Spend an Evening with Daniel Peterson

It's been a little while since I've checked in on the Mormon Stories podcast, and boy have I been missing out. Today I want to highlight a 4-part interview with Daniel C. Peterson. That works out to about 4.5 hours of discussion with one of the Church's chief (if not the chief) apologists. It's a wide-ranging and pretty frank discussion, and I thought it was just delightful. Here are a few of the gems that I picked out:

- He has an abiding interest in astronomy, cosmology, and geology. In fact, he originally intended to be a cosmologist.

- A desire that we teach our history better (i.e. warts and all), and that Sunday school in general be improved. In connection with this, Peterson tells some amusing stories about his time on the Sunday school manual-writing committee.

- While serving as a gospel doctrine teacher, he talked about the human side of prophets (e.g. Nephi probably was a really annoying younger brother). A contingent of the class complained to their bishop that he was teaching "secular humanism."

- Speaking of humanism, Peterson sees Mormonism as a kind of theistic humanism, and thinks that non-religious humanists have important things to say.

- His opinion that many prophecies, and their fulfillment, are often a reflection of God's power to bring things to pass in the way he chooses, rather than some kind of predestined future.

- A second-hand story that President Eyring remarked that most high priest groups have more doctrinal certainty than the First Presidency.

I want to dwell on one part of the interview for a moment, because I think it needs some challenging. In defense of Joseph Smith's use of folk-magic, Peterson pointed out that dowsing for water is still a wide-spread practice, and told of a personal experience where dowsing for water seemed to work. First I should note that although that line of defense might work well with religious critics, it makes things worse for someone of a scientific skepticism orientation. This is because dowsing appears to be a phenomenon that can be attributed to subconscious cues and muscle movements, and retrospective justification. In short, it appears to be a psychological illusion, similar to facilitated communication and Ouija boards.

I don't doubt Peterson's sincerity (and to be clear, he does not claim that dowsing does in fact work), nor am I in a position to judge his experience, but his story does raise some red flags. For example, he and others may have received subtle cues as to where the water pipe was. Did the dowsing rods cross at exactly the right spot, or was there an element of 'close enough,' that artificially inflates the number of hits? Further, Peterson discounts the guy for whom the dowsing failed, attributing the failure to his not holding it right. As convincing as the experience sounds, a lot of ordinary possibilities remain. So, I agree that Joseph's use of folk-magic is not, in and of itself, any more scandalous than dowsing, but let's be careful in comparing him to a practice that controlled tests have repeatedly shown to be illusory. (Actually, I'm open to the possibility that many of Joseph's magical experiences were honest illusions, but that's another discussion.)

Anyway, my overall impression of the discussion is that Daniel Peterson and I think a lot alike, and his view of Mormonism resonates with me in many ways. I don't say that as though he should be flattered or to inflate my own status. I simply mean that Peterson has impeccable LDS credentials, so when I agree with him about something that isn't the company line, so to speak, I think I'm in good company.

In the spirit of this blog, I want to finish with a couple of quotes that I really liked.

To the extent that there is an anti-scientific, anti-intellectual strain in CES [the Church Educational System], that's something that needs to be rooted out. This does not help us. And I know that there is a movement on in the Church right now with some people pushing certain geographical theories of the Book of Mormon, and a component of that is young-earth creationism, anti-evolutionism. This worries me enormously, because it can't be sustained.

And later:

We're not fundamentalist Protestants who happen to have an extra book, and maybe an extra wife.

...Mormonism itself is bigger than that. And I object to it when critics try to paint us as a narrow-minded little fundamentalist sect, and I really object to it when Mormons try to do it. And I don't like it from either side. That's why I object to some of this young-earth creationist stuff that I'm hearing recently. No, no, that's not us.

Preach it, brother!

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