Author: Stephen C

BYU’s recent policy changes that appear to be geared towards reinforcing the institution’s Latter-day Saint character are causing consternation in some circles, so I thought now would be a good time to be the bad guy and make a case for why proactive faculty boundary maintenance is needed for an institution like BYU to fulfill its mission. Like a lot of other people, I get the sense that recent changes are bellwethers for future shifts to come, so this will probably be a relevant topic for the next little while. First, a common response is that a religiously sponsored institution can positively reinforce its religious mission while still allowing faculty to challenge the teachings of the sponsoring institution. However, the whole idea of a religious institution of higher education is the belief that a synthesis of the faith’s framework and the traditional academic venture is synergistic in some way. Challenging the faith’s framework itself doesn’t fit into that; using that framework as a lens through which to view academic learning does.  If you don’t hold to the premise that religious institutions are right to perform any boundary maintenance, if you’re okay with an anti-Mormon teaching a religion class as long as they have an MDiv, then this is the part in a “choose your own adventure” book where it tells you to skip to the end, but as a parting note I would just add that there’s plenty of ideological boundary maintenance…

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Free will is one of those issues where you have to think deep and hard about your definitions. Many philosophers will subscribe to one definition, but not another, so sometimes the whole debate on whether we have “free will” revolves around semantics that you can’t do justice to in a single post, so I won’t try. However, it is fairly clear that Latter-day Saint theology not only makes space for (at least some version of) free will (except we refer to it as “agency” in our vernacular), but puts it at the cornerstone of our teleology.  Scientifically, the most famous experiment that addresses the concept of free will is the so-called Libet experiment. While there’s some dispute, my understanding is that there is a soft consensus that, when you ask someone to make a random decision such as moving a finger, scientists can detect a buildup of brain signals that predicts whether they will “choose” to move the finger moments before they are consciously aware of deciding to move it, suggesting that what we think we are choosing is actually the result of non-conscious brain mechanics.    Assuming that the technical aspects of the experiment are sound, there are still a lot of steps before we get to a “it’s all brain mechanics” conclusion (for example, the experiment begs the question of whether free will can operate subconsciously). Predicting responses from brain patterns is an exciting area of cutting edge research,…

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When I was a Wikipedia editor years ago the Joseph Smith page stated that “[Smith] began teaching that God was…embodied within time and space,” and they cited Busman’s statement to that effect. I removed the “embodied in time” and explained that this is arguable, citing Alma’s statement that “time only is measured unto men.” (As I was writing this I re-checked the page, and it’s back up, oh well).   So is God in and beholden to the flow of time? Church historians and theologians undoubtedly have a more informed take on this than I, but in terms of the science I’m more comfortable with an Augustinian “no.”  Since Einstein discovered that “now” is relative, saying that God dwells in time begs the question of which time, since it doesn’t do us any good to simply say that “now” for God is “now” for us, and that God remembers the past and is aware of, but is not experiencing, the future. (Although the Pearl of Great Price speaks of Kolob as reckoning “God’s time,” I read this as talking about God’s unit of time measurement more than the “now” that God is operating in, although I might be wrong). Joseph Smith’s quote that “the past, present, and future, were, and are with [God] one eternal now” basically strikes the same note as Einstein’s statement that “the distinction made between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” …

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A pattern I’ve noticed in political and sometimes religious discourse lately is the concept of “good anger.” This isn’t the calm and measured, but firm response of Christ before the Romans or at the temple, but a deep antipathy with bite to it. The acidity of this anger is not considered a weakness, but is intentional; a feature, not a bug, justified because of the injustice that motivates the anger.  My interest here is with the justification for the hate. In the same sense that there is a major difference between weaknesses of the flesh and open rebellion against God, the justification of social or political righteous anger is essentially an open revolt against the teachings of the Savior, even if it’s not seen as such. On the issue of forgiveness, the Savior is clear and direct. All people, everywhere, in any circumstance. It’s hard enough for those of us living in fairly comfortable circumstances to pull this off, but a few moments of pondering on just how horrible humans can be to each other makes one realize just how radical this command is.  Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris committed what are considered some of the most horrendous murders in US history. I have no desire to go into detail, but the tapes they made of their tortures are used by the FBI to habituate recruits to violence, and by all accounts the perpetrators never showed real remorse for their crimes. I…

