Moses as Dr. McCoy

Over at Times and Seasons, Dave has a nice post, Genesis and Genre, that reviews several perspectives on what kind of writing Genesis is. It fits with some of my posts here regarding concordism, but that's not what I want to discuss at the moment.

Down in the comments, R. Gary expressed the probably common opinion that Moses witnessed the creation in detail, something he has done on this blog before. The scriptural support for this is Moses 1:27:

And it came to pass, as the voice was still speaking, Moses cast his eyes and beheld the earth, yea, even all of it; and there was not a particle of it which he did not behold, discerning it by the spirit of God.

I think it is unclear whether Moses saw a panoramic view of the history of the earth, or just a cross-section at that time. Sometimes I imagine Moses stepping into a large command-and-control center for a few minutes, with all kinds of real-time information flowing in. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that Moses had a panoramic vision.

I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek that I saw as a kid. Aliens had captured Mr. Spock and removed his brain, and Dr. McCoy was under pressure to surgically replace it before Spock's body died. This was a task beyond McCoy's ability and knowledge, so he used an alien machine to temporarily enhance his knowledge. But he could only do so once and still live. McCoy emerged from the machine marveling, "A child could do it." The surgery began and McCoy worked quickly. However, as time wore on McCoy's enhanced knowledge began to fade, his comprehension became foggy, and the surgery became more difficult. Capt. Kirk tried to spur him on, reminding him that "a child could do it," but eventually McCoy was left to his own abilities. Fortunately Spock was now conscious and with his help, and through trial and error, McCoy was able to finish off the job.

Back to Moses: He was only able to comprehend what he saw "by the spirit of God." Even if he saw and understood everything about the earth, by the time he wrote his account he was back to his normal self. What could his mortal mind remember of his experience? What comprehension would he retain? I think that it would have been as ephemeral as a dream.

Of course, what exactly Moses saw and remembered is a matter of speculation. But if his experience was like Dr. McCoy's, there is reason to think that it isn't relevant to science.

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Utah's Legislature Goes for Climate Science Denial

Last week Utah's House of Representatives voted 56-17 for a non-binding resolution urging the EPA not to regulate carbon dioxide, ostensibly because they fear it will hurt Utah's agriculture. OK, that's understandable; no problem. It's their job to represent the interests of their constituents and seek the best policies. Unfortunately, this concern for Utah's economy is accompanied by an attempt by several House members to become to climate science what Chris Buttars was to evolution.

This has been brewing since at least last fall, which prompted 18 BYU earth scientists to write the House and urge them not to embrace fringe views. (See Open Letter (PDF).)

You can read the bill here. It includes amendments that changed some of the more inflammatory language, like "conspiracy" and "gravy train." That's right; the person who composed this resolution--Rep. Kerry Gibson, apparently--used the words "gravy train".

Anyway, the bill is nonsense almost from beginning to end. It's also self-contradictory. If I may paraphrase: Scientists have been fudging data to make it look like the earth is warming, but it's not. But if it is, the warming is natural. Or if it isn't natural, it's because of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are not used anymore. And that explains why the natural, non-existent, artificial warming has leveled off over the last 12 years.

Also of interest are some of the comments reported in the Salt Lake Tribune.

[Rep. Gibson] said there is mounting evidence that humans can't influence their environment...

That's actually a paraphrase, so I have to hope he didn't say that. Because if he did, not only is it asinine, it is contradicted by his own bill where he attributes warming and then cooling to human use (and then non-use) of CFCs.

Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, staged a defense of carbon dioxide, saying it is an odorless gas that is "essentially harmless to human beings" that is unrelated to air pollution and can actually encourage plant growth.

Thank you, Rep. Noel, for the science lesson. But I'm sorry, that is not a serious argument. In the physical world nothing is an unadulterated good in unlimited quantities.

Rep. Noel thinks he knows what is really behind all the fuss about climate change: population control.

But Noel defended the "conspiracy" wording, pointing to an out-of-print textbook, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, written in the 1970s by biologist Paul Ehrlich, Ehrlich's wife, Anne, and physicist John Holdren about the potential hazards of unchecked population.

The Kanab Republican, referring to Holdren as the Obama administration's "energy czar," read from passages of the 1,000-plus-page tome about population-control alternatives that included abortion and forced sterilization. He did not share the authors' conclusion: that voluntary population-limiting methods are "a far better choice." [I think that means that Noel failed to mention the conclusion, not that he disagrees with it. -- LDSSR]

"Now, if you can't see a connection [of a conspiracy] to that," the legislator said, "you're absolutely blind to what is going on. This is absolutely -- in my mind, this is in fact a conspiracy to limit population not only in this country but across the globe."

Don't forget fluoride! Fluoridation of water has to be somewhere in there too!

