LDS Scientist

Nobody is safe. Ever. Anywhere.

            “The Day the Sands Caught Fire” is the title of an article one of us published in Scientific American in 1998 (Wynn and Shoemaker, 1998) about the Wabar asteroid impact event of 1863. This was a Hiroshima-explosion-sized impact in the middle of the remote Empty Quarter of what is now modern Saudi Arabia. As far as we know, no one died and nothing went extinct.

            The Chicxulub Event about 65 million years ago, however, wiped out the dinosaurs. (Not all of them died, actually; modern-day birds, tortoises, and alligators, among others, are their direct descendants.)  That Chicxulub object (there are still arguments about whether it was an asteroid or a comet) was about 10 km (6 miles) in size. The Wabar object was quite a bit smaller – about the size of a small house. It smacked down in the middle of the driest and hottest desert in the world (the temperature reached 61⁰C (142⁰F) one mid-morning while I ran a magnetometer profile over the largest two craters (Wynn, 2002). 

            While small by comparison with the Chicxulub object, the Wabar object still caused startling damage. Geologic and geophysical mapping show that it raised a mushroom cloud to at least the stratosphere; molten glass rained down at least 850 meters (900 yards) away. The object apparently broke up in the lower atmosphere and created at least three craters that we could still see between the moving saif dunes (“saif” is Arabic for “sword,” and these dunes are called this because their top edge appears like a giant sharp blade sweeping across the desert). Calculations show that the asteroid (94 percent iron and 4 percent nickel, plus a little copper, cobalt, and iridium) brought with it a kinetic energy equivalent to, or greater than, the Hiroshima atom bomb. The Wabar impact site is similar in all ways to the Sedan and other medium nuclear bomb craters in the Nevada Test Site, save one: there is no residual radiation. There is shocked quartz, there is an asymmetric ejecta field, and there are other minerals that suggest temperatures momentarily reaching over 10,000 C. If you could have seen it happen, it would have been a magnificent sight – but you would likely not have survived the experience. 

            Here’s a crucial point: Wabar happened in 1863. Gene Shoemaker (the father of astrogeology) and I mapped the field site together and we made a bet. We both agreed that the site was very young, much younger than the ~6,200-year previous estimate from fission-track dating. During a raging sandstorm one night we collected sand unexposed to light since the impact on some 1930-era samples collected by Philby (Philby, 1933), from below the impact rim of one of the craters.  If the Wabar site was older than a Qur’anic reference to a destroyed city named ‘Ubar, then I owed Gene a steak dinner. If it was younger than that, he owed me a Thai coconut sticky-rice dessert, and the dinner too, if he felt like it. Sadly, Gene was killed in a car-wreck 300 km north of Alice Springs in Australia in 1996, before the thermo-luminescence dating results came back. It turns out the impact site was less than 250 years old. Details for the 1863 date are in our Scientific American article (November 1998 issue; link above). 

            Whew. A “city buster” hit the Earth 150 years ago? Imagine that.

            Another crucial point: I have partial records that suggest that at least FIVE “city busters” like this hit the Earth (Wynn, 2002a). There were impacts in 1863 (Wabar, Saudi Arabia), 1908 (Tunguska, Russian Siberia), 1930 (Río Curacá, Brazil-Peru border), 1935 (Rupununi, British Guyana), and in 1947 (Sikhote-Alin, Kamchatka, Russian Far East).  At least five times in a century these huge kinetic-energy bombs have crashed into the Earth – and that’s just on the 29% of it that is on land that we can see evidence for (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html). Fortunately, every one of these fell in very remote areas. I published another article in 2002 (Wynn, 2002b) that showed that these things happen far more frequently than even a radical like Gene Shoemaker had suspected. 

            Over one-third of the total human population, nearly 2.4 billion people, lives within 100 km (60 miles) of an oceanic coast (https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-ocean). The reason? Because the weather is more moderate near an ocean. Remember that at least 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is ocean. Something like 20,000+ tons of TNT equivalent detonating under an ocean is a near-perfect tsunami-maker, comparable to tsunamis generated by subduction earthquakes. If the hit centered on your city, it would mean a relatively clean death by comparison to everyone around it. 

            One final point: We cannot easily “see” these things coming. They have to be really big before enough light scatters off them to be picked up by Earth-based telescopes, and you would need many “picks” before you could calculate a reliable orbit. By the time you could actually see a Wabar-sized object coming, it would already be over. Since the Earth has substantial gravity, one of these things flying even close to the planet will be drawn towards us, gravity being what it is. We can’t use radar to spot these things, either. The energy of a radar beam falls off as the distance squared, and even if the beam was 100 percent reflected, the reflected beam would have only the energy reflected, and then that falling off as the return distance squared. Mankind doesn’t have radar systems with enough energy to do this; if we did, it would fry everything in the sky flying through its beam.

            What does this all mean? It means we are helpless beneath the sky. It means we do not control our future. You can get fairly good warning of a volcanic eruption, but a supervolcano the size of Yellowstone (United States), Toba (Indonesia), or Veniaminof (Aleutians) going off could still take the few survivors on our world back to the Stone Age. We can get a shorter warning for a hurricane, a really short warning for a tornado, and just seconds to minutes warning for a subduction mega-earthquake – or for one of these bombs from the sky.

            But you can store a year’s supply of food and water with the intent to help your family and your neighbors survive a near hit. If you do that for your whole neighborhood, you can reasonably call yourself a Christian – being Christ-like. This is the real reason behind why members of the Church of Jesus Christ gather a year’s supply of food and water: to be Christ-like and take care of their neighbors, as well as themselves, in case of a disaster.

Or: Why can’t science solve our most critical problems?

            To some extent, we can predict weather: a hurricane land-fall up to five days out, a tornado up to two hours out. There are two consequences to this relatively new, science-driven ability: (1) these predictions have gone a long way towards saving human lives, and (2) there has been no discernable change in where people buy their homes and choose to live. What about earthquakes? If we could predict earthquakes, would it dramatically change our lives?

            Go back and read the previous two observations.