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The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.-Freeman Dyson As noted in a previous post, fine tuning is a problem that has received mainstream acceptability within the scientific community. To summarize, for complex matter like stars and carbon to exist (which, by extension, is required for us to exist), matter needs to have characteristics that are just right. If the difference between the masses of this and that particle or the strength of this and that force were slightly different the universe as we know it would not exist. I won’t go into the details here, but the Templeton Foundation funded a reader-friendly writeup on the issue.  We appear to have not only hit the jackpot, but to have hit about a half dozen jackpots simultaneously. One explanation for this is the anthropic principle, which simply states that had we not hit all those jackpots we simply wouldn’t be around to talk about it. I kind of find this an unsatisfying just-so story, and I get the sense that most physicists do too.  Ultimately, the remaining, not-mutually-exclusive options are either some kind of God calibrating the characteristics of the universe (twisting the knobs, as Dawkins puts it), or a multiverse, where there are a vast number of dead, lifeless universes, with an occasional universe with just the right characteristics…

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There are a variety of “end of the universe” scenarios that physicists currently see as most likely:  Heat Death Because of a mysterious energy in the universe (aptly named “dark energy”), the universe’s expansion is speeding up. As things expand they cool down, so the heat contained in the universe will gradually dissipate until there is no light and no heat, just an immense void of cold darkness. This is the current leader for “most likely way the universe will end.”  The Big Rip Dark energy accelerates with time, eventually causing space itself to grow so much that objects grow very distant from each other. Professor Katie Mack’s description in her excellent book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), describes the last few months of the universe’s existence in this scenario:  From this point, the destruction picks up its pace. We begin to find that the orbits of the planets are not what they should be, but are instead slowly spiraling outward. Just months before the end, after we’ve lost the outer planets to the great and glowing blackness, the Earth drifts away from the Sun, and the Moon from the Earth. We too enter the darkness, alone. Eventually the expansion of space itself explodes the planet and then all atoms inside of it get ripped apart.   Vacuum Decay Without getting too technical, the energy built into the vacuum of space switches in such a way that a wave of…

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“Leadership roulette” (or “bishop roulette”) is a common term thrown around when there is some good or bad outcome that depends on the contingencies of who happens to be your local leader. This particular complaint is often aimed at some perceived authority figure in a bubble at Church Headquarters that is supposedly detached from the complexities of lived experiences of the Saints. Now, “leadership roulette” is real, and I don’t mean to dismiss its occasional relevance, but there are also a lot of complaints about the “one size fits all” solutions, when the two are essentially tradeoffs of one another. Tying a bishop’s hands essentially involves imposing mandates from above, while allowing bishops to use their judgment essentially allows for variation from case to case. God can think multiple things at once in a perfectly consistent way, so He can square that circle, but for us mortals we are required to essentially pick our poison here.  This isn’t a new idea. One of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, coined the term “the iron cage of bureaucracy”  to describe the routinization of roles and decisions that is inevitable in a legal/technical society. To some extent the benefits of bureaucracies outweigh the costs. We like the rules being codified and written down so that they protect us from arbitrary judgment. Also, as institutions become large enough it simply becomes impossible for the leaders to manage every detail, so they need to rely…

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The American philosopher Richard Rorty recollected that when he was a teenager he dreamed of being able to read all the great works in his local library and arrive at some grand synthesis of truth from all the wisdom contained therein (for all truth to be circumscribed into one great whole, as it were). and later in his career he (arguably) became something of an apostate from philosophy as he increasingly challenged its ability to do what it claimed to be able to do.   At the risk of being presumptuous, as an undergraduate I fell in love with Rorty in large part because my own journey started tracking his. The big difference, of course, is that as an orthodox Latter-day Saint I do believe in what he would call the “writing in the sky” of absolute truth, but like him I believed that the wisdom of the ages had something to contribute to this grand understanding of capital T Truth, but also like him I later realized that it actually doesn’t do that as much as it claims to. I do intellectual things. I read a lot, I go to a local book club, I enjoy discussions, but as an identity and a structure for life intellectualism is pretty hollow. During my halcyon undergraduate days my educational philosophy was summed up in the Brigham Young quote (which I still love) “if an Elder shall give us a lecture upon astronomy,…

