Fabulous News!

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_silentkid
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _silentkid »

Daniel Peterson wrote:I invite anybody interested to read Dr. Boyce's essay, which I enjoyed very much:

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/revie ... m=2&id=725

It will quickly be seen that it has, on the whole, very little to do with the question of evolution, but is focused almost entirely on reflections about scientific methodology and the sociology of knowledge.

Good stuff.


Thanks again, Dr. Peterson, for addressing my questions. I've already forwarded Boyce's "review" article to a few professors in the biology department at BYU. I'm sure they will enjoy it. I also look forward to the thoughts of some of our posters, especially EAllusion and The Dude. Great stuff, Dr. Peterson. Great stuff.
_Daniel Peterson
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _Daniel Peterson »

I'm entirely okay with letting fair-minded readers examine the essay for themselves. You should be, as well.

And I'm not only fine with biologists reading it, but with permitting them to respond, if they choose to write an essay on the topic and we judge that it's worth publishing.

I like free, civil, substantive discussions. Do you?



.
_silentkid
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _silentkid »

Daniel Peterson wrote:I'm entirely okay with letting fair-minded readers examine the essay for themselves. You should be, as well.


Of course.

Daniel Peterson wrote:And I'm not only fine with biologists reading it, but with permitting them to respond, if they choose to write an essay on the topic and we judge that it's worth publishing.

I like free, civil, substantive discussions. Do you?


Of course.
_EAllusion
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _EAllusion »

I can reply a little later if you like. The gist of it is he is attempting to build up a case that it is reasonable to be skeptical of the current state of scientific knowledge that says man evolved on the basis of knowledge that biases affect scientific discourse and previous scientific ideas being refined or overturned. He doesn't really supply any substantive reason why he'd predict this piece of scientific knowledge will be surprisingly overturned and not, say, heliocentrism, but one presumes the answer relates to his religious views. He's wrong about some details in this argument, but the overall structure of the argument is the most problematic and really is a quite common one expressed by people skeptical of various dominant scientific ideas and/or advocating a fringe view.
_Daniel Peterson
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _Daniel Peterson »

Incidentally, just for the record and to save time in future denunciations of me and the FARMS Review:

I believe in evolution. And, for many years, the only thing we had ever published on the topic in the FARMS Review or at FARMS generally was a deeply critical essay (by Michael Whiting) of an anti-evolution book. Since then, we've published at least two very evolution-friendly essays that I can think of.
_John Larsen
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _John Larsen »

harmony wrote:
John Larsen wrote:Why is it, when ever I look at an issue of Farms review, the first thing I see is a smirking, smarmy backhanded Ad hominem? What is it with you guys? If you ever want to be taken seriously academically, you have to knock it off.


Could you be a little more specific? Thanks.

The first article that I opened was “A Review of the Dust Jacket and the First Two Pages” by Robert White. The second paragraph contains this zinger:

FARMS Review wrote:One cannot, of course, assume that this book just misses being judged by its cover alone because the author didn't try his best. Simply put, however, he nevertheless did not do well, and he received no evident assistance from his editors (who work for him).


I cannot imagine a serious journal attacking an author for "[not] trying his best"--read: half-ass.

This one is fun:
FARMS Review wrote:There is an obvious and genuine attempt to compact the text by using the ellipsis a great deal. Although the choice to make abundant use of this mark of punctuation is favored by a certain class of historian in order to obscure what was actually said by someone, or because the full contents of a document do not suit the writer's purpose, the plentiful use of the ellipsis here was clearly meant for the reader's benefit.

This author felt the need to load a long winded insult about the use of ellipsis, and then claims the author does not do this. This is called jury baiting. If the author is not guilty of this, why spend so many words bringing it up?

This is a long winded yucksie inside complement to the other reviewer posing as a complaint about the other reviews length:
FARMS Review wrote:Regrettably, the author's thoughtful consideration of the time and means of the reading public has been lost on another reviewer, whose work supplies complete rather than edited quotations of primary sources, and who goes so far as to put them into their historical context. In doing this, the other reviewer, who is admirable in all other ways, has produced a long review, completely defeating the efforts and purposes of the author and editors, and gives no credit to their obvious anxiety to spare the public an expensive and thick volume. While that review is otherwise highly commendable and deserves to be read in full, it misses the point of the editorial decisions to include enough fragmentary material in the book to ensure titillation but not so much as to demand information.


I will skip over some other crappy stuff to get at this line:
FARMS Review wrote:Obviously, then, the author is biased and will stop at nothing, not even the removal of pertinent parts of paragraphs and sentences from the first document cited, to make his case about Joseph Smith.


Of course the FARMS guys have to drop the "biased" accusation, but the reviewer goes beyond that to suggest the author will "stop at nothing". Does he even know what this means? This is a full on assault on the integrity of the author suggesting that he will use any means possible (read obfuscation and deceit) to arrive at his biased ends.