            There are about 60 scientists in the US Geological Survey, including one of us, who volunteered to reply on their own time to questions that came to us via Ask-a-Geologist. This WAS a place on the USGS website where anyone could ask a question and get an answer from a geoscientist. Almost half the questions were spam. (Surprisingly, many of these seem to be in Portuguese, and, no, we don’t understand that either, but we’re getting better at filtering them out. About a quarter of the questions were from school children trying to get someone else to do their homework assignment for them. These were pretty obvious, and by policy we were asked not to encourage this.) The rest tended to be really interesting questions from people as young as 3.

            Here is an interesting question I received one day; I share it here because I hope my answer will shed light on some of the questions that, from my reading of the daily newspapers, are floating out there:

Question:

            “Hello. I was just wondering first if the increased number of earthquakes is a sign of something bigger to come and since the earthquake in Japan knocked our earth off of its axis a few feet is that the reason for the severe weather we have had lately like all the floods in the south and tornados and severe storms?”

–No name given

My Reply:

            The Earth’s axial tilt moved about 10 cm during the 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake – that’s about 4 inches. It requires some very sophisticated GPS equipment and a lot of measurement time to arrive at that tiny amount of offset.

            While there is evidence that continents were at hugely different latitudes in ages past (e.g., freshwater aquatic dinosaur fossils discovered in Antarctica; see for instance Smith et al., 2011), a 10-cm tilt-change will not cause any effect that can be sensed by a human being. A long and slow tilt change in the Earth’s axis has been documented over time and can be explained by simple orbital mechanics (something called nutation, that you can see in a spinning top), but the operative word here is “slow” – we’re talking many thousands of years slow – the precession of the equinoxes takes about 25,770 years to complete a cycle. There is also the added complication that the continental plates have been moving around at the same time.

What fixed point do you reference against? Since we didn’t have observers using sextants to track where Polaris was 25,000 years ago, these things are understandably hard to sort out. The pole star 5,000 years ago, when the Egyptians were building the pyramids and aligning them, was Thuban, anyway, and not Polaris (Kallinger, et al., 2005). And 25 million years ago, it would have been Vega.

            Let’s consider another issue. There is an ongoing discussion within the seismic community about earthquakes triggering other earthquakes. Large earthquakes have been shown to “light up” volcanic areas like Yellowstone and Long Valley with short-term clusters of increased micro-earthquakes. Note that italic: these are very small consequences. However, the current scientific consensus, culled from literally petabytes of data (i.e. multiple libraries’ worth) collected over the past 50 years, is that distant earthquakes do not have any effect on faults not part of that earthquake’s own fault system. In other words, the monster earthquake in Chile during the spring of 2010 did not trigger the huge earthquake in New Zealand later in the fall, and that one didn’t trigger the ginormous Tohoku earthquake in March 2011 east of Sendai, Japan. Among other things, there were months separating each event. Also, an earthquake’s energy falls off as approximately distance squared, so if YOU didn’t feel these, then neither did the other distant subduction faults that broke loose later on. Researchers have studied syzygy (Coyle, 2014), the effects of Sun and Moon tides on earthquakes, and have found no statistical correlation.

            All THAT said, there is a measurable, undeniable, and steady increase in the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere over the last several centuries. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has a measurable greenhouse effect on atmospheric temperatures, and in 2015 CO₂ levels in Earth’s atmosphere reached and crossed the 400 ppm level. Methane, however, has far more of a greenhouse effect for the same number of molecules released (it’s 37 times more potent, and we’re not talking odor here). There are far more cattle now than a century ago because there are far more people feeling they deserve beef steak. Virtually all scientists (except those paid to say otherwise) will readily acknowledge that there is a large anthropogenic component to this increase. This means that humans burning hydrocarbons, destroying forests, raising flatulent cows, etc., are mostly responsible for these increased gases in our atmosphere. How are they so sure? For starts, the levels of ¹⁴C are dropping – in other words, the new CO₂ entering the atmosphere is coming from fossil carbon. Also, if you haven’t ridden a horse or milked a cow recently, you might not believe how much methane a grass-chewing critter can produce. Hooo.

            It’s still being argued – mainly through increasingly sophisticated mathematical models – just how much all this increase in greenhouse gas emissions has actually changed our weather. There are certain undeniable influences on weather (the Solar flux and the great ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, for instance). There are a huge number of variables involved, so one model may disagree with another in detail – but not in gross conclusions. As the cartoon character Pogo famously said, “We has met the enemy, and he is us.”

            You and I may not remember huge hurricanes and tornado clusters from our childhood, but that may just be our imperfect memory. The apparent increase in wild weather events over the past few decades may also be an artifact of how records have become increasingly more detailed and complete over time. Keep in mind that earthquakes – and probably to some extent anomalous weather events – are to varying degrees random things. They don’t come on the hour, nor on Friday the 13th, but often have gaps and then appear in clusters – and we remember the most recent cluster best. That’s called the Recency Effect or Recency Bias, and is an artifact of the human mind (and why scientists must carefully record their data). Using a statistically more reliable approach – averaging and comparing hurricanes and their strengths for say, the 19th Century against the 20th Century – we are also hamstrung by the fact that there were far fewer recording observers 150 years ago… and correspondingly fewer and sparser records kept then.

            Bottom line(s):

• Climate change is here, is human-caused, and it is clearly accelerating.
• Earthquakes are random and essentially not predictable*.
• Neither one affects the other.

            However, this is just what science knows today. In 3 Ne 8:6 we find these words:

“And there was also a great and terrible tempest; and there was terrible thunder, insomuch that it did shake the whole earth as if it was about to divide asunder.”

            This and subsequent verses make it clear that an earthquake and a coincident volcanic cataclysm are being described here. The timing – coincident with the death of Jesus Christ in the eastern hemisphere – implies that earthquakes can in fact be triggered, or at least understood (and thus predicted), though not yet by modern science.

            To us, this suggests how far science has NOT yet gotten in the past century, and just further reinforces the idea that there is more than one path to the truth. 

* Recent studies suggest that a cluster of earthquakes on a major fault may increase the immediate likelihood of a significant earthquake nearby by a few percent (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquake-probability-20161019-snap-story.html), however this is still controversial in the geoscience world as we write this.