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Population genetics is an exciting, cutting edge area of research. In the past we had a fairly simplistic picture of our deep history, with humans migrating out of Africa and then sequentially expanding from continent to continent. However, occasional findings of very early human remains, combined with the genetics revolution, paints a completely different picture of turbulent demographic back-and-forths with extinctions, conquests, deportations, and uprooted wanderings. Since writing came on the scene relatively late, most (chronologically speaking) of our history as a species is written down not on paper, but literally in our blood, whether it’s the history of mass sexual enslavement of Irish women by Viking raiders  or the remote San people of South Africa being cut off from the rest of humanity for 100,000 years, these stories of our fathers and mothers are still recorded in our genes.  So what does this have to do with the gospel?  The most obvious issue is the Book of Mormon genetics question. In terms of apologetics, I feel like this issue is a draw; if you want it to be an issue it’s an issue, if you don’t want it to be an issue it’s not an issue.  The first classical Book of Mormon genetics discussion revolved around mitochondrial DNA. This is a kind of DNA that everybody inherits from their mother. Consequently, by measuring how often DNA mutates we can come up with a clock for how related you are…

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I’ve noticed a not-insignificant number of members, both orthodox and heterodox, assume that the Church’s position on human sexuality is a “just because the prophet said so” issue, and aren’t aware of any well thought out defenses of the Church’s (or conservative religion’s in general) position written by non-church leaders, so I’ve gone ahead and thrown together a collection of pieces that speak to the subject that I’m posting here.  I’m intending for these sources to speak primarily to theological issues; I recognize that legal same-sex marriage is a whole other can of worms, and that the political arguments vis-a-vis same-sex marriage are related, albeit ultimately distinct. from the theological arguments surrounding same-sex sealings. However, since a lot of treatments of the subject touch on issues germane to both there is some political mixed in the batch too, but that’s not the primary intent.  A note on the comments: yes, I’m aware that for many people literally any argument defending the Church’s position is arbitrary and capricious. I don’t have a ton of time to puppy guard the comments, so while I’ll keep them open I’m not going to be a super active presence there.    Cassler, Valerie H. “Plato’s Son, Augustine’s Heir: ‘A Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology’?” SquareTwo 5(2): 2012.  https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerPlatosSon.html   Dyer, W. Justin. “Shifting Views on the Male-Female Relationship: Same-Sex Marriage and Other Social Consequences.” Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel 18, no. 2 (2017): 31-51. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1791&context=re …

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Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense. Basically, small particles act differently depending on whether they are being watched, either by a conscious human being or a detector machine (even if the detector is turned on after it has acted). I’m not going to rehash how we know, but the more details you get the more mind blowing it is (Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe has the best easy read description of said details). More and more refined experiments continue to close possible loopholes, so it looks like the crazy is true (despite, among other people, Albert Einstein spending the last half of his life trying to prove it false).  If you said that particles behave this way back before we had evidence for it people would have thought you were nuts which, a priori, should make us more humble about the possibilities in the universe. One of the less sophisticated “atheist bro” arguments points out that our every day life works according to some principle, and some religious belief violates that principle (“how can Mary get pregnant as a virgin? Check mate!”), when on a meta level quantum mechanics teaches us that our everyday operating principles are most certainly not accurate guides for peeling back layers of reality. If quantum mechanics reveals a counterintuitive reality we can measure, how much more counterintive can layers of reality be that we can’t measure? (And yes, I know that quantum mechanics is a…

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A well done religious-themed movie can be a powerful spiritual experience. Unfortunately, the movie industry generally either shies away from religious themes (unless to deride them), or they fit in the Christian cinema niche that produces simple starches for the masses. It is hard to find a religious-themed movie that is authentically spiritually touching and has good production value, that’s not sappy but also not cynical. Because of their rarity I’m on a lifelong hunt. I’ve scrounged foreign, domestic, old, and new, and these are the fruits of my labors (in order, so 1= my favorite). If I’ve missed some, do let me know. They are rank ordered with favorite=1. 1. Son of Saul  Academy award-winner for best foreign film in 2015. A Jewish concentration camp prisoner forced to help dispose of gas chamber bodies comes across the corpse of his son and tries to find a rabbi to say Kaddish. The cinematography is experimental (the camera focuses on his face the whole time), which creepingly makes the graphic horrors of the camp happening at the edges seem like a sideshow. Definitely not for kids, but a very powerful depiction of earnest, concrete faith.  2. A Hidden Life Terrence Malik is controversial (aesthetically, not socially/politically), but I like his work. A Hidden Life is the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a (now beautified) Austrian Catholic living in the Alps who was executed for refusing to fight for the Nazis. The cinematography, music,…

