Last week, while on vacation, my attention was called to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune: BYU and UVU scientists question research offered at a conference on the Book of Mormon. The article described the reaction of BYU and UVU scientists, as published in the BYU student newspaper, The Daily Universe, to a then-upcoming conference called the Firm Foundation Expo. In a word, they were horrified.



I've mentioned FIRM before. Although the organization, led by Rod Meldrum, is primarily interested in Book of Mormon geography, it pursues the subject through a young-earth creationist lens (which is required in order to make their ideas work). This kind of science-bending thinking often leads to the proliferation of nonsense, which is what the BYU and UVU scientists were reacting to. Specifically, they responded to Dean Sesson's "Universal Model" that posits that Earth is filled with water. I grumbled a little to myself and thought it might make for an interesting blog post, and then mostly forgot about it.



I'm late to the party, but last night I saw that Ardis Parshall covered the Firm Expo at her blog, Keepapitchinin. She went so that we wouldn't have to, although she ultimately gave up because she couldn't stomach any more.



Her comments are here: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Don't be intimidated; most of the posts are pretty short. However, if you don't read anything else, read the last part and her comments below it! But since I know you probably won't, I'll reproduce a few salient quotes after I share a few thoughts.



I try not to get too worked up over this stuff. After all, there is seemingly no end to the the kinds of nonsense people will push (and it sure seems like nonsense is the order of the day!), and my impression is that while many people may entertain wrong or crazy ideas, most of them don't take them too seriously [1]. Based on the program, it is clear that the FIRM Expo is fine example of crank magnetism -- which is the tendency of people with crank ideas to accumulate more crank ideas. Alternative science, alternative medicine, doomsday predictions, alternative economics, government nuttery, conspiracy theories...they're all represented. Hopefully the collective craziness is enough to warn most people that the Firm Expo is not a good source of information.



I'm sure that seeing that many crank-adherents concentrated in one place is depressing, but I think they are generally diluted to low-harm in the general population. That this kind of stuff takes place under the banner of more-faithful-than-you Mormonism is also depressing, but my general attitude toward people who think their purity of religion is better than mine (especially based on science) is to ignore them. Nevertheless, I salute Ardis for her effort and highlight some of her writing below.





My few hours at the FIRM Foundation Expo were a distressing mix of intellectual dismay at the continuous denial of the scientific method, and profound depression at the misuse of scripture – the misleading of Latter-day Saints by Latter-day Saints – that I could not bear any more of it.

To claim that you will always side with revelation against science when the two are in conflict implies that your understanding of both science and revelation is adequate – that you sufficiently understand the claims of science, and that you truly understand what revelation teaches. What I heard at this conference did not meet those criteria.

The conspiracist mindset somehow grasps the “truth” first, and then searches for data points to support the conclusion (whereas a scientist, who may well have a hunch to guide his initial research, reserves his conclusions until his observations are made and analyzed, and contraindications are addressed). That conspiracist mindset was on full display in the session about the origin of the Earth and its life: We were told first that the Earth is a sack of water, then were treated to a torrent of “data” supporting that conclusion – no coherence, no attempts to test the notion, but merely a flood of mishmash of sources: scripture taken out of context, somebody’s lawsuit about something, pictures and bits of text from sources that might have been reliable and might have been reported accurately but sometimes sounded as if they came from the Weekly World News for all the credibility they carried, rhetorical questions presented as evidence (“What if I told you that …” and “Have you ever thought about …”), and always – always – the scoffing at mainstream scientists for being wrong about this and that and not even looking for proof of this other thing.

Then there’s the bone-deep skepticism of “the world” as a place and a philosophy of deception and wickedness, and a confidence — exaggerated, in my view — that as the people of God we have all the answers to all of the great questions, and those answers do and must stand in opposition to the vain philosophies of men. That is, we simply know better … even, apparently about matters which God has not revealed. I think that generally unexamined belief runs very deep through Mormonism, although it is a byproduct, a misapplication, of Mormonism rather than anything intrinsic to it.

To declare that you will “stand with the Church” in a supposed science/revelation dispute, especially while failing to recognize that the Church has taken no stand, or that you will “stand by revelation” when you rely solely on a knee-jerk fundamentalism that doesn’t bear scrutiny, is no credit to the Church or to revelation.

1. Lest someone accuse me, a Mormon, of writing that sentence without any sense of irony, I do see the irony. But that's a discussion for another day.