Navigating between truth, Truth, and garbage in a post-truth world

            Note: To make a point here, all the references for this chapter are taken only from the Internet. Yes, that Internet.

            The Oxford Dictionary word for 2016 was “Post-Truth.” That really rings a bell with us. We are both persistently astounded at seeing transparently untruthful things on cable TV and the Internet. The word “crap” comes to mind far too often as we watch something on TV that doesn’t jive with a previous video, or when we hear about “alternative facts.” I’m sure this doesn’t surprise most of our readers – that’s in part why you picked up this book. We constantly get questions from people who ask us for advice after seeing garbage science or fake news on the Internet; one recent example was how did dinosaurs and humans deal with each other in times past, or variants on that idea. An article in New York magazine titled “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” (Max Read, New York magazine, Dec. 26, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html )… makes it ever more clear how little we can trust the information on the Internet. Keep in mind that there are MANY reputable scientists, legal scholars, reporters, federal agencies (including our own US Geological Survey), and others trying to make real (as opposed to alternative) facts available to all of us. However, our own anecdotal experience, strongly supported by Read’s article, suggests that there are probably the same number of charlatans, uninformed and self-anointed visionaries, amoral political hacks, Russian trolls, and malevolent know-nothings who are front-loading their garbage onto the internet.  

            What can any of us do about this problem of sorting trash and falsehoods from truth? The short answer is that it’s not that hard if you think a bit about it. If we use peer-reviewed and citation-listed scientific literature, we have a pretty good chance to get at the truth, at least for scientific questions. If we ask an actress about the efficacy of child vaccinations, we get what we asked for (remember the old saying “consider the source.”). Certainly, we can easily answer questions from people about dinosaurs interacting with humans. In case this issue is new to you, dinosaurs went extinct about 66,000,000 years ago, and the first recognizably human ancestors first appeared about 195,000 years ago (John Pickrell, 2006, “Timeline – Human Evolution, New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9989-timeline-human-evolution/ ).

            That wasn’t so hard to find, actually. To answer the human-dinosaur question we simply searched the Internet – and restricted our reading to articles that came from reputable (e.g., peer-reviewed and citation-indexed) scientific journals. Note that we said “peer-reviewed and citation-indexed” journals. There are so many hucksters in the world trying to get rich without working for it that it probably would also not surprise you to learn that a few so-called academics, mostly in Third-World countries, have found that they can invite beginning young scientists to submit papers to their “journals.” Ahem, for a “modest fee.” There are many young scientists trying desperately to get ahead in their profession, to get a job, or to obtain that coveted faculty tenure. One so-called “academic” in Egypt was reported to have “earned” over $1,000,000 a year by selling publication promises. He simply dumped anything submitted to him on the internet and charged a fee that was NOT modest. He didn’t bother to arrange for or arbitrate peer review for any of it. He just collected fees. He has refused to answer questions from real academics and reputable journal editors like Nature or Science who are investigating him. When discovered, he just creates another slightly-familiar-sounding journal name and starts soliciting again. Academic dishonesty seems here to be a fully-functional business model.

            You probably would also not be surprised to know that real academics find this kind of practice both abhorrent and immoral. It threatens their own real science! One tack that they have taken to isolate this cancer on science is to use “Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers” (https://beallslist.weebly.com/). It is an amazingly long list of fake science journals that grows every month

            How did Beall develop his list? One of us is an associate editor of the scientific journal “Exploration Geophysics” (http://www.publish.csiro.au/eg ). It’s not hard to do some quick research and ascertain that this journal is citation-indexed – in other words, it is a journal that is rated for how many times its articles are referenced in other scientific work, a key marker for academic esteem and quality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Citation_Index ).

            Back to the original question. We rather quickly found that dinosaurs could not possibly have interacted with humans. That’s easy, you say – anyone who has taken a science class or two already knew that. But let’s turn to the broader world. What about things posted by Russian, American, and Chinese trolls in an attempt to influence and subvert the American (Ukrainian, British, French, Austrian, Indian, Pakistani, Italian… you fill in your favorite country here) democratic process? How can we figure out what’s true, what’s True, and what is NOT true? This takes a bit more effort, but you can still figure it out. To start with the particular question of the influence of Russian trolls in the 2016 American election cycle, we went to The House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence (https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/ ). Yes, if you have followed the political news, you will recall that there was once a highly partisan divide in that very same Select Committee, with a former Chair attempting to report their investigations directly and secretly to the White House (a major ethical as well as professional violation), and even block subpoenas by the minority congresspeople on that committee for transparent political gain. Nevertheless, the staff of the Select Committee quietly put their heads down and just gathered and analyzed all the available data – and in their report (link above) they outline exactly what the “Internet Research Agency (IRA)—the notorious Russian ‘troll farm” actually did.

            Note that we did not go to Breitbart “News” or the Sean Hannity Show to answer this question, nor did we go to the other political extreme, for example Slate or the comedians of the Daily Show. We all might feel safer, dealing with political claims, to look at some of the sources that are more politically neutral, such as MSNBC, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal to get our answers.

            Well, you ask, where did we come up with that rating? The Pew Research Center, actually (https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 ). The Pew Research Center has existed for generations, and famously guards the integrity of its polls and investigations. The Center is bequest-funded and beholden to no one. There is no “pay to play” here. We thus went to a source that we felt had their own credibility on the line as perceived arbiters of truth.  If you are interested, they are also referenced by (trusted by) the University of Michigan (https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444). Here is their scaling of political reliability of (American, national-level) media:

           

Perceived ideological placement of media. You can trust things found in the Green Box.

            Well OK, but what are we to do about other questions that might arise? Perhaps there are reports about some ordinary person finding the long-lost (you fill in the blank here with anything weird). That feels good because it is by an ordinary person – like me! Perhaps someone else reports that a certain politician (fill in those words with a name of choice) said such-and-such a nasty thing. That feels good because I’ve already formed an opinion that the politician in question is a terrible person. The problem with the Internet is that it tends to feed our confirmation bias. That means that we naturally gravitate to stories that support our personal theories. We tend to accept a fact as real data, when it turns out to be just a single point of data, and not representative of the larger world out there – it is not evidence.

