The Top Ten Happenings in Mopologetics, 2023

[Tom]

The proprietor figured out his friend’s orthodoxy within the first hour of moving day? “Hey, do you mind carrying the leather couch up the stairs to the back bedroom? And then bringing in the baby grand? And then moving the 200-pound barrels of cracked wheat into the basement? When you’re done, let’s talk about your testimony.” I’m wondering whether the SCMC was aware of the proprietor’s crack investigative skills so early in his career.

I must say that the quoted conversation between the proprietor and his friend about the definition of a prophet reads like an excerpt from a script for a faith-promoting dramatic film, “God’s Not DeadThere Are Prophets on the Earth Today.” The doubter is stunned into silence by the faithful professor’s devastating logic.

Concerned faculty colleagues across campus who worked in the same general field and with the same small group of students had begun to raise the issue with University administrators, who nevertheless continually failed for month after month to pay attention or take action.

Who were these faculty colleagues? Who was the spearheader of the effort? Why didn’t President Holland do something?

Why did the proprietor find it necessary to drag a friend into his post? The comments at SEN are a dumpster fire. Very disappointing.

[Kishkumen]

There is a faithful view of BYU at odds with Peterson's vision. I've mentioned my jovial Book of Mormon teacher from Freshman year before, the Harvard theologian who taught us that if the prophet commands you to kill somebody, then you've got to obey it. And you'll be blessed for it, even if he was wrong. That's certainly the loyalty Peterson values. But my teacher had a more realistic view of BYU's mission. Peterson's pipe dream of "greatness" is obviously silly, and it's especially silly for his own department, which intersects directly with Book of Mormon claims. BYU is not going to be a world hub of ancient learning with faculty engaged substantially in proving the Book of Mormon to be real history. What a riotous laugh festival such beliefs are. A renowned school of faithful scholars -- lol, give me a break.

My Book of Mormon teacher took up the jokes and stereotypes such as, "girls go to BYU to get their Mrs. degree" or "EE meets EE". Indeed, what would be a better mission than that, to provide a place for faithful young people to get their lives going together within the faith? According to him, that should be the mission. And it was with certain costs. BYU didn't have much of a graduate school to speak of, it doesn't have a medical school at all, but it does have a pretty good undergrad school. It's emphasis is where it counts to produce a quality basic education for aspiring young members.

And it even draws in some good talent. Teachers who could teach at more prestigious schools but feel called to teach at BYU for the Church, or because of family. Clearly, David P. Wright had the talent to teach at a better school than BYU, and when Peterson's network ousted him, did the replacement take them closer to being a world-renowned center for Hebrew learning?

It's very difficult to secure talent and faith at the same time when subject matter intersects directly with faith. I remember a chemistry teacher who had to do damage control in class one day when learning about carbon dating. He had to emphasize inaccuracy the further you get back in order to make room for a young earth. Well, that's no big deal, because it was an uncomfortable ten minutes and that was that. Look at how many Harvard professors make the news for their bat-crap crazy beliefs. This is all one-off stuff. On the other hand, a culture of teaching Intelligent design within the biology department would be quite detrimental, but no doubt Dan would celebrate such a thing.

For my religion education credits, I took a history of Christianity class and a world religion class. Oddly, both teachers were former protestant ministers who converted to Mormonism, and both made comments shooting down the Book of Mormon. They made it clear it had nothing to do with their conversion. As the one put it, "I already knew about Jesus from the Bible". That guy in particular, defended the religious leaders called prophets of other faiths as actual prophets, and seemed to enjoy the flustered looks of students when he made it clear that their encounters with the divine actually happened. I'm sure Dan would have been outraged. My favorite phil professor, who also apparently was in pretty good with FARMS, he'd get in trouble because he taught the book of Job was "a bunch of boloney".

It's easier for an engineering professor to be a 6-day earth creationist and still be a good teacher then it is for real Bible scholar.

Do you think DCP imagines BYU as a Harvard of the West or as something more like the Hillsdale of the Wasatch range?

[Doctor Scratch]

Concerned faculty colleagues across campus who worked in the same general field and with the same small group of students had begun to raise the issue with University administrators, who nevertheless continually failed for month after month to pay attention or take action.

Who were these faculty colleagues? Who was the spearheader of the effort? Why didn’t President Holland do something?

Great questions, Tom. Holland evidently (later) found it necessary to shut down FARMS’s hit piece on John Dehlin. It seems telling that he was quiet on this issue: the anonymous apostate was less of a danger to faith than FARMS.

[Bond]

The Top Ten Happenings in Mopologetics, 2033

1) The Interpreter ends publication; declares victory after Hill Cumorah found. Archaeologists swarm Hill Cumorah location in Iceland. Bond converts to Mormonism.

[Gadianton]

Do you think DCP imagines BYU as a Harvard of the West or as something more like the Hillsdale of the Wasatch range?

Either Oxford or Cambridge. He's an avowed Anglophile, remember.

I think his internal justification goes something like this: John Polkinghorne is at Cambridge where he reduces physics to faith. As I said, Harvard def. has it's share of nutballs, no surprise Cambridge can tolerate Polkinghorne's nonsense. If Cambridge can have Polkinghorne, then BYU can completely transform into a giant bullhorn for faith and conservative values and essentially be Cambridge NA, in his mind. I don't think Dan actually cares about the actual research that goes on anywhere.

Of course, his entire exercise is self-defeating. The whole point of MST and related self-congratulation is that Cambridge is NOT a bullhorn for religion, therefore someone who goes there and advocates for faith has credibility -- has seen and excelled in the best mental exercises out there and retains faith. MST would be pointless even for him if it were filled with BYU Phds. All the credibility he burns to advocate faith is rooted in secularism.

