Buttars' Bill Passes House Committee 7-6

The Salt Lake Tribune has the story.

[Buttars' illness] left Rep. Jim Ferrin, R-Orem, to carry the bill. Ferrin changed the "origins" bill to remove wording that implied more than one scientific theory on the origin of species existed. He told the committee that evolution is the only scientific explanation, but that scientists have a variety of opinions under the umbrella term "evolution."

He also said he has concerns that teachers are offering evolution as a fact when it hasn't been "indisputably proven."

Ferrin would like science teachers to "simply acknowledge what is proven and what is not proven."

It sounds like the bill is getting watered down--to the point that it seems superfluous.

(hat-tip to jcobabe.)

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Book of Mormon Historicity: Sunstone Links

Over the past year a number of articles and letters have been published in Sunstone concerning Book of Mormon historicity. For those who are interested, SunstoneBlog.com has made them available for free, along with some letters not published.

For those unfamiliar with the terrain, here's a short list of people and their basic position. Not all of the authors are represented here, and I'm splitting them into two camps even though there are gradations between them.

Pro-historical: Trent Stephens, Blake Ostler, Kevin Christensen.

Not historical: Simon Southerton, Thomas Murphy, Brent Lee Metcalfe, Dan Vogel.


A number of the articles make reference to other publications such as those from FARMS. This FAIR page has links to many of those publications.

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Geology, I Am Doing It

Do you know what a varve or a Milankovitch cycle is? If not, you should head on over to The Western Geologist, a blog run by a couple of--geologists.

Western Geologist himself is not LDS but he grew up in Utah and has LDS family. Capt. Obsidian is LDS. I see they have been hitting some of the same issues I have and read some of the same blogs. I think they've even got a celebrity endorsement by Brigham Young.

I know very little about geology so I'll be keeping an eye on them.

(For WG's benefit, the title of my post is a play on a children's church song that goes, "Genealogy, I am doing it...")

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Cain, Bigfoot, and DNA Testing

The stars are aligning or something. First there was this post which brought up the connection between race and Cain. Then there was this discussion on Cain and his posterity in the Bible. Oh, and we can't forget this poll which has fun with the folk doctrine that Cain is bigfoot.

PZ Myers has drawn my attention to an article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (Vol. 21 No.2 Feb 2006) that investigates Sasquatch. Some fur was collected from the scene of a sighting and tested for DNA. The article pointed me to another article in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (31, 2004, 1-3) that tested the DNA of hair identified as belonging to yeti.

The results: Sasquatch clusters with bison; Yeti clusters with ungulates.

I suppose cryptozoologists will be undeterred. The Sasquatch researchers concluded that the hair recovered was not that of Sasquatch, so I guess they'll keep on searching.

Update: Well things have just taken a turn for the stranger. A comment on Myers' post pointed out this cryptozoology page analyzing bigfoot tracks. The analysis was done by none other than D. Jeffrey Meldrum--the same D. Jeffrey Meldrum who co-authored Evolution and Mormonism with Trent Stephens! Here is his faculty webpage--I see he has been interviewed on "Coast to Coast AM". Here is another webpage describing his interest. I'm not sure what to think about all of this.

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Judging Miracles: My Approach

I hope my last post didn't raise expectations too high for a profound analysis of miracles. I'm just going to throw out a few of my thoughts on the subject.

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As background, there are at least two great talks on miracles in Church literature. This talk by Elder Oaks, and this talk by Elder Matthew Cowley. On a more practical level, I really enjoy Michael Ash's take on miracles.

"Recognizing that miracles are harmonious with natural (although perhaps unknown) laws gives reason to suggest that some of the “miracles” of scriptural times might be understood in accordance with natural phenomenon with which we are familiar, while other “miracles” might be supported by natural laws with which we are still unfamiliar. Miracles such as the Resurrection, Jesus' walking on the water, his healing of the lame and blind, etc., appeal to natural laws that still allude us. Other miracles, such as the parting of the Red Sea, the manna from heaven, etc., might possibly be explained by phenomenon with which we are familiar – this no less makes such occurrences, “miracles.” Although an earthquake may be the result of the shifting of tectonic plates, for instance, it is no less of a miracle when the timing, location, and outcome is directed by the Lord or by the hand of the Lord's prophet."