            For a quick training session on navigating our modern “post-truth” world, check out this video: Alex Edmans, a finance professor in London, gave a talk at TEDxLondonBusinessSchool titled “What to trust in a post-truth world.” (https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_edmans_what_to_trust_in_a_post_truth_world/transcript?language=en#t-1029117).

            This talk includes three critical tips:

Tip #1: Actively seek other viewpoints. Aristotle wrote, “The mark of an educated man is the ability to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it.” Stephen R. Covey wrote, “Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.” And finally, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already. But the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.”

Do you only get your news from Comedy Central or Fox News? Then you are part of the problem – because rather little of this is actually news.

Tip #2: Listen to experts. Would you prefer to get teeth-whitening tips from a hairdresser? Vaccination advice from an actress? Or would you instead rather trust peer-reviewed evidence from experts? Think about this: who would you trust your eye-surgery to?

Tip #3: Be very, very careful with what you share. Don’t add to the garbage gyres in the middle of the Pacific Ocean… or in the middle of the Internet.

            By virtue of the fact that you, the reader, have gotten this far in our book, we have confidence that with the few examples we have listed here, you can find (and undoubtedly have already found) a pretty good approximation of the truth. Remember, as you do so, that we made a distinction early on about levels of truth, and we provided you with two definitions: things that are true, and things that are True.  That is, the former are things perceived to be correct now, while the latter are things that can withstand the test of time and stand forever.

Evidence you really have to dig into

           In 1973 Hugh Nibley gave a lecture at the University of Arizona. We tried to get him to autograph our copy of his book, “Since Cumorah,” (Nibley, 1967), but he initially refused. “There are so many better examples now available, some discovered even as this book was being printed, that I’m embarrassed to sign this poor thing.” Eventually he signed it, however, and the book is still treasured by our family.

            In fact, while “Since Cumorah” was going through the publishing process and for years afterward, hundreds of new geographic and scientific discoveries have been made (and are still being made) supporting the veracity of historical and geographical details in the Book of Mormon. All of these appeared in the 20^th and 21^st Century, long after the Book of Mormon was first released and were, of course, unknown to any scholar in Joseph Smith’s time, let alone a poorly educated young man living on the edge of a rough frontier.

            For example, one item that did not make it into “Since Cumorah” was the surprising similarity of details in 3 Nephi 8 to the events surrounding the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, which took place 13 years after “Since Cumorah” was first published. To a professional volcanologist, this chapter accurately describes a cataclysmic volcano-tectonic event on a major subduction zone. Yet volcanoes, earthquakes, subsidence, and allocthons are geological phenomena that don’t exist within 3,000 kilometers of western New York State, nor were they known to any Americans in 1828.

            Joseph Smith grew up in Vermont and New York State. He received only three years of formal education in his entire lifetime. Western New York is covered with glacial moraines – huge gravel and boulder piles shoved down from their origins in Canada by the glaciers that retreated with the Younger Dryas epoch about 11,700 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Cumorah, the hill where Joseph found the golden plates that he translated as the Book of Mormon, is one of these glacial moraines. Joseph Smith had never seen a volcano nor felt an earthquake in his short life. A primitive form of the field of volcanology existed at the time, mainly in Italy around Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli volcanoes, but Pompeii and Herculaneum had not yet been seriously excavated. Tectonics as a scientific field would not develop until more than a century later.

            Back to Mount St. Helens: Its 1980 eruption was classified as a VEI 5 event – that stands for “Volcano Explosivity Index Level 5.” This VEI scale (Newhall and Self, 1982) is approximately logarithmic: a VEI 4 is about 10 times smaller than a VEI 5 event, and a VEI 6 is about 10 times greater than MSH 1980. Third Nephi, chapter 8, describes a geological event that would rank somewhere between a VEI 6 and a VEI 7. In 3 Nephi 8 we encounter expressions such as “…there were exceedingly sharp lightnings…”, “…the city of Moroni did sink into the depths of the sea…”, “…the whole face of the land was changed…”, “…there was darkness upon the face of the land…”, and “…the inhabitants thereof who had not fallen could feel the vapor of darkness…” describing the disaster that engulfed the Nephites nearly 2,000 years ago.      

            Huge, hot pyroclastic density currents and tephra typically burn and bury all living things within their reach during these events, and completely reshape the face of the land. Magnitude 8+ earthquakes sink cities and everything else – there is a drowned forest in Puget Sound that was sunk by the January 1700 AD subduction megathrust earthquake (Atwater and others, 2005; 2015). Earthquakes this violent commonly redistribute whole sections of mountains to cover and fill valleys, sometimes even causing flanks of mountains to slide so fast that they fly through the air before they hit; these are called allocthons by geologists; and these monster events make smooth places very, very rough. The relatively small (by comparison) eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980 created the largest landslide in recorded human history.

            For “vapor of darkness” substitute “volcanic ash” and everything falls precisely into place. This kind of ash suffocated many of the people who died during the eruption of Mount St Helens on May 18, 1980; and the city of Yakima, Washington, was essentially shut down hours later as a meter-thick blanket of ash fell on the town. Contemporary descriptions and video tell us that day turned to night and the streetlights came on around noon (Waitt, 2015). It is important to keep in mind that the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St Helens was relatively small when compared to ash and tephra falls now well documented in Central America.

            Central America, of course, is an integral part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, so called because of the string of volcanoes that all lie just inland from the Pacific Ocean margins. The Ring of Fire includes hundreds of volcanoes, some of them HUGE, including super volcanoes like Cerro Hudson in southern Chile, Masaya in Nicaragua, Katmai and Veniaminof, in the Aleutians, Sheveluch and the Mutnovski-Gorely complex in Kamchatka, Aira in Japan, and Taupo in New Zealand. We can’t leave out Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, whose 1992 eruption lowered the worldwide temperature by two degrees Celsius, and we must include the long arc of volcanoes in Indonesia fronting the Indian Oceanic plate, including the monster Toba. The phenomenal eruption of the Toba supervolcano around 72,000 years ago may have reduced the proto-human population on Earth to less than 10,000 individuals, according to genetic studies (Gibbons, 1993; Ambrose, 1998).

