During this recent Obama/Cheny smackdown (in fact, let’s just put the two in a UFC ring and get it over with), I was thinking about the argument that our policies are creating more terrorists than we are killing or capturing. I have no idea how to approach answering that question, but it made me think of a more important fallacy embedded in that claim.

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If I have some reservations about Darwinism as a good theory, what can we say about intelligent design? Let me first try to describe it. Intelligent Design theory says that there are too many interdependent parts in metabolism for these changes to evolve gradually. They call this irreducible complexity, and it’s pretty easy to imagine. A half an axle, half of a cell phone, are not half as useful as a whole one, they are entirely worthless. Intelligent Design advocates point to a great number of complex processes in life, from cellular motors to oxygen exchange in hemoglobin, and say that these things cannot develop incrementally. A cellular motor that barely works, or a hemoglobin that doesn’t exchange oxygen, is worse than nothing. It confers no evolutionary advantage and in some cases will kill you altogether. How do you get all this complicated machinery to develop gradually, in stepwise fashion?

A lot of these things have to work together, and very well, or they don’t work at all, and the organism ends up dead. So how do you suddenly “evolve” all of that stuff at once? The suggestion is, you can’t. And while Intelligent Design theory concedes that species do adapt in response to natural selection, the most important parts are too important, and too complex, to evolve gradually and randomly. The implication is (and this is very much an implication; rarely do they come out and say it) , those key parts were not evolved, they were designed. And then, depending on how much you credit some of their statements, ID advocates either leave it there, or they mean to say this proves the existence of a Creator.

The biggest problem with this formulation is it isn’t even a theory. Read more »

You’ll hear some opponents of Darwinian evolution say this sometimes, and it makes me laugh. If Darwinian evolution is merely a theory, that is small comfort. After all, gravity is “just” a theory, but for all that, gravity can mess with you pretty bad when you take a stroll off a third-floor balcony.

My beef with Darwinian evolution isn’t that it’s “just” a theory. It’s that it’s become more than a theory for some. A good theory, according to Karl Popper, should be falsifiable. Yet if we concede (unlike the Creationists) that the Earth is older than 6,000 years, that species can be created and go extinct at times other than the creation and the flood, and that species themselves can change over time and adapt to their environments, then can we still be absolutely sure that the only mechanism of species creation and change is Darwinian natural selection? How would we know if other mechanisms are operating sometimes?

All too often, Darwinian evolution functions as a heuristic, or a rule of thumb, rather than as a theory. A theory should help us make predictions, and certainly Darwinian evolution makes plenty of predictions. But most often, Darwinian evolution seems to preordain its own conclusion and then the “proof” is actually sought to show how natural selection produced the observed result.

As an example, let us consider how the leopard got its spots. Read more »

This month is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. I thought it would be interesting to post some thoughts about Darwin and what he has spawned, but I’ll break it up into smaller posts. The first question I’d like to consider is, do the scriptures provide any support for his theory, or does it truly deserve the fierce objections some (though not all) LDS people have directed at him? I will list here four areas where I think the scriptures support Darwinian evolution.

Before we start I do need to briefly describe the theory of Darwinian evolution. It is meant to describe how different species get created. It says that due to limited resources, disease, predation, only certain individuals survive to reproduce the next set of offspring. Various random variations happen which, if they improve that individual’s ability to survive to reproduction, will then also get passed on. (Darwin had no idea how; we had to wait until Watson & Crick discovered the structure of DNA.) Species adapt in order to best exploit the available resources locally. When Darwin described it as “the survival of the fittest” he meant “fit” in the same way your clothes fit. He didn’t mean necessarily the survival of the strongest or smartest or fastest, but the survival of the individuals who were best adapted to their immediate environment would be most likely to survive–and sometimes being weak, slow, and dumb is an advantage.

