Science and Religion

Human brains naturally use locations in space and time to make sense of events. Why should we expect eternal spirits to follow that protocol? The question has always bothered me. What follows is speculation about a different way of looking at the relationship between the physical and the spiritual than the Restoration faiths adopted in [...]

In a futile attempt to answer President Packer, this post will address the feeling of the Spirit via psychology and affective neuroscience.

Dawkins: delusion. Freud: illusion. James: intuition. Jung: incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship with an extramundane authority.

In my last post on natural law, I focused on how changing minor “precepts” might make tremendous impacts on our theological understandings. I used cosmological models from general relativity to illustrate the point. Today, I want to look at things a little less, well, cosmically,  and review how changing scientific “precepts” over the last few [...]

Mormonism comes with its own science. So does any brand of mainstream Christianity, but many such Christians are unaware of how their creeds embed the assumptions of the “scientists” and mathematicians of antiquity. They can consequently perform a mental jujitsu of preserving the religious idea as metaphor for modern times while ignoring the fact that [...]

A recent Huffington Post article discussed the difficulty the Mormon church has in making an official apology for the Priesthood Ban, and according to the article, the reason is not racism.  This will come as no surprise to most Mormons who are not racist but hesitate to completely throw revered prophets and church leaders under [...]

I have been personally (and later professionally) interested in the extent to which mathematics could help forecast historical trends ever since I read the fiction of Isaac Asimov way back in the 1960′s. When I shared my first office at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with a staff meteorologist working on air quality dispersion [...]

I recently read about a book called Positive Intelligence.  (Clearly if I were more of a stickler, I would have actually read the book and not just about it.)  For those of you familiar with Emotional Intelligence, this is a slightly more accessible related assessment, one that has more to do with identifying the self-sabotaging [...]

As an American living in Asia, I often encounter cultural disconnects.  A peer or friend will make a comment that is so obviously based on assumptions or values I don’t share that I realize that my own values and assumptions must sound equally foreign to them. A few months ago, one of my co-workers in [...]

Are Americans childist, disregarding the needs of children in favor of parents’ needs, or helicopter parents, hovering over our children to make sure they get everything to which we deem they are “entitled” – from turns at bat to Easter eggs to good grades in school?  Either way, are Americans becoming the worst parents in the world, [...]

Community of Christ does not follow its LDS cousins in having secret temple rituals. So I read last week’s post by Bored in Vernal, on the “Sacred Embrace As Five Points of Fellowship” with the curiosity of one who has never even been inside an LDS Temple. Much of the terminology was unfamiliar to me [...]

I know the rest of you were as shocked as I was at the demise of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s long standing union. Shocked that it didn’t happen ten years earlier! I was recently reading an article in the NYT about a scientific prediction for celebrity breakups. Here are some of the factors that [...]

Science knows that the Norse (Vikings) colonized Greenland a millennium ago, but the colony didn’t stick when colder temperatures returned following the Medieval Warm Period. Average daily temperatures in Greenland warmed about 3 degrees F before the plunge back into a Little Ice Age (which itself only ended well into the 19th Century) that forced [...]

Anyone who has listened to the Mormon Stories podcasts, or spent any time around New Order Mormons, or any Ex-mormon site should be familiar (they are used often enough) with the terms cognitive dissonance, deception and delusions. It seems as if they have a particular traction amongst these groups. Personally I think they are over [...]

It’s been interesting to listen to the debate men have been having about women’s reproductive rights, including claims from Rick Santorum that contraception gives one license to do things which ought not be done and perverted pundit Rush Limbaugh referring to an advocate of easier access to contraception for women as a “slut” to the disgust of [...]

This afternoon’s post is by guest author Childe Jake. His other posts can be seen here and here. His personal blog is at http://thejakefoyer.blogspot.com/. Dear Dr. Carl Sagan, In The Demon-Haunted World, you write of a struggle that took place in your heart over whether or not there is an afterlife. You preface this struggle by introducing readers [...]

I like dystopian novels. I think that if many of the ideals espoused by most people were executed to perfection the result would be captured by one of the many dystopian novels that have been written. I think this says something very important about ideals, paradox, uncertainty, and truth. I’ve been reading “Brave New World” [...]

Ah, the BYU Testing Center.  Like Milgram’s famed experiment, the Testing Center is a perfect microcosm illustrating just how quickly people can convince themselves that the pain they inflict on their fellow students is well deserved. This is what happens when unrighteous dominion is given free rein and an orange vest. As Jim on The [...]

Like many people who consider the Book of Mormon as scripture, I am fascinated by questions about where it has a setting in ancient historical events. I know, of course, that many other people hold it as Scripture, but are content to see it as having no origin prior to a set of 19th Century visionary [...]

“The system that you are brought up with is the one that seems obvious – any others seem intuitively wrong, however rationally they may have been constructed.”