            All these volcanoes (except the Indonesian archipelago volcanoes like Toba) lie just inland of the Pacific Ocean margins because they lie just above their sources: the down-going Pacific Ocean seafloor that is being over-ridden by continental margins all around it. Linking each over-riding continental plate with its subducting oceanic plate are huge subduction faults. These subducting plates are the sources of the largest earthquakes in Earth’s recorded history, including the magnitude 9.5 Valdivia earthquake of 1960 in Chile (which caused a tsunami that destroyed downtown Hilo, Hawai’i, about 8 hours later). Other subduction earthquakes include the magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 Cascadia event of 1700, which sank an entire forest in Puget Sound, and then created the “Orphan Tsunami” that destroyed villages on the Japanese east coast (Atwater and others, 2005; 2015). The magnitude 8.6 Aceh subduction earthquake of 2004 triggered a tsunami that killed over 250,000 people along the Indian Ocean margins. The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 triggered the meltdown of the Fukushima-Di-Ichi nuclear plant and devastated the northeastern Japanese coast yet again.        

            During the colonization of Central and South America by Spain, a number of regional Central American capitals (including Santiago de Guatemala, and Managua, Nicaragua) were repeatedly buried and/or pulverized. In each case, the city had to be entirely rebuilt, often in a different location.  There is a reason why Nuevo Leon is “nuevo.” To say that earthquakes and related volcanic tephra-falls have changed the face of the land in Central America would be an understatement.

            Since the 1963 eruption that created the island of Surtsey, Iceland, and especially since the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, volcanologists have known that lightning storms are closely associated with Plinian eruptions (named for Pliny the Elder, killed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD). This is because of the prodigious electric charge dragged aloft along with the vast amounts of volcanic ash that are blasted up to the stratosphere. Those electric charges accumulate until voltage differences are so great that they must discharge back to the earth via lightning.

            But what caused the “vapor of darkness” described in 3 Nephi 19 and 20? This was almost certainly a smothering blanket of volcanic ash. As attention-garnering as it was, Mount St. Helens 1980 was a relatively small eruption (as we said earlier, a “mere” VEI level 5). Yet this event still lofted about 3 cubic kilometers of material and left nearly a meter-thick blanket of ash on Yakima, Washington, 240 kilometers to the east, within a few hours of its eruption (Waitt, 2015). Can ash put out fires? Yes – ask any forest fire fighter (one of us worked his way through college fighting forest fires each summer) or ask anyone who learned how to shovel dirt and ashes onto a campfire to smother it.

            So, what caused all this destruction? To get a handle on a “smoking gun” responsible for 3 Nephi 8, we must examine the largest volcanic eruptions in Central America (Sigurdsson et al., 2000; Jordan, 2003; Kutterolf, et al. 2008; Grover, 2014). One sneaky but efficient way to do this is to accumulate information on tephra, the fragmental (pea-to-cantaloupe-size) material blown out by a volcanic eruption. More to the point, we want to know how far the tephra reached (we are not really interested in ash here, because ash can travel all around the world). The greater the distance that the tephra falls reached, the larger the eruption. Two events stand out:

• Masaya volcano, Nicaragua, about 2,100 +/- 100 years ago. It deposited tephra as far as 170 km distant.
• Chiletepe volcano, Nicaragua, erupted about 1,900 +/- 100 years ago and dropped tephra as far as 570 km distant.

            Note that these dates are very approximate (see Kutterolf, et al., 2008). 

            The Masaya eruption lofted approximately 8 cubic kilometers of ash and tephra, nearly three times more than Mount St Helens in 1980. Both Chiletepe and Masaya lie east of the subduction zone where the Cocos Plate is being over-ridden by the Caribbean Plate at a rate of nearly 7 cm/year.

            This rate of crustal movement is important, because it is nearly three times faster than the Cascadia subduction rate in the Pacific Northwest of the US. This faster subduction rate means that there are proportionally larger and more frequent volcanic eruptions in Nicaragua than in the Washington and Oregon Cascades. Central America is basically a gargantuan pile of volcanic lava, tephra, and ash covered with recent soils and vegetation. In that sense, 3 Nephi 8 doesn’t record a particularly remarkable event for Central America – except for its timing.

            In other words, the Book of Mormon is fully conformable with the geologic record of Central America.

            This subduction-earthquake-volcano cataclysm is just one example among many where modern science seems to be converging with events and geographical details recounted in the Book of Mormon.  Other examples include linguistics (for instance chiasmus, Egyptian names, and other Semitic cognates seen in the Bible (see Welsh, 1969; 1981), and the remarkable correlations of the first 17 chapters of the Book of Mormon with the still-accumulating details of the Frankincense Trail (see Hilton and Hilton, 1976; Givens, 2002). The stories recorded in the Book of Mormon by prophets over the 1,021 years of its internal history are remarkably consistent with geologic, geographical, and historical evidence now known.  The Uto-Aztecan language group in the Western Hemisphere is loaded with over 1,500 cognates and fossil linguistic structures only found in Semitic languages of the Arabian Peninsula (Stubbs, 2016).

            None of this information, however, was available in Joseph Smith’s lifetime. None of it “proves” the veracity of the Book of Mormon, but it is certainly part of a rapidly-growing, startling – and rather compelling – series of hints at that direction.

Something as valuable as gold… A major trade item for millennia, in fact

            How DO you deal with a corpse when it’s sweltering?

            The short answer, used by our poorer ancestors, was to bury Grandpa. Quickly.

            Hasidic Law and Islamic Sharia both still mandate burial within 24 hours of death. For our somewhat wealthier ancestors, the answer was to use deodorant on Grandpa – and then bury him when more convenient. For our really wealthy ancestors, it was to use deodorant, remove and can the internal organs, paint what’s left with pitch, let Grandpa dry out, and build a huge mausoleum around him… a pyramid would be even better (it’s slightly harder for thieves to break into).

