{"id":109516,"date":"2025-03-21T15:59:22","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T21:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=109516"},"modified":"2025-03-22T01:29:18","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T07:29:18","slug":"anchoring-nephis-account-in-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/03\/anchoring-nephis-account-in-the-real-world.html","title":{"rendered":"“Anchoring Nephi\u2019s Account in the Real World”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A political map of the modern Arabian Peninsula (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As happens several times each week, something new has appeared on the website of the nearly-dead and never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation. \u00a0It\u2019s a new review essay in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cWonder No More: A Review of Into Arabia<\/em>,\u201d<\/a> written by\u00a0Brant A. Gardner<\/a><\/span><\/span>:<\/p>\n

\n

Review <\/strong>of Warren P. Aston, Godfrey J. Ellis, and Neal Rappleye, Into Arabia: Anchoring Nephi\u2019s Account in the Real World<\/em> (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2024). 298 pages. $44.99 (hardback), $39.99 (paperback).<\/p>\n

Abstract:<\/strong> Into Arabia is a collected reprint of six articles. The first chapter reprints an article that first appeared in <\/em>BYU Studies. The other five appeared in <\/em>Interpreter. Both <\/em>BYU Studies and <\/em>Interpreter are peer-reviewed academic journals, which means that all these articles were examined and reviewed prior to publication. Thus, my review is more of a synopsis of the importance of each chapter rather than a detailed critique.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a book that I wish I had written. \u00a0You can read more about Warren P. Aston, Godfrey J. Ellis, and Neal Rappleye, Into Arabia: Anchoring Nephi\u2019s Account in the Real World\u00a0<\/em>here<\/a>. \u00a0And you can order it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, today marks the six-hundred-and-sixty-first (661st) consecutive Friday of publication for Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship<\/em> since its founding 662.5 weeks ago. \u00a0At least one article has appeared each Friday, without interruption, since we launched the journal back in August of 2012, and sometimes two or even three articles have been published on the same<\/em> Friday. \u00a0(Along with the blog entries and reprints and etc. that appear on other days of the week.) \u00a0It seems undeniably obvious \u2014 doesn\u2019t it? \u2014 that the Interpreter Foundation is on its deathbed, as hath long been confidently prophesied. \u00a0However, I begin to despair of ever being able to help some of Interpreter\u2019s more unhinged critics to understand this. \u00a0They confuse our Thursday reprints with our Friday journal articles, imagine that we\u2019re trying to substitute reprints for new articles, arbitrarily decide that review essays don\u2019t count as articles, accuse me (on the basis of their own willful confusion and misunderstanding) of attempting to deceive them, and, just generally, remind me of one of the famous corollaries to Murphy\u2019s Law: \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"It's<\/a>
A landscape near Hanalei, not far from Princeville on Kaua\u2019i\u2019s northern shore
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So far as I can recall, I have never been a young-earth creationist. \u00a0Not even when I was a child. \u00a0(I played with dinosaurs and I loved going to the La Brea Tar Pits and to natural history museums in Los Angeles and elsewhere where I could learn about prehistoric animals. \u00a0I always knew that they lived millions of years before the present.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also never denied the reality of organic evolution, for which the evidence seems to me overwhelming. \u00a0Barring some inconceivable scientific upheaval, I don\u2019t believe that a religious viewpoint that altogether rejects the idea of substantial biological change over time or that denies the evidence for a very old Earth can be intellectually sustained. One of the early articles that we published in Interpreter<\/em>\u00a0was Gregory L. Smith\u2019s \u201c\u201cEndless Forms Most Beautiful\u201d: The uses and abuses of evolutionary biology in six works.\u201d<\/a> \u00a0Since then, I myself have written affirmatively about an important book reflecting on evolution (\u201cHow Can We Make Sense of Evolution?: A Latter-day Saint Perspective\u201d<\/a>) and have conducted two friendly video interviews with Latter-day Saint scholars for the Interpreter Foundation that plainly presuppose belief in evolutionary theory. \u00a0(See \u201cInterviews with Ben Spackman and Samuel T. Wilkinson.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