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Like most Latter-day Saints, my testimony of the Church is based more on the numinous than the intellectual. However, I still remember the moment when, ruminating on my AP biology class while taking a break during my summer lifeguarding job, I decided that there is no way life could have just spontaneously happened, and that I’d be a believer in something out there even if my Latter-day Saint faith cratered.  As I type that last sentence I can hear the shrieking and eye scratching from the Dawkins disciples in the back of my head. Because of the catastrophic political and social alliance between people who are skeptical that chance could have led to the first cell and people who want to put disclaimers on biology textbooks teaching evolution, there is more of a visceral reaction to “design” among biologists than there is to “fine tuning” among physicists. (Indeed, before he passed away the great physicist Steven Weinberg admitted that the only options left for explaining fine tuning was God or a multiverse). And that makes sense, the “intelligent design” people are professional adversaries of the evolutionary biology and biology education discipline in ways that the fine tuners just aren’t for professional physicists.  So to just be clear, I don’t think intelligent design should be taught in schools. If anything my “design” based realization that afternoon at the Riverside Country Club probably would have been muddied had it been immediately framed…

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When I was in graduate school with a young family my wife and I went on government assistance. We didn’t have a car so I had to fill our stroller up with groceries every third day. Of course, one particularly cold winter our stroller got a flat and we couldn’t fix it, so I had to go out in face-numbing West Philadelphia weather and run multiple shopping laps back and forth with a backpack so that I could make it back in time for class. Those were tough times (somewhat obviated when we had our rent paid one month by an anonymous donor who left the message “love one another”). Even though we were in a low income area of West Philadelphia, and a lot of people were on government assistance, we still got the awkward stares when the cashier tried to figure out our WIC checks while the line stacked up behind us. (Thankfully I still had some of the “ignore the awkward stares” calluses left over from my mission.) For us the decision to have children was not really affected by whether or not they would require government assistance, but we ran into our fair share of people who were torn over the dilemma of whether to have children that they could not afford. In our particular circles, the people who had an issue with having kids on government assistance fell into two groups: the first were “bro”…

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Many countries have continuity of government plans for what to do if the leadership suddenly dies in some sort of a catastrophe. The United States famously has a “designated survivor” that is in a secure location during the State of the Union so that somebody in the line of succession can be preserved if the Capitol building is destroyed; one of the of the most interesting manifestations of this planning is the fact that each of the four UK nuclear missile submarines has a handwritten letter from the Prime Minister in a safe that has instructions for what to do with their nuclear missiles in case the UK government is destroyed. The hierarchy of the Church is structured around the doctrine that the top fifteen men in the Church have the same office as Christ’s original apostles, and that they are ordained to that position by other apostles, eventually stretching back to Jesus Christ through the laying on of hands. But what would happen if all fifteen pass away at the same time?  The lack of a clear, legal successor might lead to a post-Joseph Smith martyrdom situation, with various splinter groups and claimants. Institutionally it seems the most likely scenario would be that the Presidents of the 70s would become the new governing body of the Church (assuming they were not affected by the catastrophe). D&C 107:26 could be interpreted as meaning that, just as the Quorum of the…

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Any reasonably intelligent person can understand the principles involved in the search for extraterrestrial life issue that I addressed in my last science post. However, the issue of consciousness is fundamentally mind-wracking and forces us to question some of our basic intuitions. It can get crazy; with some philosophers going so far as to claim that consciousness itself is an illusion, and others claiming that consciousness is almost everything. Consequently, it’s a little foolhardy to do the issue and its relevance to the gospel justice in one post, but I will try.  The standard position of philosophers and neuroscientists is that consciousness arises from chemistry in the brain. However, a substantial minority hold that things we associate with consciousness such as internal experience and feeling fundamentally cannot arise from atoms and molecules interacting with each other. While our computers are becoming more human-like in terms of processing and even in terms of intuition with neural networks and other AI algorithms, they would argue that our computers are not getting any closer to “feeling” anything or self-awareness.   One of the most famous thought experiments making this point is called “Mary’s Room.” Mary is a neuroscientist who has lived in a black and white room for her whole life, during which she has spent all her time studying the technical characteristics of the color red. Despite her lifetime of learning, once the door is open and she sees red for the first…

