I lectured today, at BYU Education Week, on the subject of “Athanasius and Arius,” focusing mostly on the Nicene Council of AD 325 and the Nicene Creed that emerged from it. The victor at the Council, of course, was the future patriarch of Alexandria, eventually known as St. Athanasius the Great. And the loser was the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, who has been branded by the mainstream Christian tradition ever since as a heretic (or even... Read more
Notes from an uncompleted manuscript: The quantum theorist Hugh Everett was evidently the first to seriously propose the idea of multiple universes. He has been followed, however, by such scientists as Oxford’s David Deutsch and Lee Smolin, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at Canada’s University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin has apparently described... Read more
Several years ago the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang the “Gloria” from Schubert’s Mass in G during its weekly Sunday morning television broadcast. I love Schubert’s Mass in G, partly because I know it very well. While my wife and I were living in Cairo, Egypt, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we sang with the choir at the Ma‘adi Community Church, near our apartment. (The pastor, Rev. David Johnson, was our downstairs neighbor during our... Read more
The first volume in our “Medical Works of Moses Maimonides” subseries within BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative was Moses Maimonides, On Asthma, Volume 1, which appeared in 2001 in a dual-language publication that had been edited and translated by Gerrit Bos. Here is the online summary that accompanies it: Moshe ben Maimon, or Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), remains one of the most celebrated rabbis in the history of Judaism; his numerous writings include philosophical and medical treatises in Arabic, two of... Read more
Yesterday, just prior to my lecture on the emperor Constantine the Great at BYU’s Education Week — today, I’ll be speaking on Eusebius of Caesarea — Stephen Wight kindly handed me several pages photocopied from William Shepard and H. Michael Marquardt, Lost Apostles: Forgotten Members of Mormonism’s Original Quorum of Twelve (2014). The copied passages refer to three accounts of Lyman Johnson’s claiming to have been visited by an angel testifying of the Book of Mormon. Two of... Read more
Professor Hubert P. Yockey (April 15, 1916 – January 31, 2016) was a physicist and an information theorist who worked under Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project as well as at the University of California at Berkeley. One of his areas of concentration was the application of information theory to problems in biology; from 1974 onward, he published his writings in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Yockey was very critical of the theory that life had originated in a kind of “primordial soup,” arguing instead that “the origin of life is unsolvable... Read more
Current estimates of the age of the earth put it at about 4.543 billion years So the dates suggested by this study are extremely early: “The ancestor of all organisms” “We find that the “last universal common ancestor” – a hypothetical very early single cell from which all life on Earth descended – existed prior to the “late heavy bombardment”. This was a period of intense meteor bombardment sustained by our planet about 3.9 billion... Read more
It’s an arresting headline: “Researchers identify the most sexist places in America — and Utah ranks pretty high on the list” (And, no, the headline doesn’t read “most sexiest,” even though, since the day that I moved to Utah from California, it could justly have read that way.) There’s a lot here that might be discussed — thus far, commentators are blaming Utah’s high ranking on Mormonism — but let me offer a couple of... Read more
I’ll be speaking at Brigham Young University’s annual Education Week this year, starting on Tuesday and continuing on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’m speaking each of those days from 12:30 PM to 1:25 PM, in the ballroom of the Wilkinson Student Center. My theme is “Pivotal Figures in Religion and Politics in Early Christianity.” This is actually a series of lectures that I delivered at the 2012 BYU Education Week, but the Ed Week powers-that-be asked me... Read more
Unorganized notes from another as yet incomplete manuscript: C. S. Lewis: “Let us suppose a race of people whose peculiar mental limitation compels them to regard a painting as something made up of little coloured dots which have been put together like a mosaic. Studying the brushwork of a great painting, through their magnifying glasses, they discover more and more complicated relations between the dots, and sort these relations out, with great toil, into certain regularities. Their... Read more
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