The icing on the cake in all of this is the call for an apology from BYU and the 18 scientists who wrote the letter last fall. To their credit, both BYU and its scientists say there will be no apology. I guess those 18 scientists feel free to speak their mind since they aren't dependent on the "gravy train" of state funding for their jobs.

Personally, I think the House owes the citizens of Utah an apology for passing a resolution filled with nonsense, and for indulging in conspiracy thinking to the point that they have latched onto any dissenting views and ignored the expertise coming from one of their state's major universities.

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The Spirit as a Homunculus

Although we take them for granted, the details of how babies are made have only been discovered over the last 150 years or so. Prior to that not much was known about it--aside from the obvious. Also a mystery was the process of development, about which there were two general schools of thought. Tracing back to Aristotle, epigenesists held that development was a process of emerging formation from formlessness. In contrast, preformists thought that the sperm (or egg) contained a miniature person--a 'homunculus'--and that development consisted of the enlargement of this preformed anatomy.

Preformists had to deal with two outstanding problems: that children had traits of both parents rather than just one, and the absurd implication that all of humanity was contained in the body of Adam (or Eve) like miniature Russian dolls. As science has progressed it has become clear that preformatism is wrong. Each person inherits genetic information from both parents, and development from a single cell occurs through a process of emerging organization, structure, and differentiation as cells alter their gene expression in response to their local environment.

The homunculus may be an outdated scientific idea, but it lives on as the spirit body in Mormonism [1]. While searching for something totally unrelated a while ago, I ran across this passage written by Joseph A. West in the May 1920 Improvement Era.

The gospel teaches, however, that the life-giving, intelligent, and immortal part of man is the spirit, which is in the exact likeness of the body, the growth and development of which are occasioned, according to Orson Pratt [2], one of the former Council of the Twelve, by the elastic force of the spirit in its effort to expand the body to conform to its spirit dimensions, and that, if the body is not stunted or deformed by some abnormal act of nature, it becomes, in every function and feature, an exact counterpart of its spirit life.

Although West was more detailed than most in his explanation, it is not hard to find similar statements using D&C 77:2 and Ether 3:16 as support. For example, in Vitality of Mormonism James E. Talmage wrote (p.243),

The human body, so far as it is normal, undeformed and unimpaired, is a presentment of the spirit itself.

Other Church leaders such as President Joseph F. Smith said similar things in the context of the resurrection of children. These ideas can still be found in the Church, but often there is less emphasis on the degree of correspondence between spirit and body.

The statements referenced above were all made no later than 1920, a time when science had little to say about heredity and development. For comparison, the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the field of genetics, followed by molecular genetics in the second half of the century. Embryology and developmental biology have seen great advancements as well. From today's perspective, there doesn't seem to be any role for the spirit to shape the body, which makes the comparison to a homunculus apt in another way.

Homunculus arguments are fallacious arguments in theories of vision or mind that account for a phenomenon by invoking the same phenomenon that they are intended to explain, resulting in an infinite regression. For example, if you explain vision as the result of a little person (so to speak) inside you who views the images gathered by the eyes, you have not really explained vision; you have merely added another viewer.

Thus the spirit can be compared to a homunculus in two ways. First, there is the idea expressed by West that the expansion of the spirit is what shapes the physical body. And second, attributing physical features to the form of the spirit not only clashes with the demonstrated truths of genetics and developmental biology, but it also adds another layer to the mystery without really explaining anything. (What determines the shape of a spirit? And what determines the shape of that? And so on.)

None of this is to deny that we have a spirit, but it does raise questions about doctrinal traditions that developed in a pre-scientific environment. At the very least, I think we should be cautious in interpreting D&C 77:2 and Ether 3:16. It may also be worth re-evaluating what these scriptures mean, or looking at a range of possible meanings (for example, see Kent Condie's article, Pre-Mortal Spirits: Implications for Cloning, Abortion, Evolution, and Extinction).


Notes:
1. I don't know whether any Mormon commentators directly borrowed preformist ideas. As far as I know, the similarities are at best indirectly related.

2. I have not yet found such a discussion by Orson Pratt. If anybody knows of one, please tell me.

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Climategate: Michael Mann Cleared of Academic Misconduct (So Far)

Michael Mann is a climatologist at Penn State. Perhaps he is best known for his 'hockey stick' graph--a reconstruction of global temperatures over the last millennium, and he was prominent in the recent controversy over the stolen emails of the British Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Based on the many emails and inquiries received, the University conducted an official inquiry of academic misconduct.

The inquiry committee condensed the various emails down to four questions (allegations):

1. Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data?

2. Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?

3. Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to you in your capacity as an academic scholar?

4. Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities?

After reviewing all emails from, to, or about Mann, as well as interviewing him and reviewing some of his own archived emails, the committee found "no substance" to the first three allegations. The inquiry committee judged that the fourth allegation should be investigated by "faculty peers from diverse fields" rather than the administrative committee.

Mann has thus been mostly cleared of academic misconduct, with the remaining allegation awaiting further investigation. More importantly for science, he has been cleared of falsifying data.

