or Alive? The Truth and Relevance of Jesus’ Resurrection (Nottingham UK: Inter Varsity Press, 2007): First of all, a fundamentally important point: If Jesus’ life gives a strong indication that there is someone out there, and that he claimed to be God, it is his resurrection that substantiates his claim. Who can overcome death? No mere human can. (26) If... Read more
A passage in Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010) that I marked because I want to discuss this topic in the book manuscript on which I’m now working: What is most disturbing is that we now face quite extraordinary remarks from an entire class of right-wing ideologists who actually challenge the fundamental humanity of Muslims — as products of a culture that is fundamentally incapable of... Read more
Sam LeFevre kindly brought the following interview with Francis Collins M.D., Ph.D., to my attention: “‘Reason is on the side of faith … Faith works on a different plane, asking questions that science can’t answer’” *** I recently read an interesting article by two physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico: William Charles Louis and Richard G. Van de Water, “The Darkest Particles: An experiment aims to find a new type of neutrino that... Read more
Within weeks of our marriage in the Salt Lake Temple, my wife and I moved to Cairo, Egypt, where I wanted to shift gears quite dramatically from classical Greek and philosophy (the major fields of my undergraduate coursework) to classical Arabic and Islamic studies. In retrospect, it was clearly a rather crazy move in multiple senses of the word crazy. But, against all reasonable expectations, we survived. One of the reasons for doing so was the presence,... Read more
A few days ago, in an entry entitled “Are NDEs caused by oxygen deficiency in the brain? (Part 1),” I cited a passage from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), that mentioned a phenomenon that Dr. van Lommel called “shared death experiences.” But no explanation of “shared death experiences” accompanied what I wrote, and some have wondered about what the term means. So I draw again from Dr. van Lommel’s book:... Read more
My paternal grandfather, who died several years before I was born, came over from Denmark as an infant. My paternal grandmother arrived in the United States from Norway when she was roughly twenty. Perhaps that’s the reason that, growing up, I was always more aware of my Norwegian ancestry than of my Danish ancestry. (I think that my father felt more Norwegian than Danish, as well.) On this American Father’s Day, I’m of course thinking of my... Read more
A new item — as always where at all possible, made available at no charge — has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Book of Moses Insights #008: Enoch’s Teaching Mission: Mahijah and Mahaway Interrogate Enoch (Moses 6:40)” *** Here are three passages that I marked in Ronald E. Romig, Eighth Witness: The Biography of John Whitmer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2014): First, Edward Stevenson interviewed David Whitmer on 22 December 1877, taking... Read more
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