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On my mission in Belgium, Brussels I was transferred to Metz in the Moselle/Lorraine area of France. We began teaching a very bright recent convert the integration lessons. She had a very strong testimony and made a wonderful point that has stuck with me over the years. “Everyone says they believe but that they don’t practice. That makes no sense. It’s like saying, ‘I raise chickens but I don’t give them anything to eat.’”

So: Have you fed your chickens today? Read more »

Just a couple of days ago I was asked to give an invocation at a public event attended by a couple hundred people. While the organizers were all LDS, most of the attendees were not. Yet I believe public prayers are not just an expression of my faith, but the entire group’s faith. While I am not ashamed of my faith and in fact hope that all would choose to embrace it, I know that this was far from the case in this instance.

I ended up giving the standard Mormon prayer (invoking our Father in Heaven’s name, expressing gratitude, asking for blessings, and closing in the name of Jesus Christ), since I assumed that most of our audience was Christian.

Even though I am not usually nervous much at all in front of crowds, I was surprisingly nervous about praying in this situation. I’m not sure I did a very good job. After this experience, I have a lot more sympathy for those who have to do this often. It presumes a lot to assume that I know what a group of people wants and needs, not to mention the assumptions I must make about what Deity is willing to grant to such a group, or what is even appropriate to ask Deity to grant.

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• Two twelve inch pizzas
• A two liter bottle of soda
• A box of Boo Berry Cereal
• Two pints of Ben & Jerry’s
• A quart of motor oil (long story, but it was not used for any nefarious purpose)

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Campaign finance reform has been an attempt to legislatively eliminate greed from our public officials. We all know how well that has worked. Instead of trying to ban greed and graft, which has worked as well as repealing the law of gravity, or legislating the movement of tides, I propose we, the taxpayers, instead use it to our advantage.

Recently, as some of you know, our House of Representatives accepted a pay increase. I do not think any of us begrudges our hard-working elected officials certain perks and compensation, provided that we are getting our money’s worth. However, it appears that I am not the only one who thinks our Congress’ performance is subpar. Well, you get what you pay for. So how about we start paying for performance?
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My wife and I were shopping at a grocery store that shall remain nameless (but it is the kind of place you have to be very nicely dressed when you are shopping there).  And it was mobbed. We were trying to navigate the aisles when this store employee pushes past us, grumbing quite loudly, “There are too many ^#$%! people in this store!” I look down at his tag, and under his name it reads, “CUSTOMER SVC MGR”

What do you do when the Customer Service Manager is telling off customers? I loved it! Pure poetry, right there in the grocery store.

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Neil Postman coined the term ‘media ecology.’ He points out that the term ecology dates back to Aristotle, coming from the Greek word for ‘household.’ Aristotle, according to Postman, “spoke of the importance, to our intellectual equanimity, of keeping our household [or oikos] in order.” The modern usage is apt because we are all–plant, animal, mineral–sharing a single household. “If we wish to connect the ancient meaning with the modern,” he continues, “we might say that the word suggests that we need to keep our symbolic household in order.”

I was struck by that when I was reading an old talk by the late Elder Neal A. Maxwell. He says:

Even with its flaws, the family is basic, and since no other institution can compensate fully for failure in the family, why then, instead of enhancing the family, the desperate search for substitutes? Why not require family impact studies before proceeding with this program or that remedy, since of all environmental concerns the family should be first? Hundreds of governmental departments and programs protect various interests, but which one protects the family?

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, 1919.

Since President Thomas S. Monson is the master of the amusing and heart-warming anecdote, it seems only fair that I should share my own about him.

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You’ll sometimes hear people claim that legally recognized same-sex marriage doesn’t affect traditional marriages at all. This argument is easily refuted, as I will show shortly. But traditional marriage advocates hurt their case when they say marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Put that way, it does sound a bit arbitrary and exclusive. I think it is better to say, marriage should be comprised of a husband and a wife. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ can mean anything [could refer to any type of role within a marriage]. But people instantly know what a husband is, and what a wife is. To extend marriage to same sex couples requires also abolishing the roles of husband and wife. It is not possible to do the one without the other. And so the bureaucrats implementing California’s court order decreed henceforth that all marriages would have the respective parties designated as “party A” and “party B”.

