[UPDATE, 2 May 2005: After Gary’s comments, I have changed the wording of this post in a few places in the “disagreement” paragraph, crossing out old wording and placing new wording in brackets.]

Justin is our winner! He deciphered the acronym NDBF. (Actually, it’s an initialism, as Silus informed us.) Well done, Justin.

The initialism appears in the address, http://ndbf.net, of a website put together by one Gary Shapiro. Can you believe anyone would set up an entire website devoted to the notion of No Death Before the Fall? Sheesh, it’s almost as bad as devoting an entire site to a reconciliation between Mormons and Evolution.

The NDBF site contains ideas I agree with, ideas I disagree with, and one statement that made me curious enough to try a poll. (more…)

I despise acronyms. They are bearable if fashioned into an actual word, but if not, they are simply inhuman. (more…)

In a previous post I mentioned that “the leading councils of the Church have the right to establish doctrine,” but deliberately avoided specifics. This is because my main point was that we should not get too hung up on ‘doctrine’ in thinking about factual matters subject to scientific investigation (such as evolution), as ‘doctrine’ may primarily represent the community’s need for bounds on official discourse, and may not correspond precisely with ontological reality.

Still, the issue of how the leading councils of the Church establish doctrine is an interesting and nontrivial one. A major textual resource—an ecclesiastical constitution, essentially—is Section 107 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which will be considered here in isolation. This section defines the leading councils and describes their relationships to one another. To put it gently, this section contains several subtleties, or complexities, or ambiguities. (No need to gratuitously unnerve anyone with the word ‘contradictions’!) This post examines one of these ambiguities: Does the President of the Church have ultimate authority? (more…)

In comments on the post On Doctrine, Nate has identified two big problems in understanding Church doctrine, and judged that I have been mired in the elementary issue of fallibility of prophets that we all should have understood before leaving kindergarten. (Well, those weren’t exactly his words!) I would like to get past the trivia, and understand the more important issues: “1. How do I identify what [church doctrine] is; and, 2. How do I understand its authority.” (more…)

The proliferation of priests on television the past couple of weeks [in 2005, around the time of the pope’s death] reminds me of a joke I often heard missionaries tell in Catholic-dominated Chile. (more…)

Greg is one of our frequent commenters, a thoughtful lawyer with an intense interest in what constitutes ‘doctrine,’ and what its significance is. His insightful questions and comments often irrupt into threads on various doctrinal concepts related to evolution. One of my comments in response became so long, I decided to promote it to a post in order to provide a place for more focused discussion of this question. This appears somewhat midstream in a series of exchanges across several threads, but I don’t know that I can easily find or summarize what has gone before. Hence I simply begin here by meeting Greg on his own turf, trying an analogy with the law. (For more competent discussions along these lines by a real lawyer, explore the posts by Nate Oman at Times and Seasons.) Greg, eat your heart out! (more…)

I contribute to a group blog entitled Mormons and Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. The subject addressed by this blog involves ongoing, multipart discussions. To maximize distribution, keep my blogging corpus together in one place, and help maintain an illusion of ongoing activity at this site, I cross-post these contributions here (while pointing to the other site for comments—my house is a house of order!). This post, linked permanently on the sidebar and updated as appropriate, serves as a roadmap to my contributions—in their reverse video instantiations, for your reading pleasure. (more…)

Why is the connection between evolution and God’s existence so emotionally charged? In a previous post I argued that evolution is unpalatable to some believers because it seems to remove what is, for some, a primary evidence of God’s existence: “the testimony of His creations.” I pointed out that this is the zeroth-order answer the Church offers to outsiders in answer to the question, How can I know God exists? At the risk of pedantically elaborating the obvious, in this post and a subsequent one I will discuss two reasons why debates about evolution—and perceived implications for the existence of God—take on a stature much larger than our insignificant intramural Mormon debate, and rise to the level of culture war. (more…)

I noticed this morning [back in 2005, that is] that my visitor counter was actually set to display page loads, not unique visitors, as advertised on the sidebar and in an earlier post. My apologies. It is now corrected, and the number is cut roughly in half. (more…)

Physicists inherit an aversion to philosophy, but a bestselling book by a Princeton philosopher has me thinking that philosophy might be pretty cool after all. (more…)

Rather than adopt one of the Blogger templates out-of-the-box [for this blog’s original site], I spent a nontrivial amount of time developing a color scheme and overall look-and-feel that was to my liking. Why did I spend so much time at this? Does it say something about my personality, in the way handwriting analysis might? Perhaps such issues can be illuminated through that classic, penetrating tool of the analyst—the Top Ten List. What are the top ten reasons my template looks the way it does? (more…)

I experienced two instinctive, opposing reactions last week [in 2005] to groups or people I am more or less affiliated with, concerning protection of the weak. I will simply describe these reactions, without much by way of reasoned postprocessing. (That can be done in comments, if necessary.) (more…)

A new post, to get the dateline right. Sorry this comes at the onset of the next (and final) session; we watched the first with friends, and just got back from dinner with them. (more…)

I was determined to take a Breather from the Blogosphere, and I expected a Bloggernacle Blackout. Brethren at Big Ed’s—our Melchizedek Priesthood Quorums’ traditional gathering before Priesthood Session at a local pizzeria & bar (complete with smoke and neon beer signs), where our ward’s seminary teacher is a waitress and can get us a discount (and maybe free beer, of the Root variety)—was going to be my only extrafamilial distraction this weekend. But my wife went on a Church visit with our two oldest daughters between sessions, instructing me to stay home with the youngest. So here I am, fallen off the wagon, and noticing that all the major hubs have open threads on Conference. So I may as well chip in one- or two-sentence first impressions, to be updated after each session. (more…)

April Fool’s! Well, sort of. I’d never want to poke a serious finger in the eye of Times and Seasons—the Colussus that bestrides the Bloggernacle as no other (see also footnote below)—but I’m not past parasitically invoking it in a provocative title, in order to catch the eye.

There is junk at Times and Seasons, but I’m not referring to any of the main posts—which are reliably excellent—and, more importantly, my use of the term ‘junk’ in this context is not derogatory. (more…)