Posts Tagged ‘ science ’

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 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 [...]

Lori and George Schappell are the oldest living craniopagus (joined at the head) twins.  The twin girls were born in 1961, and it was believed that they not only shared blood vessels in the brain, but also had a fused brain.  They share the frontal lobe of the brain, and scientists wondered if they might share [...]

Today’s guest poster is Tatiana, a crazy-cat-lady engineer entrepreneur scientist flexitarian mom wildlife-sanctuarian public-healthian global-developer pro-nuke feminist liberal Mormon. Averting Human Extinction party platform: There are 15 key points. Energy: Work with utility companies to aggressively move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy including next-generation nuclear energy using reprocessed fuel. This will limit [...]

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 [...]

The Community of Christ has begun “crossing the Rubicon” on LGBT issues, and there can be no reversing the action taken. CofChrist is committed to the theological precedent that priesthood can be compatible with participation in a legally recognized same-sex sexual relationship. On June 2nd, the Australian National Conference approved the following recommendation to the [...]

There is a call on the bloggernacle to talk about peace with us this week.  With Easter upon us, I wanted to talk a bit about the death of the Prince of Peace, who died a violent, tortured death.  Traditional images of the Crucifixion look similar to this one (pictured on the right.)  National Geographic [...]

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 [...]

I still contend I was not being insensitive — just naive. I arrived on the East Coast in 1973 — freshly out of grad school — having been selected for the one job at John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab I’d wanted more than any other I’d even considered applying for. After my church had canonized [...]

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” [...]

On August 6, 2009 I introduced myself to the bloggernacle with the introduction Unleashing the Analyst. A Personal Story. It is a story about me, my faith journey to that point, and some of the positions I had at that time. The real revelation in the story (even if only for myself) was the unboxing [...]

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.”

Last time I addressed the topic of our discussion in the church I talked about faith in Christ, and how we might shift our discussion from speculation on doctrines designed to create an emotional response to discussions about faith in our real lives. In perhaps a not too dissimilar vein, I’d like to talk about [...]

Several recent studies suggest that there is a good chance that Homo sapiens (us) mated with Neanderthals in the past?  Did Adam have Neanderthal DNA?  Do we?  What does this mean?  The next few posts in this series will discuss evolution, different species, time lines, etc.  In order to understand this better, this is a [...]

My son’s recent experience in early morning seminary caused me to look a little more closely at the church’s stance (or perhaps lack thereof) on evolution.  While teaching about the book of Genesis, his teacher made a few claims: that she is not descended from monkeys that the earth is literally 6,000 years old that evolution contradicts the [...]

In the last couple of posts (here, and here) I defined some terms relating to consciousness and artificial intelligence. Then in part II, I took a look at those topics from the point of view of philosophy and psychology. As I have examined the topics of philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence I have learned there [...]

I tend to be overly in awe of the grandeur of nature anytime, but having a once-per-hundred-plus year earthquake and a once-per-fifty-year straight-up-the-Atlantic-coastline hurricane track brush my home within a six day period has only amplified that tendency. Neither event was strong here in the sense that many of you have probably experienced a hurricane [...]

In my last post I gave some definitions of Autonomy, Intelligence, and Consciousness and discussed some possible implications with the intent of further discussing artificial intelligence. In this post, we’re going to dive a bit deeper into consciousness, and set the stage for a discussion of how conscious robots might emerge. Consciousness in Philosophy In [...]