I have left out the title, which is a clear implication that the book can and should be reviewed without even giving it a fare shake, and the reviews powers of discernment go beyond any legitimate research. Maybe this article is really the flag ship work--for it states the real purpose, it is not worth reading any work on Mormonism that doesn't conform to FARMS preconceived conclusions.

I would be embarrassed to have anything at all to do with this "journal" and shame on BYU for publishing such BS.
_EAllusion
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Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _EAllusion »

Daniel Peterson wrote:I believe in evolution. And, for many years, the only thing we had ever published on the topic in the FARMS Review or at FARMS generally was a deeply critical essay (by Michael Whiting) of an anti-evolution book.


You personally wrote glowing book recommendations of the then latest wave of anti-evolutionist/creationist writing.

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/revie ... m=2&id=218

Evolving Developments
I want to draw attention to several other books, as well. They have not received reviews here, and very probably will not, but they have provided me some high-grade intellectual entertainment in recent months and I think others beside myself may well find them interesting.

The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies does not have an official position on the question of organic evolution. We certainly do not have an officially negative position. Indeed, I fully know the opinion on the matter of only one member of the FARMS Board of Trustees, and he is a convinced evolutionist. This Review, moreover, has published only one article dealing with evolution, and that article proceeded from an avowedly pro-evolutionary stance.2

Evolution is not a question over which I myself have lost much sleep. I have, for years, been pretty much an agnostic on the subject. Nevertheless, since a more or less Darwinian evolutionary theory is important to virtually every form of modern naturalism or antisupernaturalism, I have occasionally given a glance in its direction. "The entire scientific ethos and philosophy of modern western man," notes Michael Denton,

is based to a large extent upon the central claim of Darwinian theory that humanity was not born by the creative intentions of a deity but by a completely mindless trial and error selection of random molecular patterns. The cultural importance of evolution theory is therefore immeasurable, forming as it does the centrepiece, the crowning achievement, of the naturalistic view of the world, the final triumph of the secular thesis which since the end of the middle ages has displaced the old naïve cosmology of Genesis from the western mind. . . . [T]oday it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century.3

There is a great deal, an inexpressibly great deal, resting on the question of whether this universe is a closed system of atoms and the void--a system in which all can be explained without residue as merely matter in ultimately pointless motion. Shakespeare's Macbeth, burdened with bloody sin and looking unrepentantly into the face of death, summed that view up eloquently:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.4

I have been surprised, in recent years, to notice what I now suspect is a growing tendency among very good and reputable thinkers to question evolutionary dogma. I had naïvely assumed that, conservative Latter-day Saints and fundamentalist Protestants aside, all educated people--certainly all intellectuals--accepted evolution. I was immensely surprised, therefore, when, in talking with him repeatedly over the summer of 1990, I began to realize that Huston Smith, the eminent authority on world religions, is an outspoken critic of the theory of evolution. He is far from being a Christian fundamentalist and, with his impeccable academic credentials (including years of teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he is nothing at all like the backwoods bumpkin creationists that I had been led to imagine were the only folks who rejected Darwinism. Yet there he is.

Since that time, I have watched with mounting interest what I see as the emergence of an intellectual critique of evolution that has little if any link to Protestant fundamentalism or, indeed, directly to religion of any kind. It cannot be dismissed as a reprise of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial. It features neither simplistic appeals to the authority of scripture nor sermonizing on the fact that my grandpappy wasn't a monkey. So far as I can see, it offers up no conveniently ignorant William Jennings Bryan to be fatally humiliated by a new Clarence Darrow.

Norman Macbeth's Darwin Retried was the first book I read on the subject, and I was intrigued by the logical case he constructed against Darwinian evolution.5 Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis argued, on the basis of a lengthy analysis ranging from molecular biology to paleontology, that "the problems [with evolutionary theory] are too severe and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox Darwinian framework."6 Phillip Johnson, a prominent law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, subjected the theory of evolution to calm but withering criticism in his Darwin on Trial and followed it up with his important book Reason in the Balance.7 Within just the past few months, David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher who has taught in both the United States and France, has written a fascinating piece on "The Deniable Darwin" for Commentary.8 Finally, Michael Behe, who teaches biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, has just published a new book entitled Darwin's Black Box.9 In it, he contends that the astonishing complexity of the cell, which we have only begun to appreciate in recent decades, is impossible to explain on the basis of the gradualistic changes assumed by evolutionary theory. Rather, he says, the structure of the cell must have been purposefully devised by an intelligent designer--whether that designer be God or some other vastly intelligent and powerful being or beings.

