For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. 2 Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. 3 When it is extinguished, the... Read more
I want to complete some of the thoughts that I shared last night from Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010). So here’s a bit more: To begin with, Graham Fuller cites the famous British universal historian Arnold Toynbee: In the first place we can discount the tendency — which has been popular in Christendom — to over-estimate the extent of the use of force in... Read more
The universe began approximately 13.8 billion years ago in a literally inconceivable explosion. How do we know this? How was it discovered? The so-called “Doppler effect” is relevant here, and a familiar example will explain it: If a train blows its whistle while sitting at rest in a train station, stationary listers will hear that whistle at the same pitch regardless of their location. However, as the train begins to move, those who are ahead of it... Read more
I share a couple of passages from Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010): [I]t is absurd to think in simplistic terms of “loyal Christians falling to anti-Western Muslim forces,” the often-popular Western version of the process. The Christians in these Semitic regions were not particularly loyal or happy with Byzantium and were already quite anti-Western in predisposition. Simple theories of “Islam versus West” dichotomies here simply... Read more
I’m working toward the writing of a kind of brief introduction to the Book of Mormon witnesses. With that in mind, I’ve gathered the scriptural passages that pertain to them, and I thought that I would share them here. Linking himself with Isaiah and with his own brother Jacob — all of whom, he says, have seen the Lord — Nephi proclaims himself a witness to the Redeemer. “Wherefore,” he explains, “by the words of three, God... Read more
A note extracted from John Warwick Montgomery, “Miracle Evidence: How Philosophers Go Wrong,” Philosophia Christi 17/1 (2015): 199-203, followed by my own meditations on it: “No testimony,” wrote Hume, “is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” . . . The Humean argument depended squarely on an eighteenth-century, absolutist view of natural law, impossible today in... Read more
To our delighted surprise, my wife discovered a little diary of my father’s a few weeks ago. Its entries are maddeningly brief and sporadic, but it covers his time on the continent of Europe during 1944 and 1945, affiliated with the Eleventh Armored Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. It begins with his landing at Cherbourg after several months in England, and continues through Belgium and Germany and Austria to his time in Paris after the... Read more
Dr. Stanford Carmack will be the guest, by telephone from his home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, during the first hour of this coming Sunday’s Interpreter Radio Show, which begins after the 7:00 PM news. Martin Tanner and I will be the hosts. Here are several more of the articles that Dr. Carmack has published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “On Doctrine and Covenants Language and the 1833 Plot of Zion” Abstract:... Read more
Newly published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship and, accordingly, available to interested readers at no charge: “The Tabernacle: Mountain of God in the Cultus of Israel,” by L. Michael Morales Abstract: In this article, Michael Morales considers how the building of the Tabernacle had been pre-figured from the earliest narratives of Genesis onward. It describes some of the parallels between the creation, deluge, and Sinai narratives and the tabernacle account; examines how the high... Read more
“Scientists Are All Abuzz over This Rare Prehistoric Bug Fossil Found in Utah” If the paleontologists continue their labors, I’ll soon be the only fossil left in Utah that isn’t housed in a museum. *** From Scientific American: Christof Koch, “What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain: A close brush can leave a lasting mental legacy—and may tell us about how the mind functions under extreme conditions” Dr. Koch takes a predictably naturalistic approach to the... Read more
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