In March of 2009 a group of LDS engineers (mostly) gathered for a conference at Claremont Graduate University focusing on Mormon perspectives on engineering.
Videos of the talks were made available online, and now
Kofford Books has published the talks as a collection of essays. It is edited by A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman (yes,
the), the principle conference organizers.
Overview
What does Mormonism have to do with engineering? Is there something about the gospel that improves bridges, batteries, or automobiles? Terryl Givens' introduction, "No Small and Cramped Eternities: Parley Pratt and the Foundations of Mormon Cosmology," which was the keynote address at the conference, provides the basic orientation. He describes Pratt's role in systematizing and popularizing Joseph Smith's teachings, particularly with respect to the eternal nature of element and the physical corporeal nature of God. The result can perhaps be summarized with the following sentence.
What this means is that, by naturalizing Deity, the entire universe of God and humankind, heaven and hell, body and spirit, the eternal and the mundane—all are collapsed into one sphere.
With this idea in place it becomes easier to see God as a master engineer, who possesses and uses technologies that seem miraculous to us. Thus the interest of LDS engineers. The rest of the book follows in this vein with speculative excursions into the nature of spirit matter and how human advances in technology may fulfill prophecy and God's purposes. Essays cover the concept of Gaia, how Mormonism dovetails with transhumanism, a novel argument for the existence of God, and more. The book wraps up with a survey of technological advances by David Bailey. It is a credit to the organizers that they were able to attract the involvement of Richard Bushman, Terryl Givens, and David Bailey.
The introduction to the first section of chapters opens with this arresting idea, which also serves as an additional overarching theme:
In the same way that each person should have the privilege of hearing the gospel in his or her own language, it might be important to consider that technical language is another mode of expression into which we ought to translate our most important concepts.
Although the scientific revolution began with figures like Galileo and Newton, most of what is taught in college courses on any scientific topic dates from the late 19th century onward. With two minor exceptions, none of our canonized scripture was written after 1847. Is it any wonder, then, that scripture and science often do not speak the same 'language'? In fact, Givens goes so far as to suggest that the "humanizing and temporalizing" of God by Joseph Smith's King Follett discourse,
does have one virtue, however—one that we will have the boldness perhaps to someday plumb, in that it lends itself to the world’s best hope for a naturalistic theology. Stripped of all invocations of transcendent entities and transcendent eternities, such a universe should be at least potentially appealing to the hardcore materialists currently working the anti-God/anti-religion circuit [1].
After quoting Richard Dawkins--a prominent scientist and atheist--to the effect that god-like extraterrestrials probably exist, a later essay asserts:
“Eternal progression” is what Mormons call that perhaps unfamiliar version of Darwinian evolution. “God” is what Mormons call those god-like extraterrestrials that didn’t start that way. Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably gods. So says Richard Dawkins. So said Joseph Smith.
Translation indeed!
The book has many interesting ideas--sometimes old ideas presented in new ways. For example, chapter 11, "Spiritual Underpinnings for a Space Program," makes an impassioned defense of space exploration, and the authors envision a future day of planet colonization as fulfilling God's purposes.
It should be apparent that the peopling of other worlds will occur according to natural laws and that the recent outpouring of inspiration regarding space technology might be for the purpose of building a foundation of necessary technologies that will allow us to participate in this great work.
In this essay, planetary colonists become futuristic Jaredites.
This is all heady stuff that's fun to think about. Given the speculative nature of the topics discussed, I suppose it was inevitable that I would find some things to object to. Some of the towers of logic are constructed quickly, but perhaps not durably. I am not an engineer; my background is in the biological sciences. Nevertheless, a few problems stood out to me that I would like to briefly tackle.
Criticisms
One essay claimed that:
Inside each cell, ribosomes are a form of enzyme that are highly interconnected with microtubules. They read RNA strands and manufacture proteins that are building blocks for various cell structures. Microtubules function as both scaffolding and as microprocessors for the cell. From an engineer’s perspective, the microtubules (controller) and ribosomes (factory) would be exactly the sorts of functions where we would want to have a capacity for remote control.
Anybody who has taken a cell biology course will be familiar with the scaffolding role of microtubules. But the notion that they are microprocessors that participate in neural networks, and might even be involved in consciousness, was new to me. Granted, I am not a neuroscientist; but my brief look into the scientific literature suggests that these ideas are being promoted by a small handful of theorists who admit that they don't have solid evidence of these functions yet. Thus I believe that any functional role of microtubules in brain function, apart from their structural role in cells, remains hypothetical at best. As to the broader point, I am not aware of a significant interaction between ribosomes and microtubules under normal circumstances, and I don't know that I've ever heard of microtubules playing a role in the regulation of gene expression--they certainly are not among
the chief mechanisms.
