We flew this morning from Cairo to Aswan, in the south of Egypt.   We looked at the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser and the earlier British dam.  Then we took a boat over to the Philae Temple, or Temple of Isis, and spent a fair amount of time exploring it.   Next, we proceeded to our riverboat, the Amwaj Livingstone, named after the famed explorer of the Nile.  It’s a very nice vessel, much nicer than the one... Read more

    The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, in his book The Firmament of Time:   “A scientist writing around the turn of the century remarked that all of the past generations of men have lived and died in a world of illusions.  The unconscious irony in his observation consists in the fact that this man assumed the progress of science to have been so great that a clear vision of the world without illusion was, by his own time, possible.  It... Read more

    So much of science consists of things we can never see: light “waves” and charged “particles”; magnetic “fields” and gravitational “forces”; quantum “jumps” and electron “orbits.”  In fact, none of these phenomena is literally what we say it is.  Light waves do not undulate through empty space in the same way that water waves ripple over a still pond; a field is only a mathematical description of the strength and direction of a force; an atom does not... Read more

    This is becoming a really good relationship:   http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/jewish-mormon-leaders-meet-new-york-city   Posted from Cairo, Egypt     Read more

    This would have been fascinating:   https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/05/08/top-vatican-scientist-calls-scientists-believe-come/   Brother Guy Consolmagno S.J. is a fine scientist and an engaging communicator, as his speech to the Interpreter Foundation last year illustrates very nicely:     I echo his call.   I haven’t been doing any recruiting for, or any work on, my Mormon Scholars Testify website for far too long:   http://mormonscholarstestify.org   I keep hoping that I can get back to it, and that I can perhaps persuade... Read more

      We drove down this morning to Saqqara, the marvelous necropolis of the Old Kingdom capital, Memphis.  I’ve always loved this place, for many reasons — including the abrupt difference – very clearly visible on the short road up out of the Nile Valley onto the western plateau – between green fields and the sudden, utterly barren Sahara Desert.   The centerpiece of Saqqara, of course, is the famous step pyramid of King Zoser, designed by the quasi-legendary Imhotep. ... Read more

    What are some of the problems on which Mormon thinkers might focus their attention?   Blake Ostler suggested a few back in 2010:   http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/The-Challenges-of-Non-existent-Mormon-Theology   Posted from Cairo, Egypt     Read more

    Some point to the proposal of a heliocentric model of our solar system by the cathedral canon Nicholas Copernicus as a watershed moment in what they view as the long and always triumphant war of science and reason against religion.  It’s supposed to have shocked people with the realization of how insignificant our planet is, in the great scheme of things.   That’s wrong at virtually every level.  For now, though, here’s the British medievalist C. S. Lewis,... Read more

    A simple but nice little testimony out of Jamaica:   http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20170513/thirty-two-years-mormon-changed-my-life   Posted from Cairo, Egypt     Read more

    “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.  You can tell a man is wise by his questions.” Naguib Mahfouz (d. 2006), Egyptian novelist and 1988 Nobel laureate in Literature   Posted from Cairo, Egypt     Read more