What is the relevance of this? I am, as I have said, largely unconcerned with the truth or falsity of the theory of evolution. I think it possible, though not at all certain, that the central principles of the restored gospel can ultimately be reconciled with some modified form of evolution. But since faith in a blind evolutionary process is essential to the most common forms of naturalism, which are in turn among the chief enemies of belief in the gospel, I must admit that these recent writings have put me in exceptionally good spirits. I am pleased that some are beginning to recognize that evolution can itself be just as much a faith commitment and a world view as any religion, and can be just as dogmatically held, for reasons that are just as susceptible to psychological reduction, as a religion can be.10 "One might have expected," observes Michael Denton,

that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth. Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. Like the Genesis based cosmology which it replaced, and like the creation myths of ancient man, it satisfies the same deep psychological need for an all embracing explanation for the origin of the world which has motivated all the cosmogenic myth makers of the past, from the shamans of primitive peoples to the ideologues of the medieval church.11

I commend the books by Macbeth, Denton, Johnson, and Behe, and the article by Berlinski, to anybody interested in evolution, or in the broader question of whether good science commits us to a world view that excludes God. They make a powerful case for the proposition that rational people can be theists, believers in an intelligent and purposeful creator. This is a valuable contribution. After all, if one is convinced that a purposeful cosmos is an impossibility, there is little reason to look at the particular claims of any specific religion. Such claims will have already been destroyed by the one universal solvent, blind evolution. For those who are inclined to think along such lines, perhaps overawed by the sheer weight of the scientific authority that seems to be arrayed against theistic belief, it is pleasant to know that the foundation of evolutionary theory, which itself lies at the foundation of modern naturalism, may not be wholly secure. Not a few serious and reasonable observers have concluded, with Michael Denton, that "after a century of intensive effort biologists have failed to validate it in any significant sense."12

While I am on the issue, permit me also to commend a book by Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist/cosmologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, entitled The Creator and the Cosmos.13 Dr. Ross has established an organization in southern California called "Reasons to Believe," which specializes in often quite intriguing scientific apologetics for a conservative form of Christianity. Like Professor Behe, he argues for the presence of intelligent design in the universe.

Finally, I shall recommend with considerable enthusiasm a pair of books about the greatest miracle of them all, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ: The volume Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? supplies the text of a debate between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas about the historicity of Christ's resurrection, accompanied by the postdebate comments of several prominent thinkers of various persuasions.14 Reading it, I was genuinely surprised to realize how strong the historical case for the resurrection is. (And, I must say, I was delighted to see a well-known and widely respected atheist philosopher get thoroughly thumped on this issue by a little-known professor of philosophy at a small Christian college.) Last, but certainly not least, I heartily endorse Stephen Davis's wonderful recent book, Risen Indeed.15 A philosophy professor in Claremont, California, Davis argues forcefully and rigorously for the plausibility of Christ's resurrection as a genuine event in nonmetaphorical history.

It need scarcely be said that, if Jesus is alive, naturalism is dead.
_Daniel Peterson
_Emeritus
Posts: 7173
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2007 6:56 pm

Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _Daniel Peterson »

-1-

Thank you for providing that quotation, EA. I hadn't read it in quite a while, and I think it's pretty good.

-2-

I invite fair-minded people here to read a representative sample of the contents of the current FARMS Review, without spin and without hostile preconceptions.

It's available on line at

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/review/?vol=20&num=2

Incidentally, I'm very pleased to note that Nevo, whose learning and judgment I respect and who was previously skeptical about the prospect of a review by Gregory Smith of George D. Smith's book on Nauvoo Polygamy, has now, over on the better, more substantive discussion board, praised it as "superb" and termed it something that everybody concerned with the subject should read.

Here's a link to it:

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/revie ... m=2&id=721
_John Larsen
_Emeritus
Posts: 1895
Joined: Fri Jan 12, 2007 7:16 pm

Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _John Larsen »

Daniel Peterson wrote:-1-

Thank you for providing that quotation, EA. I hadn't read it in quite a while, and I think it's pretty good.

-2-

I invite fair-minded people here to read a representative sample of the contents of the current FARMS Review, without spin and without hostile preconceptions.


I like the fair-minded dig. Because at its very heart, that is what FARMS is all about. Ignorance is Strength after all.
_Daniel Peterson
_Emeritus
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Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2007 6:56 pm

Re: Fabulous News!

Post by _Daniel Peterson »

John Larsen wrote:I like the fair-minded dig.

I'm sure you do. But, although I do think that you labor under a powerful and quite unfair animus, it wasn't really aimed primarily at you and it wasn't really a dig.

Fairness is a pretty useful quality, in my opinion. Those who approach the FARMS Review unfairly won't see it fairly.

John Larsen wrote:Because at its very heart, that is what FARMS is all about. Ignorance is Strength after all.

And it's plainly my desire to keep people here in ignorance that motivates me to invite them to read FARMS Review 20/2 for themselves at

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/review/?vol=20&num=2
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