You might expect me to bring this up, but in the essay arguing for space exploration the authors write:
The Creation story mentions several points at which God and those involved in the preparation of the new world initiate new phases in the Creation sequence. We can imagine advanced celestial engineers periodically visiting the new world to take samples of the atmosphere, water, soil, and variety of organisms and determining that the planet is ready for the next step. We can see in our mind’s eye advanced celestial biologists selectively engineering certain organisms and releasing them into the environment where they take over the older generations, and slowly bring the biosphere up to a new level of readiness.
Indeed, I think this kind of scenario is envisioned by many Mormons. However, the paragraph immediately preceding the one just quoted says:
Perhaps the evidence shows a kinship of all life because the advanced engineers used the same highly adaptive set of programmable building blocks to construct the bodies of each species. Whether the organisms appeared strictly through emergence from a single ancestor or were physically brought and placed in turn as an already developed species, that kinship would be apparent.
This is an argument that is popular with young-earth creationists and intelligent design proponents alike. It seems quite reasonable because it appeals to common sense and experience, but unfortunately it is not well supported by the evidence. Now is not the time to get into the details, but generally speaking, the sequence divergence for the same gene in different species is proportional to their evolutionary separation. Furthermore, our genomes
bear the marks of history; approximately half is made up of broken viruses and other self-replicating (or formerly so) DNA elements, much of which we share with other species in patterns that are easy to understand from the perspective of common descent but difficult to justify from a design perspective. With respect to patterns, the same could be said for the fossil record.
The same essay employs quotations from several Church leaders in support of the idea that life on our planet was brought from a previous one, and this is used as implicit support for the idea that we might reach out and colonize other planets. One of the leaders quoted is Joseph Fielding Smith, who said that the universe is peopled with God's children. Although strictly speaking this quote is not misused, it is misleading in the larger context. President Smith is often said to have predicted that man would not go to the moon, with the Apollo landings as an obvious refutation. But this obscures
his larger point which, ironically, was that Earth was created as the dwelling place for humans, and that we have no business trying to colonize the moon or any other planet. He might turn out to be wrong on that too, but he clearly would not have agreed with the thesis of the essay.
Chapter 7, "Quantified Morality," sketches out an idea of how morality can be quantified. The basic principle is that moral decisions maintain the greatest number of future possibilities. This interesting idea is then converted into the concept of entropy, which theoretically could be quantified. To put it simply, destructive behaviors are said to increase disorder (entropy) and righteous behaviors minimize disorder, or even create order (i.e. decreasing entropy). The problem with this that any local decrease in entropy is always more than offset by an increase in entropy elsewhere. Yes, your room is more ordered after you clean it, but any drop in entropy is offset by the energy you use and the heat you produce while doing so. Living organisms are
great at increasing entropy. So if changes in entropy are the measure of morality, a desolate planet is morally superior to one filled with life. Yet, even though I think this essay is fundamentally flawed, there are gems of interest. Consider this:
As we contemplate the eternal principle of self-replication as a way to combat entropy at all levels [which I dispute], we can speculate that self-replication also applies to planets—that the inhabitants of one world grow and progress until they eventually achieve the ability to replicate their biosphere on another world: “And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words. For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:38–39).
I never thought of that scripture like that before.
Chapter 8 contains a more mundane error.
We have evidence that our ancestors used spears 5 million years ago, but did not fire-harden the points until 500,000 years ago. Over 100,000 years later, we began making complex blades. Roughly 65,000 years after that, we began using the bow and arrow; 14,000 years after that, we began using gunpowder. Less than a thousand years later, we used a nuclear weapon in war.
This appears to assume that spear use by chimpanzees can be extrapolated to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees 5-6 million years ago. Be that as it may, the subsequent chronology puts the first nuclear weapon at roughly 320,000 years ago.
Conclusion
The value of this book is not in its explication of science, which I have noted is suspect at times. To me, the value of the book is the new perspectives that it brings to the scriptures and words of Church leaders, emphasizing the exciting and forward-looking side of our theology. I think it would make a nice gift for your scientifically inclined LDS friend or relative. My personal opinion is that if you want this for yourself, a cheaper electronic copy is a better choice, but I may be biased by the fact that I was already broadly familiar with the contents of the book. Then again, there are several engineers in my ward who might enjoy the book and it's too bad I can't easily lend it to them. In my opinion, more Mormons should be thinking along the lines of this book.
Notes:
This review is based on a complementary Kindle copy that I received.
1. Givens
elaborated on this somewhat in the Q&A at the conference.
Continue reading...
Posts