The Climategate controversy has generated a lot of heat online and in the media. Some commentators, particularly in the conservative media, speak as though it is established fact that these prominent climatologists not only acted poorly, but also falsified and manipulated data. As I wrote at the time, there seemed to be little evidence that there would be any significant change to the science based on the emails.

Given the prominence of the initial controversy and subsequent commentary, it is important that the public be made aware of this. (Expect cable news to be all over this...not.)

Further links:

Statement by Michael Mann

Inquiry Report (PDF)

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What's With the Ages of the Patriarchs? (Final)

In my first post in this series I brought up reasons why the ages of the ancient patriarchs (and numbers in general) in Genesis should be approached with caution. In my second post I showed how a straightforward reading of the ages results in problems of scriptural consistency. But this still leaves us with D&C 107:41-53, a revelation to Joseph Smith that gives support to the long ages of the patriarchs. I will admit up front that I don't have a tidy solution, but maybe we can nibble around the edges of the problem.

First let's look at these verses more closely. The ages at which the various patriarchs down to Noah were ordained to the Priesthood are given, and range from 10 years old to 496. Two of the ages stand out: Enos was ordained at 134 years and 4 months, and Mahalaleel at 496 years and 7 days(!). Why are we given such specificity for these two obscure prophets? Also notice that Enoch was ordained at 25 and blessed at 65. This blessing cannot refer to Adam's final blessing, as a look at the graphs in my second post shows. Is it coincidence that this blessing by Adam, the birth of Methuselah, and the founding of Zion all occurred when Enoch was 65? The text mentions that "God called upon Cainan...in the fortieth year of his age," and Enoch's ordination and blessing were also 40 years apart. The number 40 plays a prominent role in the Bible. For example Moses: was 40 years old when he first visited the Hebrews, spent 40 years as a shepherd, led Israel in the desert for 40 years, was on the mountain for 40 days, etc. Finally, perhaps it's also worth pointing out that these verses are somewhat in tension with D&C 84:15-16, which gives a different impression as to who ordained whom.

Now let's look at historical context. This portion of D&C 107 was received in March (or maybe April) of 1835. Perhaps it is not coincidence that just 2-3 months before, Joseph was helping to prepare the Lectures on Faith for publication. The Lectures on Faith had been composed the previous November, and they were selected for inclusion in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, which was published in August of that year. Although Sidney Rigdon is thought to have done most, if not all, of the actual composition, it seems clear that Joseph oversaw their contents.

The Lectures on Faith are of interest here because the second lecture dwells at length on the ages of the various patriarchs and their relationships to one another. A passage that seems to foreshadow D&C 107:53 says,

So that Lamech, the father of Noah, Methuselah, Enoch, Jared, Mahalaleel, Cainan, Enos, Seth, and Adam, were all living at the same time, and beyond all controversy, were all preachers of righteousness.

This brings us to the changes to the patriarchal ages made in the JST. The Book of Moses was written in 1830-31, and it followed the Old Testament in the ages it used. Sometime later (apparently after August 1831), Oliver Cowdery marked changes to the ages on one of the source manuscripts of the JST. However, except for the ages for Enoch, these changes were apparently removed by Joseph Smith III during publication, which is why they are also absent from our Book of Moses. As can be seen in my last post, it appears that the most important effect of these changes was to push Lamech's birth to after Adam's death, which fits better with D&C 107:53. Were these changes pure revelation? Were they adjustments made to correct perceived inconsistencies? What is their relationship to D&C 107 (especially the age of Enoch)? And why were they not included in the Lectures on Faith?

Perhaps the key to another way of looking at this scripture is verse 57.

These things were all written in the book of Enoch, and are to be testified of in due time.

Perhaps when the unknown book of Enoch was written these ages had symbolic or numerological significance that is lost to us. Under this hypothesis Joseph revealed contents of an ancient text, the real meaning of which remains cryptic to us.

But what about Adam's meeting with so many generations of his lineal descendants? There are several potential answers:

1. Such a thing would technically be possible even with non-miraculous documented lifespans of up to 120 years.

2. Returning to my first post, it may be that the relationships were not all strictly lineal.

3. It's possible that some of the detail is actually based on assumptions made by Joseph. It might be that the actual revelation was simply that Adam assembled and blessed his posterity, and that Joseph filled in the details of names based on his familiarity with the kinds of details contained in the Lectures on Faith?

Admittedly these ideas are not the most natural way to read D&C 107. However, the point of all of this is not to force a conclusion on whether the patriarchs lived for hundreds of years, or whether D&C 107 is right or wrong--or right in an unexpected way. Rather, my purpose has been simply to think creatively and raise possibilities. Since a straightforward reading of the scriptures dealing with the patriarchal ages leads to contradictions, it seems that creative thinking is required whether you think the ages are real or not.

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