            The preferred pre-burial deodorant du jour from well before 600 BC until the Middle Ages is golden brown in color. It’s still used in Catholic and Orthodox Christian funerals in fragrant-smoke-distribution devices called censers. These are generally brass containers dangled from a chain, with a piece of charcoal in the bottom and a crystal or two of the aromatic spice on top of the burning coal. This golden crystalline stuff is found as sap leaking out of knife-slashes in the bark of an unassuming bush found mainly in the Omani mountains. It’s called frankincense. It is wonderfully fragrant. A tiny nugget of frankincense, with some raisins and cashews, will do wonders for a huge bowl of basmati rice.

            A careful reading of 1 Nephi 1 through 1 Nephi 17 in the Book of Mormon comes across to a modern archeologist or geographer as a startlingly accurate description of the Frankincense Trail – the biggest trade route of antiquity, predating the Asiatic Silk Road. Scholars in the 1990’s found a small tribe on the northwestern Yemeni coast whose name is, using the standard three consonants for an Arabic word: ݦ ﮭ ﮞ . In reverse (western) character order, this is NHM. This could be pronounced ‘naheem” “nuhom”, “niham” – or Nahom, depending on where the diacritical marks are added, something first introduced in the 9^th to 11^th centuries AD, long after the original Qu’ran was compiled, and a much longer time since Lehiyim, or Lehites as a tribe existed in Arabia. The land any tribe occupies is traditionally named after that tribe; thus, Americans are the “tribe” occupying America, French occupy France, the English occupy England, and so on.

            Think: make a left turn at Nahom. See 1 Ne 16:34: “And it came to pass that Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom.”

            Cities along the Frankincense trade route from Jerusalem to the Nile Valley, and from Jerusalem to the southern Arabian Peninsula, were frequently Jewish cities. With one notable exception, that city ownership tidbit was figured out only in the past century. When Muhammad, the founder of Islam, first arrived in Madinah around 632 AD, he encountered two warring Jewish tribes – or what we might now call trading corporations – and set himself up as a judge and dispassionate arbiter of their conflicts. It worked – and 1.3 billion people today at least read his dialect of Semitic as a result. However, the trading lingua franca of 600 BC in the region was not Arabic, but Egyptian – the language of the Nile River Valley, the geographic center of the huge trade network in spices. Egyptian writing by that time had evolved its written form from clumsy and tedious hieroglyphs to a phonetic shorthand called Demotic.

            That’s a long way around to point you at 1Nephi 1:2. “Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.”

            The Frankincense Trail was actually a series of sub-parallel routes mainly predicated on where the oases were – which were themselves controlled by a long scarp, part of the tear-apart fabric of the first of two Red-Sea-opening rifting events. One chain of springs runs close to the coast where the groundwater finally reaches the sea.

            Another chain of oases followed the uplifted scarp left over when the Red Sea originally split apart the Arabian-Nubian continental craton 35-30 million years ago. These cliffs rise to nearly 2,000 meters (7,000 feet) high, high enough to trap passing clouds. As the air rises, it cools and drops its moisture, which collects in a line of springs at the base of that scarp – a line hundreds of kilometers long running parallel to the Red Sea. One of those springs is the famous Zamzam Well of Makkah. A devout Muslim wishes to be buried in a shroud dipped in Zamzam water, lying on his left side, with his face towards Makkah.       

            That’s a long way around to point you at 1 Ne 2:5. “And he came down by the borders near the shore of the Red Sea; and he traveled in the wilderness in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea; and he did travel in the wilderness with his family, which consisted of my mother, Sariah, and my elder brothers, who were Laman, Lemuel, and Sam.”

             Incidentally, the borders of a tribe were the ridges between the pasturage for their sheep, goats, and camels. In the Hijaz and Tihamma Plain along the east side of the Red Sea, there are frequent ridges of lava running out to the sea, some as recent as the previous millennium, triggered by the ongoing second opening of the Red Sea, something that won’t be completely opened for another several million years: “The borders which are nearer the Red Sea.”

            The city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where we lived as a family for four years, has several of those springs. The humidity, heat, and salt in the air from the proximal Red Sea were murder on our car – and for that matter on any iron or steel, including steel bows that became available to wealthier traders around 600 to 700 BC…

            …and that’s a long way around to point you at 1 Ne 16: 13-14. “And it came to pass that we traveled for the space of four days, nearly a south-southeast direction, and we did pitch our tents again; and we did call the name of the place Shazer. And it came to pass that we did take our bows and our arrows, and go forth into the wilderness to slay food for our families; and after we had slain food for our families we did return again to our families in the wilderness, to the place of Shazer [where Nephi’s steel bow broke]. And we did go forth again in the wilderness, following the same direction, keeping in the most fertile parts of the wilderness, which were in the borders near the Red Sea”.

            As you arrived at the Yemen part of the route, you had a choice of paths: one choice was to go south and then east, and pay a tax that helped sustain the great Sabaean Kingdom (remember the fabulously wealthy Queen of Sheba/Saba who visited King Solomon?). The alternative route was to skip the taxes and take a sharp eastward turn at a place called Nahom. However, you had to risk crossing the desert, where for over 5,000 years bandit tribes have made a living by preying upon spice caravans (Thesiger, 1959). If you took the cheap route, you sure didn’t want to light any fires to give your location away – even if you could find enough firewood in the edge of the incredibly desolate Empty Quarter to burn in the first place. You had to eat raw or sun-dried goat meat.

            You could still nurse your babies, however (1 Ne 17:2). “And so great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we did live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women did give plenty of suck for their children, and were strong, yea, even like unto the men; and they began to bear their journeyings without murmurings.”

           Incidentally, the Muslim holy city of Madinah lies along one of these strings of oases. The name Madinah mean “city” in Arabic, so its full name is Madinah al-Munawarrah, or the City of Lights. Madinah in 632 AD was a Jewish trading city – occupied by two rival Jewish tribes. When the Muslim prophet Mohammed was driven out of Makkah, he arrived at Madinah and offered as an outsider to arbitrate between the two feuding sides.

          Who do you suppose could make their way through such a dangerous trail, and who could communicate with the Jewish sub-tribes or trading corporations controlling the towns around the oases in the trading language of the day? How about a family of Jewish traders already familiar with the trade system and network? A large family or a small sub-tribe – perhaps with a name like… the Lehites. It turns out that the names Lehi (Lehiyyim) and Nephi (Nefiyyim) are both known from antiquity in south-central Arabia (Stubbs, 2016). And who could translate the records they carried with them, and wrote as they traveled, in a language long lost to history, more than twelve centuries later, than an inspired prophet?