I am perfectly comfortable with many miracles having more limited and natural explanations. In many cases I don't think it really matters. My basic philosophy is that I will not deny God the power to do anything that He or his prophets have not ruled out--but we have to deal with what we have in terms of evidence, if there is any.

Did God actually cause the whole earth to be flooded in the time of Noah and kill all land life not on the ark? I won't deny God the ability to do so in principle, but we have to deal with what we have. In order to believe that God flooded the whole earth I must also believe that he erased any trace of it and planted contrary evidence, so I favor a more limited explanation of local floods. (As an aside, imagine you had never seen the ocean before and you were washed out into the open sea. Wouldn't you think the whole earth was flooded?)

So I find myself with a mix of skepticism and faith. I am not willing to throw out miracles, but neither do I automatically accept them all at face value. I guess I could summarize my approach with several questions. For any miraculous claim, (i) how trustworthy is the source? (ii) is there a more limited or natural explanation? (iii) does it matter?

It's not an objective or unbiased approach, but it's the best I've got at the moment.

(By the way, note that Elder Oaks proposes a more natural explanation for the miracles performed by Pharaoh's magicians.)

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Judging Miracles: Background

Over the Christmas holiday I picked up my Dad's copy of Believing History: Latter Day Saint Essays, a collection of essays by Richard Bushman. One of the essays, "Joseph Smith and Skepticism," discusses some of the context that led many to reject Joseph's miraculous claims. [Disclaimer: I don't own the book, so I welcome correction if my memory errs.]

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For many, the skepticism toward miracles was rooted in the Enlightenment resulting in rejection of biblical miracles. Protestant Christians responded with apologetic arguments in defense of miracles, but they had a problem--Catholicism had a substantial tradition of miracles. Protestants had to defend biblical miracles while discrediting Catholic miracles, so they came up with a number of criteria to separate the true from the false. One fierce defender of Christian miracles was Alexander Campbell--the same man who attacked Mormonism after the conversion of Sidney Rigdon and other of his [Campbell's] movement in Ohio.

Joseph's miracles stood between two opposing enemies--those who rejected miracles in general, and those who thought miraculous claims like Joseph's had to be debunked and rejected for the sake of defending those in the Bible.

I found this historical context quite interesting. It seems to me that the whole problem of judging miracles applies to us, but also in a slightly different way. Ours is a religious tradition that encourages seeking knowledge and understanding of this earth and how it works, yet demands belief in miracles. Skepticism and belief each have a claim in our theology.

In a forthcoming post I will discuss my half-baked approach to the issue of judging miracles.

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Humanzees Are Right Out

Bush's State of the Union speech last night contained this bit:

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

PZ Myers responds:

But guess what? Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it's really happening. Of course, it isn't with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it's the topic of ongoing debate. Let's consider one recent example of such an experiment.

Referring to a mouse model of Down's syndrome, he continues:

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

I hope he doesn't have this kind of research in mind.

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Overview and History of the Wedge

The Seattle Weekly has a nice article that reviews the history of the Discovery Institute. It gives some background on the founders, funding, and strategy, then summarizes the recent court defeat. It tells the story of the leaking of the document, "The Wedge Strategy," and provides a copy for your reading pleasure. (While the document was leaked in 1999, Phillip Johnson was already using the wedge analogy in at least one of his previously published books.)

Here's one of my favorite parts, referring to the recent trial:

Almost as soon as Eric Rothschild [plaintiff's attorney] began his cross-examination, Behe's cultivated scientific calm began to crumble. Rothschild baited him like a picador, dashing in, planting a barb, turning away to attack from a new direction before his victim realized it. Hour by hour, Rothschild got Behe to admit:

-That no peer-reviewed scientific journal has published research supportive of intelligent design's claims.

-That Behe's own book was not, as he had claimed, peer reviewed.

-That Behe himself criticizes the science presented as supporting intelligent design in instructional material created for that purpose.

-That intelligent design seems plausible and reasonable to inquirers in direct proportion to their belief or nonbelief in God.

-And that the basic arguments for evidence of purposeful design in nature are essentially the same as those adduced by the Christian apologist Rev. William Paley (1743–1805) in his 1802 Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected From the Appearances of Nature, where he sums up his observations of the complexity of life in the ringing words, "The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD."

(via Red State Rabble.)

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