[Gadianton]

The proprietor figured out his friend’s orthodoxy within the first hour of moving day? “Hey, do you mind carrying the leather couch up the stairs to the back bedroom? And then bringing in the baby grand? And then moving the 200-pound barrels of cracked wheat into the basement? When you’re done, let’s talk about your testimony.”

There was so much revealing material in that entry I had to skip over something. The whole moving thing was surreal. He writes it as a mighty European adventurer tackling a mountain in the Himalayas with an army of Sherpas at his disposal. Did he even carry in any of the boxes himself?

[Marcus]

The proprietor figured out his friend’s orthodoxy within the first hour of moving day? “Hey, do you mind carrying the leather couch up the stairs to the back bedroom? And then bringing in the baby grand? And then moving the 200-pound barrels of cracked wheat into the basement? When you’re done, let’s talk about your testimony.”

There was so much revealing material in that entry I had to skip over something. The whole moving thing was surreal. He writes it as a mighty European adventurer tackling a mountain in the Himalayas with an army of Sherpas at his disposal. Did he even carry in any of the boxes himself?

Not to mention its very unkind to discuss his friend this way. With so many specific details, surely his friend would recognize his own very private story. And being such a good friend, surely he checks in on his good friend's blog occasionally. One wonders if this blogger had his friend's permission to share so many intimate details of his friend's private and professional life.

[Physics Guy]

Polkinghorne died in 2021. I'm not sure what MST is or was.

Up to a point I was fine with Polkinghorne's attempts to harmonize faith and science. He was another physics guy, and I guess I'm Anglican as much as I'm anything. When I read his book The Faith of a Physicists, though, he lost me when he waved the Virgin Birth through with an argument that seemed to be nothing but, "Oh, well, what the heck." After that I couldn't take him seriously.

Polkinghorne was a quantum chromodynamics theorist, and I got the idea that he suffered from the occupational hazard of that kind of work. QCD is the nasty quantum field theory about how quarks hold together to make protons and neutrons and things. People who work on that kind of stuff often get the idea that if they can understand that very difficult stuff that nobody else even tries to understand, then they must be able to understand everything else easily. The attitude might not exactly be arrogance; I think to some degree it's based on awareness that all their work is on a very narrow topic that's pretty irrelevant to everything else. Protons are important, but if you just assume that they hold together somehow, then you're fine; nobody really needs to know QCD for any practical reason. If you've struggled with such immense difficulty on such a small and isolated topic, you want to feel that you've cracked an exceptionally tough nut. It's hard to accept that everything else is comparably hard, too, albeit in different ways, and that the only special thing about you is that you've picked a particular small and isolated set of problems.

Anyway, Polkinghorne really was a distinguished physicist, and Cambridge has always had a few theologians. Universities like Cambridge try to cover lots of approaches and viewpoints, to the point of being willing to go out on limbs sometimes. They can have a few people like Polkinghorne. They're not going to require that everyone be like him.

[Tom]

There was so much revealing material in that entry I had to skip over something. The whole moving thing was surreal. He writes it as a mighty European adventurer tackling a mountain in the Himalayas with an army of Sherpas at his disposal. Did he even carry in any of the boxes himself?

Not to mention its very unkind to discuss his friend this way. With so many specific details, surely his friend would recognize his own very private story. And being such a good friend, surely he checks in on his good friend's blog occasionally. One wonders if this blogger had his friend's permission to share so many intimate details of his friend's private and professional life.

This. Why was it necessary to share his friend’s story in a very public forum? (I couldn’t believe the detail that the proprietor responded to his friend’s news that his employment had been terminated by immediately sharing the news with the person who spearheaded the effort to get the administration to take action.)

[Chap]

Anyway, Polkinghorne really was a distinguished physicist, and Cambridge has always had a few theologians. Universities like Cambridge try to cover lots of approaches and viewpoints, to the point of being willing to go out on limbs sometimes. They can have a few people like Polkinghorne. They're not going to require that everyone be like him.

One of the reasons Cambridge is a great university is precisely because it would not dream of telling one of its scientists what they could write on the topic of their religious faith - so long as they are not advocating the murder or coercion of people who might disagree with them, that is. And since John Polkinghorne was an Anglican, we can rule that out.

Oh, and by the way, when in 1979 he decided to study for ordination as an Anglican priest, he resigned his chair in mathematical physics. On his thinking, the source above has this:

"Polkinghorne said in an interview that he believes his move from science to religion has given him binocular vision, though he understands that it has aroused the kind of suspicion "that might follow the claim to be a vegetarian butcher."[20] He describes his position as critical realism and believes that science and religion address aspects of the same reality. It is a consistent theme of his work that when he "turned his collar around" he did not stop seeking truth.[28] He argues there are five points of comparison between the ways in which science and theology pursue truth: moments of enforced radical revision, a period of unresolved confusion, new synthesis and understanding, continued wrestling with unresolved problems, deeper implications.[29]

He suggests that the mechanistic explanations of the world that have continued from Laplace to Richard Dawkins should be replaced by an understanding that most of nature is cloud-like rather than clock-like. He regards the mind, soul and body as different aspects of the same underlying reality — "dual aspect monism" — writing that "there is only one stuff in the world (not two — the material and the mental), but it can occur in two contrasting states (material and mental phases, a physicist might say) which explain our perception of the difference between mind and matter."[30] He believes that standard physical causation cannot adequately describe the manifold ways in which things and people interact, and uses the phrase "active information" to describe how, when several outcomes are possible, there may be higher levels of causation that choose which one occurs.[31]

Sometimes Christianity seems to him to be just too good to be true, but when this sort of doubt arises he says to himself, "All right then, deny it", and writes that he knows this is something he could never do.[32]"

... very Anglican stuff there. Of course, that does not mean it is true.