![\"Mr.](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/02\/400px-George_Clooney_66%C3%A8me_Festival_de_Venise_Mostra_3.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I was delighted, some time ago, to discover that the British ITV mystery\/detective series Midsomer Murders<\/em> (1997-) has, at least in the past, featured a character named \u201cDr. Dan Peterson.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Who, I wondered, could they have hired to portray a person bearing so solemn \u2014 so august, respectable, and important \u2014 a name?\u00a0 This would surely have been a decision fraught with cultural significance, entered into after long and serious deliberation.\u00a0 Several actors came immediately to my<\/em> mind.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But no. \u00a0They selected an actor who surprised me. \u00a0Frankly, I have to confess that I, personally, would never have thought of him.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Plainly, we live in a fallen and sinful world:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Another random observation on the passing scene:\u00a0 I often marvel at the bizarre internet behavior of certain apostate critics of Mormonism<\/a>.\u00a0 Some time back, though, I think I may have found an explanation for their antics:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.braindecoder.com\/caffeine-induced-mania-1168100701.html<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n More than a few of the zanier internet apostates post from time to time on the life-transforming wonders that they\u2019ve discovered in their post-liberation consumption of coffee.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Pure coincidence?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe.\u00a0 But I\u2019m a man of science, and the alternative seems to me something more along the lines of demonic possession. \u00a0I would prefer not to resort to that explanation.\u00a0 Unless, of course, we postulate that the devil dwells in coffee.\u00a0 Which is, surely, something to ponder . . .<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Speaking of science:\u00a0 I find the continual contrasts of science to religion made by certain atheists \u2014 including at least one who likes to comment on my blog here \u2014 exceedingly odd. \u00a0They incessantly point out that science has given us new technologies and cures for polio and other diseases, while theology hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My response, on the whole, is \u201cSo what?\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To me, this is rather like criticizing the Houston Astros for their failure to score so much as a single touchdown during the entire baseball season just past. \u00a0Or faulting Homer because his English was so bad. \u00a0Or lamenting Chaucer\u2019s uselessness in stamping out the bubonic plague or the irrelevance of an accurate knowledge of the Renaissance for building a highway bridge.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s like declaring that Thucydides, Tacitus, and Josephus are\u00a0no longer worth reading since we now have electric toasters. \u00a0Or that, in these days of jet air travel, there\u2019s no point in reflecting on\u00a0ethics or on moral issues. \u00a0Or that, now that we\u2019ve identified muons and positrons and covalent bonds, philosophy is obsolete. \u00a0Or that, for a society that has essentially eliminated small pox, Shakespeare, Bach, Monet, Dickens, Goethe, Dante, and Dostoevsky\u00a0are no longer relevant.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n (I understand that the people making these unfavorable contrasts of science to religion are likely to go on doing so, despite the fact that, from my point of view, they\u2019re committing something analogous to what Gilbert Ryle called a \u201ccategory mistake\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u2014 and, yes, I\u2019m well aware that Ryle was arguing against mind-brain dualism when he invented the term \u2014 but I retain the wan hope that, just perhaps, one of them will, in the manner of a Buddhist<\/a> monk reflecting on a Zen koan<\/i>, someday experience enlightenment.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In the past, I devoted at least two overlapping columns to this topic in the Deseret News<\/em> \u2014 but, since the argument continues to be made, I think it advisable to call attention to them yet again:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIs the Bible more like Plato\u2019s or Copernicus\u2019 books?\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n \u201cScience, progress and religion\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Moreover, when these atheists observe that religion didn\u2019t give us modern cosmology or a flu vaccine, they seem, implicitly, to be claiming science and its achievements for atheism, which is an entirely unjustifiable bit of ideological imperialism. \u00a0It completely overlooks and ignores such figures (and their number could be multiplied many times over) as the cathedral canon Nicolaus Copernicus (father of the modern heliocentric concept of the solar system), the devoutly Christian Francis Collins (who oversaw the sequencing of the human genome), the deeply Lutheran Johannes Kepler (who made Copernicus\u2019s system accurate by positing elliptical rather than circular orbits for the planets), Father Georges Lema\u00eetre (the mathematical physicist who first formulated the concept of an expanding universe and the \u201cBig Bang\u201d), the great Isaac Newton (who devoted roughly as much time to commenting on the Bible as to inventing modern physics), the devoutly Jewish Arno Penzias (co-discoverer of the first empirical confirmation of the Big Bang, 1978 Nobel laureate, and father of a rabbi), Father Gregor Mendel (the founder of modern genetics), the pious Muslim theoretical physicist Abdus Salam (winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize), the very Christian Allan Sandage (among the most prominent astronomers of the twentieth century), the great American Latter-day Saint chemist Henry Eyring (whose son currently serves as a counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and Theodosius Dobzhansky (the devoutly Russian Orthodox evolutionary biologist who was a principal figure in the synthesis of Darwinian evolutionary theory with genetics).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Please see my 2018 Deseret News<\/em> column on \u201cKepler and the supposed war between science and religion,\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>