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“John saw curious looking beasts in heaven, he saw every creature that was in heaven, all the beasts, fowls, & fish in heaven, actually there, giving glory to God. I suppose John saw beings there, that had been saved from ten thousand times ten thousand earths like this, strange beasts of which we have no conception <all> might be seen in heaven.” -Joseph Smith, 8 April 1843  That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God. -D&C 76 About two days ago the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. It’s a pretty big deal; in a few months we’ll be able to peer almost to the moment of creation itself (plus we’ll get some killer “worlds without end” shots). Because of recent events I’ve been lately thinking about big, existential questions that are still amenable to scientific testing, and the likelihood that neighboring solar systems harbor life is one such question.  My personal interpretation is that cosmological research has a part to play in D&C 121:30-31, which prophesies that big picture questions are going to be answered in the last dispensation. Unlike most other Christian faiths, extraterrestrial life was built into our fundamental cosmology almost from the beginning; it’s not the domain of speculative theologians trying to weld the concept onto frameworks that weren’t built with them in mind. (A very-informed-about-the-Church…

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One of the stereotypes conservative US members have to deal with is the idea that they click their heels and salute every time the Church makes a political statement, when anybody who’s had deep political discussions with them understands that there are multiple layers of nuances and influences built into their decision making process. Consequently, I can’t say that I was terribly surprised when vaccination rates didn’t seem to jump up in Utah when the Church very explicitly came out in favor of vaccines.  However, in the spirit of humbly pointing out something I did not expect, according to a survey recently released by research firm PRRI: “Among religious groups, Hispanic Protestants and Latter-day Saints (Mormons) increased most in vaccine acceptance. Hispanic Protestants went from 56% vaccine acceptant in June to 77% in November, and Latter-day Saints similarly increased from 65% acceptance in June to 85% in November.” Now, technically we can’t tease out causality for this increase, but given that the First Presidency came out with their statement between those two waves, the most likely scenario is that First Presidency statements can actually move the political needle among members. [As “John Mansfield” in the comments pointed out, this suggests that more than half of those in the Latter-day Saint community who did not accept vaccination before changed to being pro-vaccine]. Another interesting point from the survey, besides Jews we are the religious group most likely to agree with the…

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I recently helped conduct a much-overdue national survey of Catholic priests that, among other things, confirmed what most informed Catholic observers already knew: younger priests are much, much more conservative than their older counterparts. While a significant proportion of older priests disagree with fundamental Catholic Church teachings regarding homosexuality, for example, among the latest generation there are few priests that think that contraception among married people is okay. The gulf is pretty big.  Now, there are fundamental dynamics and background histories at play with the Catholic Church that aren’t relevant to the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I do not want to overdraw the parallels. Still, some comparison is useful.  One explanation for our results is that in the past the clerical collar carried with it a cachet and social esteem among certain communities that they no longer enjoy. (On a related note, I wouldn’t be surprised if members of the 12 receive more jeers than cheers when they travel in certain sections of Salt Lake City.) Yes, in the case of the Catholic Church scandals are part of the story, but it is also symptomatic of a broader decline in authority and religion more generally. Consequently, people who join the Catholic priesthood are more likely to do so out of personal devotion, and they will be more likely to choose the Church when its teachings do not comport with modern day norms. Similarly, while…

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A few weeks ago I posted some numbers that suggested that Latter-day Saints have significantly lower divorce rates than non-Latter-day Saints. Fair enough, but are these marriages actually happier, or is this just because the stigma against divorce in Latter-day Saint culture is keeping marriages together that would have otherwise divorced? Unlike the divorce question, I am not aware of anybody else who has tested whether Latter-day Saint marriages are happier. Thankfully, every year the US General Social Survey (discussed in the last divorce post) asks married respondents about their happiness with their marriage: “Taking things all together, how would you describe your marriage? Would you say that your marriage is very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” I pooled the last 10 years in order to get enough Latter-day Saints (although the results don’t substantively change if we include the last 15 years like I did with the divorce post), and scored “very happy” as a 3, “pretty happy” as a 2, and “not too happy” as a 1. If we do this, we have 96 randomly sampled married Latter-day Saints to compare to everyone else (with 159 if we extend it back 15 years). The average non-Latter-day Saint marital happiness score is 2.59, whereas the average Latter-day Saint happiness score is 2.71. While both groups on average indicate that their happiness falls somewhere between “very happy” and “pretty happy,” Latter-day Saints are closer to “very happy.” This difference is…

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