DiaBLOGue
Straight Home
March 17, 2018Six cars pulled through the intersection, one after the other over the course of an hour, but none of them was hers. Barefoot, Bart waited on the slat bench outside his front door, picking away…
Badge and Bryant, or, the Decline and Fall of the Dogfrey Club
March 17, 2018Badge and Bryant Braunhil were first cousins, but they could have passed for fraternal twins, having—both of them—bright blue eyes, big grins, and unkempt blond hair. They lived in Linroth, a Mormon town in northern…
Undefined Borders
March 17, 2018
Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution
March 17, 2018Dialogue 43.1 (Spring 2010): 1–36
And in fact, what might it mean that God “used” evolution tocreate life’s diversity? Was this a choice for God among other al-ternatives? Do Wildman’s pessimistic conclusions hold for Mor-monism? Does evolution imply a noninterventionist Deity? Arethere more optimistic views possible, some of which may actuallysuggest that evolution enhances and expands our view of God?
Formulas and Facts: A Response to John Gee
March 16, 2018 Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2012): 1–10
In Winter 2010, Chris Smith and I published an article in Dialogue demonstrating that no more than ~56 cm of papyrus can be missing from the interior of the scroll of Hôr—the papyrus Joseph Smith identified as the Book of Abraham. John Gee has responded by claiming that our method is “anything but accurate” and that it “glaringly underestimates the length of the scroll.” He states that “Two different formulas have been published for estimating the original length of a scroll,” then attempts to show that “Hoffmann’s formula approximates the actual length of the papyrus,” whereas “Cook and Smith’s formula predicts a highly inaccurate length.” The fact is, the two formulas are completely equivalent. They are both exact expressions of an Archimedean spiral and they yield precisely the same results, if correctly applied.
