It is very simple to reduce things down to the level of mere matter.  Even the finest cello concerto is, from one not very interesting perspective, nothing more than the scratching of cat gut on cat gut.  Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina are merely blotches of colored liquid on thin sheets made from rag and wood fiber.  The reductionist is merely a transient cell colony, and what we refer to as that cell colony’s reductionist point... Read more

    From yet another of my manuscripts-in-progress, a few lines on one of the lesser-known and unofficial witnesses to the Book of Mormon plates:   Illinois state senator Orville F. Berry wrote a tribute to Katharine Smith Salisbury not long after her death, in her late eighties, on 2 February 1900: “There resided in this county, until her death, Catherine Smith Salisbury, sister of the prophet.  The writer knew her personally, has been in her house many times and... Read more

    I was able to listen to much of the funeral service yesterday for Elder Robert D. Hales, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  One of the moments that impressed me came when President Henry Eyring cited the words of the prophet Mormon, from Moroni 7:   46 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—... Read more

    Carrying on with the story:   The death of Herod the Great marked the end of the last period of stable Jewish rule in Palestine until, in the middle of the twentieth century, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel. True, Herod had sons, but they proved unworthy and incompetent. Archelaus, to whom Herod left Judea, was deposed by the Romans in 6 A.D. For several decades afterwards, the province of Judea and its major city, Jerusalem,... Read more

    A recurrent motif in accounts of near-death experiences is the peculiar light that many people have encountered in them, which they often describe as exceptionally bright, as intense but not harsh, and as somehow suffused with love and with an indescribable warmth.  With such accounts in mind, I’m struck by analogous references from the early days of the Restoration.  Two examples will suffice:   “I saw,” says Joseph Smith in describing his First Vision, “a pillar of light exactly over... Read more

    In his book Monopolizing Knowledge, MIT plasma physicist Ian Hutchinson first cites a passage from Chance and Necessity, by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod:   The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective.  In other words, the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes–that is to say, of ‘purpose.’   Hutchinson agrees that Monod has correctly characterized science, and then proceeds to... Read more

    Another portion of one of the manuscripts that I’m working on:   In 63 B.C., Judea became a client-state of the new superpower, Rome. Thus, as the Christian era dawned, the vast majority of the Jewish population—in Palestine and in other centers such as Alexandria—lived in areas under Roman control. At first, the Romans didn’t rule Palestine directly. They preferred rule through locals, such as the infamous Herod. Herod saw himself as something of a reformer, dragging a... Read more

    “Scientism is the belief that all valid knowledge is science.  Scientism says, or at least implicitly assumes, that rational knowledge is scientific, and everything else that claims the status of knowledge is just superstition, irrationality, emotion, or nonsense. “The purpose of this book is to show the pervasiveness of the doctrine of scientism; to explore its coherence, and consequences; and to show that it must be repudiated, both to make sense of a vast range of non-scientific human... Read more

      “I strongly believe in the existence of God, based on intuition, observations, logic, and also scientific knowledge.” “Science, with its experiments and logic, tries to understand the order or structure of the universe. Religion, with its theological inspiration and reflection, tries to understand the purpose or meaning of the universe. These two are cross-related. Purpose implies structure, and structure ought somehow to be interpretable in terms of purpose.” “At least this is the way I see it.... Read more