That said, my views on the subject are not firmly settled. \u00a0Nor am I in any particular hurry to settle them; in most regards, I don\u2019t consider the issue to be of primary importance.<\/p>\n

One of the things that I read on the way over to Kaua\u2019i on Wednesday was\u00a0Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design<\/em><\/a>, by Neil Thomas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let it be acknowledged right up front that Neil Thomas is not an evolutionary biologist. \u00a0He is, rather, a Reader Emeritus in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at the University of Durham, England. \u00a0Trained the universities of Oxford, Munich, and Cardiff, his teaching at Durham covered a broad spectrum of subjects, including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment, and modern German history and literature. \u00a0He sometimes focused on the propagandist use of the German language employed both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic. \u00a0Notably, too, he was a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association and, even now, he describes himself as committed to \u201cno revealed religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although not a biologist, Thomas has plainly read widely and deeply on the subject of evolutionary thought. \u00a0He is a first-class intellectual historian, and I found his book impressively learned and deeply interesting. \u00a0I recommend it to anybody who is really concerned with the topic of the origin and development of Darwinism and, yes, in the leaps of logic and the evidentiary gaps that, Thomas argues, continue to exist in it and to cast grave doubt upon it. \u00a0I will almost certainly be drawing upon Taking Leave of Darwin<\/em> for future blog entries here.<\/p>\n

Among the major problems still faced by evolutionary theory is the question of the origin of terrestrial life. \u00a0It is one thing, say, for the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection to work on existing organisms, but where and how did organic life originate in the first place? \u00a0Charles Darwin couldn\u2019t answer that question, and neither can the science of our day. \u00a0Certainly not definitively, though there has been no shortage of effort devoted to it and although there has been no lack of hypotheses.<\/p>\n

My attention was caught this morning by an article on the CNN website, \u201cIguanas floated 5,000 miles from North America to Fiji on vegetation rafts, new study finds.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Genetic evidence suggests that the ancestors of today\u2019s Fijian iguanas came originally from what is today the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, arriving in Fiji between 34 million and 30 million years ago. \u00a0The Fijian archipelago is a volcanic formation that was originally barren of either botanical or zoological life. \u00a0In this regard as in others, of course, Hawaii is a parallel case. \u00a0The Hawaiian Islands originally emerged from the sea as sterile volcanic rock. \u00a0How did flora and fauna arrive here?<\/p>\n

But the largest parallel, obviously, is Earth itself. \u00a0How did life arise on our planet? \u00a0The problem of the origin of terrestrial life has proven so intractable, thus far \u2014 although, by and large, devotees of abiogenesis continue to hold to the promissory faith that a solution to that problem will shortly be found \u2014 that some over recent decades have proposed that the explanation lies in the notion of panspermia<\/em> (from ancient Greek <\/i>\u03c0\u1fb6\u03bd [pan<\/i>] \u2018<\/span>all<\/span>\u2018<\/span> and <\/i>\u03c3\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1 [sperma<\/i>]\u00a0\u2018<\/span>seed<\/span>\u2018<\/span>). \u00a0This idea \u00a0is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe, and that it is distributed by space dust, <\/sup>meteoroids, <\/sup>asteroids, comets, <\/sup>and\/or planetoids,<\/sup> and even perhaps by alien spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms. \u00a0 In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest \u201cdirected panspermia,\u201d which holds that the seeding of Earth was deliberately undertaken by advanced extraterrestrial beings of some sort. \u00a0(Given my own religious views, I\u2019m open to the possibility of something like that being actually true.)<\/p>\n

But the theory that life did not originate on Earth, having instead evolved somewhere else and having thereafter seeded life as we know it, goes no distance at all toward solving the problem of life\u2019s origin. \u00a0It merely kicks that problem down the road.<\/p>\n

Posted from Po\u02bbip\u016b, Kaua\u02bbi, Hawai\u02bbi<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 As happens several times each week, something new has appeared on the website of the nearly-dead and never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation. \u00a0It\u2019s a new review essay in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: \u00a0\u201cWonder No More: A Review of Into Arabia,\u201d written by\u00a0Brant A. Gardner: Review of Warren P. 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