            Because of these and other evidence of the ancient Semitic origin of the Book of Mormon, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ has approved the following statement:

“When a sacred text is translated into another language or rewritten into more familiar language, there are substantial risks that this process may introduce doctrinal errors or obscure evidence of its ancient origin. To guard against these risks, the First Presidency and Council of the Twelve give close personal supervision to the translation of scriptures from English into other languages and have not authorized efforts to express the doctrinal content of the Book of Mormon in familiar or modern English”. (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Handbook 2, Administering the Church, p.74). Emphasis ours.

 Most people by now have learned that a PhD doesn’t always correlate with smarts…

            Perhaps you’ve noticed a trend in previous chapters: a certain fascination with what an ill-educated 25-year-old, living 180+ years ago, could tell us about modern cosmology, human health, and the world we live in. This knowledge has interested Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scholars since the first years the Church was in existence (Paul, 1992). However, in the last several decades cosmology has exploded (pun intended) into a broader understanding that appears to us to more and more closely mirror what Joseph Smith began teaching in the 1830’s. We will spend much of this book reviewing these new discoveries. Of particularly interest to us are the implications of the extraordinarily tiny ratio of biosphere to the rest of the universe. What we can directly sense and measure is just 4% of what we know by indirect means to be out there, and the biosphere is an immensely tiny fraction of that (see the following chapters on Candles and Constants, Dark Energy, Biosphere to Universe Ratio – DNA and Poetry, and Intelligence Part III). Even if we count other populated worlds that Joseph Smith was the first to inform us about, where humankind can actually live constitutes an incredibly tiny fraction. Yet Joseph apparently understood many of these things by 1832 (D&C 76: 19-24).

            Hugh Nibley published a book (Nibley, 1967) about things that Joseph Smith couldn’t possibly have known about, that nevertheless appear in the Book of Mormon and have been verified since that time in formal scholarship. These elements include things like the “borders nearer the borders” of the Red Sea – tribal borders that are mainly lava ridges perpendicular to the land-sea boundaries on the western side of the Red Sea that separate different grazing regions; and the name “Sam,” the name of one of Nephi’s younger brothers. This name was ridiculed in the 19th Century, but the Nag Hammadi documents discovered in the 20th Century in the Nile Valley have shown the name “Sam” to have been in common use among the traders of 600 BC. The Book of Mormon is full of other Semitic cultural artifacts, too, including those unusual phrase constructions (e.g., “And it came to pass,” “I dreamed a dream,” and so on; see Stubbs, 2016). John Welsh (Welsh, 1961, 1987) discovered Chiasmus, a reverse-repeat literary structure common in Hebrew which does not survive translation into modern Bibles – yet is found all through the Book of Mormon.  There are hundreds and hundreds of examples like this.

            We have some personal experiences that we could add to that huge and still-growing Since Cumorah list. Between us we have traveled along about 70 percent of the Lehite Trail in the Arabian Peninsula, and one of us served as chief scientist for volcano hazards in the US Geological Survey and helped monitor the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens. In the next few chapters, we will be providing abbreviated outlines of some of these experiences, and how they both connect to things described in the Book of Mormon – things that a farm boy in 1828 could not possibly have known. Joseph Smith dictated the content of the Book of Mormon in about 53 days. At the time he had approximately 3.5 years of formal elementary school education.
            It’s remarkable what you can do with just a 3rd grade education.

Just a different, much more ubiquitous kind

            From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (the preferred name; it’s commonly called the Mormon Church) modern scripture, the Doctrine & Covenants, Section 131:

7 There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes;

8 We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

            Until a few decades ago, this statement was confusing to some Church members and drew ridicule from some non-members. However, during the latter part of the 20th century astronomers had noticed, using red shifts (moving-away form of Doppler shifts of starlight) and point-mass counts, that galaxies were spinning far faster than could be explained by the visible matter in them. This wasn’t a small amount of disparity, either: in some cases, the galactic spin was an order of magnitude too fast for the galaxy to hold together. Speculation first turned to invisible gas, or dust, but scans on bands from infra-red to X-Ray showed that these together couldn’t account for anywhere near what was observed: spiral arms of galaxies were rotating so fast that they should be flinging themselves out into intergalactic space. The only feasible explanation was that there was additional matter in the galaxies, increasing the pull of gravity sufficiently to hold the galaxies together. We’re talking 5 to 6 times more “dark matter,” as it was dubbed, than visible matter. 

            In the last decade of the 20th century, the newer and bigger telescopes coming online were able to reach farther and farther back into deep time: to see light emitted almost back to the time of the Big Bang, calculated from various different means to be about 13.8 billion years ago. One can use several different kinds of “Standard Candle” (cosmic distance-measuring methods) to figure how far away a given galaxy is. A problem popped up as they reached farther and farther back in time, however. Remember that light, though extremely fast, takes a finite amount of time to travel a given distance. Thus, the greater the red shift, the faster the object is moving away, which means it’s a greater distance away, and also means it was that much longer ago that the object separated from what became our galaxy. We already knew about visible or baryonic matter, and now we knew that dark matter was out there also.

            However, two different groups of experimental physicists, using slightly different approaches, determined that instead of the universe expansion slowing down under the gravitational pull of all that mass, the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. In other words, the universe is expanding faster with time (Perlmutter, et al., 1997; Riess et al., 1998). This won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011.

            It doesn’t take very sophisticated physics to actually put a number on this. Keep in mind that one of Einstein’s earliest papers (Einstein, 1905) demonstrated the equivalence of matter and energy (this has been subsequently proven in laboratories, solar physics, and atom bombs) with the famous equation e=mc². In other words, matter and energy are interchangeable. So what kind of energy field would it require to make this expansion accelerate? It turns out to be about three times more energy than all known visible matter and dark matter combined. This value, now called “dark energy,” has checked out repeatedly. The scientists working on the problem, despite pressure to publish quickly, held off for a long time because they just couldn’t believe these numbers. 

