\u201cMysterious monolith found in remote part of Utah fuels speculation on how it got there: The object drew comparisons to Stanley Kubrick\u2019s famed 1968 film \u20182001: A Space Odyssey'\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
What puzzles me about it is how everybody, seeing it, immediately leaps to the conclusion that the mysterious object was created and put in place by an intelligent agent, by either a prankster or an alien.\u00a0 (One person suggests that it\u2019s the grave marker for Jimmy Hoffa.\u00a0 Others have proposed that hundreds of thousands of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia ballots marked for Mr. Donald J. Trump have been concealed in it by Dominion, working together with Georgia\u2019s governor Brian Kemp, the CIA, George Soros, and the specter of Hugo Chavez.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some have contended that it can\u2019t be very old, because metal objects in the desert Southwest of the United States very quickly grow bullet holes, while the surfaces of this monolith appear to bequite smooth.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t find that argument conclusive.\u00a0 We don\u2019t yet know of what metal the object is made.\u00a0 It could, for example, be composed of unobtainium, and we don\u2019t know whether unobtainium develops bullet holes in the same way that conventional earthly metals do.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
But why posit an intelligent agent as the force behind the monolith?\u00a0 How often has an intelligent agent proven to be the explanation for much of anything<\/em> in the thousands of acres of wilderness that surround it?<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t it more likely that it\u2019s just an outcropping of metallic ore that has been left standing after the less resistant sand stone around it has eroded away?\u00a0 If you look at photographs of it, it\u2019s plainly located in a little hollow that has been . . . well, hollowed out.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Imagining that intelligent beings did this \u2014 for what earthly purpose<\/em>? \u2014\u00a0 is just as silly as the widespread notion that somebody named Gutzon Borglum<\/em> was responsible for creating the four seemingly anthropoid \u201cfaces\u201d on South Dakota\u2019s Mount Rushmore.\u00a0 In that case, plainly, just like the other hills and mountains in that area, they\u2019re no more and no less than the result of naturally occurring erosion by wind, water, and soil.\u00a0 (See the 1995 book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion<\/em>, in which anthropologist Stewart Elliott Guthrie proposes that religion originates from the evolutionarily beneficial human tendency to see purposive agents in natural occurrences, as illustrated, for example, in our ability to \u201crecognize\u201d faces in random clouds of atmospheric moisture.). Given an infinity of time, two or four or fifty \u201cfaces\u201d are bound to appear not just once but, literally, an infinity<\/em> of times across the multiverse.\u00a0 We might be amused<\/em> by the occurrences of such \u201cfaces\u201d on our<\/em> insignificant speck of cosmic dust, but we shouldn\u2019t be surprised<\/em> at it.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Move along.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing to see here.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Imagining that a purposive intelligence created the Utah desert monolith will only serve to cut off scientific inquiry, just as it has done at Mount Rushmore.\u00a0 It is profoundly incurious.\u00a0 Our ignorance of the specific reasons for the shape of this or that rock is no proof that \u201cGutzon done it.\u201d\u00a0 However, once the \u201cGutzon Borglum\u201d superstition became the dominant explanation for those supposed \u201cfaces\u201d in South Dakota, the scientists effectively went home.\u00a0 All inquiry into the mechanism by which unguided natural forces shaped that rock cliff over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years came to a complete stop.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Moreover, the notion that a mind analogous to ours, a person, was required to create \u201cGeorge Washington,\u201d \u201cThomas Jefferson,\u201d \u201cTheodore Roosevelt,\u201d and \u201cAbraham Lincoln,\u201d as the four adjacent rock formations are whimsically known, is deeply arrogant.\u00a0 Barely evolved simians such as ourselves, only lately emerged from the primordial tidal pool or deep sea volcanic vent that spawned our single-celled ancestors, like to give ourselves airs, imagining ourselves apart from and superior to nature, but our pretensions are rather absurd, really.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The financial motivations for the \u201cBorglum\u201d hoax are easy enough to discern:\u00a0 The area around Mount Rushmore is a bustling assemblage of paid parking, restaurants, motels, souvenir shops, and entry fees.\u00a0 (By the way, what a ridiculous name!\u00a0 Gutzon Borglum?\u00a0<\/em> Why didn\u2019t the creators of this lucrative scam just go all the way and attribute the scenery to the Flying Spaghetti Monster?<\/em>). As long as there\u2019s a kind of \u201cGutzon Borglum priesthood\u201d profiting from this nonsense, along with gullible believers forking the money over to support them, we\u2019ll never be free of the lies.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Incidentally, while speaking with one of my sons this morning about the foundations of morality, the following related idea came up:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Suppose that you\u2019re driving in the eastern United States.\u00a0 You come to a spot on the road where you see a hill, on which rocks appear in a form that appears to spell out the words Welcome to Virginia<\/em>.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
You have two basic options:\u00a0 You can presume that those rocks were placed there, in that formation, in order to convey the message that you\u2019re now entering the Commonwealth of Virginia.\u00a0 But you can also surmise that they simply happen<\/em> to have occurred in that form.\u00a0 In the latter case, however, you cannot conclude from the appearance of those rocks that you\u2019re actually entering Virginia.\u00a0 They convey no message.\u00a0 Their seeming significance is illusory; they convey no actual message at all.\u00a0 Unless, that is, an intelligent agent, seeing them, decided to put the state border of Virginia precisely there because he noticed that coincidental rock formation.\u00a0 But then, in that case, a human mind will have decided to attach<\/em> a meaning to an entirely random and ultimately meaningless natural feature.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
How can you decide?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Are our moral values and inclinations to be taken as messages from something or someone transcendent?\u00a0 Or are they ultimately to be explained naturalistically?\u00a0 What status does our moral reasoning have?\u00a0 Is it, in the end, quite arbitrary and conventional?\u00a0 The approximate equivalent of adjusting our invented state boundaries to fit a mindless natural given?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Incidentally, too, some folks I know have created a \u201cTreasures of the Restoration Jigsaw Puzzle\u201d that might interest you for yourself or as a gift to others (or, of course, both).\u00a0 It\u2019s appropriate for 2021\u2019s Church curricular focus on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church history, and seems especially well suited for home church with the coronavirus pandemic lurking outside (along with cold weather in the northern hemisphere):<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
https:\/\/scot-facer-proctor-fine-art-photography-photos-with-a-story.myshopify.com\/?ref=5iEyO8VTambC0<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Most of you have probably come across this strange little story already: \u00a0 Deseret News:\u00a0\u201cMysterious monolith discovered in remote Utah wilderness: People are freaking out over a monolith discovered in the middle of nowhere in Utah.\u201d \u00a0 CNN:\u00a0 \u201cMysterious monolith found in remote part of Utah fuels speculation on how it got there: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19309,19333,19321,19324,14264,6681,572,11155,2601,14261,19327,4619,677,14464,123,14273,19306,6759,19303,19300,14267,19336,6387,14276,19330,19318,19312,19315,782,14270],"class_list":["post-89242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-19309","tag-agent","tag-alien","tag-aliens","tag-borglum","tag-desert","tag-design-argument","tag-gaps","tag-god","tag-gutzon","tag-gutzon-borglum","tag-id","tag-intelligence","tag-intelligent","tag-intelligent-design","tag-jefferson","tag-kubrick","tag-lincoln","tag-metal","tag-monolith","tag-mount-rushmore","tag-person","tag-personal","tag-roosevelt","tag-south-dakota","tag-space-odyssey","tag-stanley","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-utah","tag-washington"],"yoast_head":"\n
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