Now, some of you may be rushing to reply, “Well, no one is preventing me from still being a husband or a wife in my marriage. I can still use those terms, no matter what the state says!” If so, you’ve just fallen into my trap. Read more »

When I learned that historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin was giving the commencement address at my university graduation, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. People around me in the audience expressed disappointment it wasn’t someone like Bill Cosby or Bono. But Boorstin had long been one of my intellectual heroes, and I had read everything of his I could get my hands on. The theme he chose to speak on was “Leadership and the Amateur Spirit,” a theme he also explores in chapter 18 of his book Hidden History.

He pointed out that ‘amateur’ has become a dirty word to many people, to their discredit. Boorstin writes,

The true leader is an amateur in the proper, original sense of the word. The amateur (from Latin amator, “lover”; from amare, “to love”) does something for the love of it. He pursues his enterprise not for money, not to please the crowd, not for professional prestige [JSB-I highly recommend people explore the etymology of that word as well; prestige may not seem so, well, prestigious anymore] or for assured promotion and retirement at the end–but because he loves it. If he can’t help doing it, it’s not because of the forces pushing from behind but because of his fresh, amateur’s vision of what lies ahead.

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I know apologetics is a dirty word among some of us here, but I am having a great time at the 2008 Annual FAIR Conference in Sandy, UT. I have heard about the importance of innoculating believers against opposing arguments, about how the Book of Mormon might have located within the context of Mayan ideas about kingship, initiation, and ascension. I have heard a delightful and moving presentation (it brought me and many others to tears) by our own Margaret Blair Young and Darius Gray (sorry folks, you’re going to have to wait a little longer for their DVD!). (I didn’t get a chance to say so in person Margaret because I was buttonholed by another attendee on the way up, and you were mobbed anyway, but you and Darius did a great job!) Now I am listening to a panel discussion on philosophy, religion, and apologetics. I am a horrible multitasker, so I am not going to liveblog what’s going on, but you can look at FAIR’s open conference thread here.

Boyd K. Packer a few years ago said, “Let no one underestimate the power of faith in the ordinary Latter-day Saints.” I wanted to write to tell you about some otherwise ordinary Latter-day Saints I know who are doing some extraordinary things. Several months ago, I through some business associations I met Ron and his daughter Shauna. I knew right away that they were great people, people who make me proud to be a fellow Latter-day Saint.

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If you needed any (further) proof that I am an odd duck, you have it in the fact that I always enjoy Fast & Testimony meeting. Not only do I like the classic, approved form of testimony, but I also enjoy the other, deprecated forms that irritate so many people, including Dallin H. Oaks. I enjoy the thank-imony, the travel-imony, the spouse-imony, the health-imony, and even the roommate-imony.

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Here are some gems from this year’s Priesthood and Relief Society Manual. The more I read of Joseph Smith, the more dense and insightful his thinking seems. The list, of course, is mine. Feel free to add your own!
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Nearly all of these come from Joseph Fielding Smiths’ Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, so it is possible that some of these quotes are not present in our manual due to historiographical reasons, and I have made no investigation into the validity of these quotes. Others, of course, were not included due to space or subject matter considerations. As with the other list, these are my favorites. Feel free to add your own in the comments. Read more »

We’re quite a fertile bunch here at MM, I think, and with our own impending birth in my family, I too have uteruses on the brain (but definitely not, what with all the aches, pains, nausea, fatigue, any uterus envy). Two completely separate bits of reading I was doing during the same time period jolted me with a new idea:

We are all familiar with God’s parting words to Adam and Eve as they were expelled from the garden. God says to Eve, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.” (Genesis 3: 16) Could it be, I wondered, rather than merely being a curse, that this pain in childbirth was a direct and literal consequence of the physical changes resulting from the Fall?

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