            So where does the count now stand? 

            Baryonic (visible) matter – the stuff that you can lay your hands on or see: a bit over 4 percent of the universe. 

            Dark matter (which no one yet understands, but which astronomers can actually measure remotely): about 25 percent of the universe. 

            That leaves about 71 percent of the universe made up of this newly discovered but still not understood dark energy. One recent close calculation of the ratio of baryonic (tangible) matter to all the dark matter and dark energy for our Milky Way Galaxy is astonishing: this ratio is just 0.0003 – in other words, almost all of the Milky Way is NOT “regular” matter. This is a value that catches the breath of any physicist or cosmologist. It means there is a lot out there that we know close to nothing about. As in, at least 96 percent of the universe. (See the later section “Dark Energy – Something Even Bigger” for more on this subject.)

            Back to D&C 131: 7-8 – this is a remarkably prescient statement for someone with a 3rd grade education and without a cosmologist’s vocabulary. This statement seems to be saying that there is matter out there that cannot be seen by our eyes, and Joseph equates that invisible matter, which physicists have recently concluded forms the vast bulk of the universe, with what he called “spirit.” The implication here is not that the latest research in astrophysics proves Joseph Smith to be correct. (Few atheists would be persuaded of this anyway, especially since Joseph equated this non-visible matter with that particular word, spirit.) Rather, the take-away here is that one religion taught back in the 1830s that there was far more to our universe than could be seen. This is now borne out by new cosmological data about the universe. It is one of the things that make it possible for us to be believing scientists, because there is clearly abundant room in LDS Church theology for scientific thinking.

            And vice versa.

ANOTHER surprising convergence of science and religion:

            We are both scientists, and as such we carefully and sometimes rather tediously gather and analyze data on a wide range of topics, then home in on a number of different kinds of truth, and then publish it in a book or scientific journal.

            We’re also members of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Church’s doctrine we subscribe to is found in surprisingly many sources, both ancient and modern, including the Standard Works, Statements of the First Presidency, General Conference talks… and even Hymns. At least two very interesting, uniquely Church of Jesus Christ doctrinal concepts are found ONLY in the “LDS Church Hymn Book.” For example, here are two stanzas from Hymn #284:

1. If you could hie to Kolob
   In the twinkling of an eye,
   And then continue onward
   With that same speed to fly,
   Do you think that you could ever,
   Through all eternity,
   Find out the generation
   Where Gods began to be?
2. Or see the grand beginning,
   Where space did not extend?
   Or view the last creation,
   Where Gods and matter end?
   Methinks the Spirit whispers,
   “No man has found ‘pure space,’
   Nor seen the outside curtains,
   Where nothing has a place.”

            That’s a fair description, if you avoid modern physics terminology, of what cosmologists have learned in the past half century about the universe. Kolob (see the subsequent chapter titled “Sgr-A* and Kolob”) appears to be close to the center of the galaxy. No “pure space”? He’s right – because we now know there is vacuum energy no matter how empty the “space.” Electrons and positrons constantly pop out of nowhere. And there’s “dark energy” besides that (also discussed in a later chapter).

            And where ARE the “outside curtains,” the bounds of the universe? Current cosmology, just calculating from proto-galaxies that we can see now from 13 billion years ago, suggests the radius to the Outer Edge must be at least 40 billion light-years (Gott et al., 2005).

            How about “See the grand beginning, where space did not extend”? To us, this clearly refers to the microseconds after the Big Bang, as a singularity began to unfold and fill space. For 300,000 years light couldn’t get out of the dense seething plasma because electrons and nuclei hadn’t formed yet. The details of this epoch are poorly understood, and even then, only by using plasma experiments and mathematical modeling. These things were not even known in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Keep in mind that mathematical modeling of the Big Bang, and String Theory, are very different things. The former back-calculates conditions from observable data, whereas the latter is a theory of everything that unfortunately has 10⁵⁰⁰ possible solutions that you cannot really constrain – it can predict anything you want. String Theory has no connection to any collected data. 

            However, William Wines Phelps wrote this hymn nearly two centuries ago. The first time we sang it, we liked the music but the words didn’t make a lot of sense. Later we earned advanced degrees, and a childhood interest in stars and galaxies gave way to a research interest in astrophysics and cosmology.

            There is an interesting side implication of the last stanza, which we correlate with vacuum energy. If the sudden appearance of paired particles occurs next to the event horizon of a black hole (the “point of no return” for light and anything else that falls in), one particle will fall into the black hole and one will not. This means, among other things, that Black Holes are “gray and fuzzy,” and that without additional matter drawn in will fade with time (although extremely slowly), and the information that passes the event horizon may not, in fact, be lost (Hawking, 2001). Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, two of the greatest theoretical physicists alive at the time, had a long-standing bet on this. (Penrose won the case of beer when Hawking finally conceded the point; there is no direct physical proof for ANY of this, or course.)

While theoretical particle physics has focused on String Theory for nearly 40 years, there have been huge advances in biology and cosmology during that time. Recent advances in cosmology have included an improved understanding of the Big Bang – how matter and energy expanded (in incomprehensible violence where the laws of physics may have been different) from a single point in empty space. Or perhaps space itself didn’t exist beforehand.  Some additional understandings have implications for the speed of light limitation. Quantum entanglement appears to prove that information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Vacuum energy implies that there is an underlying energy field in what might appear to be empty space.

            We rediscovered W.W. Phelps’ hymn a few years ago and were stunned. We read it several times to make sure we understood the implications. Phelps died in 1872, and during his lifetime he did NOT have access to Nature, Discovery, or Phys. Rev. Letters – but he did have another source of information: direct personal revelation – a way that individuals can receive information directly from God, unmediated by religious authorities. That sure soaks some preachers’ business models! This is a doctrine that most people on the planet instinctively understand and believe, but it is NOT preached by any other religion that we are aware of. In fact, it draws the vociferous ire of a number of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.

            This hymn, for us, is yet another tangible and reassuring piece of evidence that all truth comes from, and leads to, a single source. Phelps was interested in something, thought and prayed about it, and quietly penned words to a hymn with content that cosmologists and astrophysicists finally figured out with several billion dollars’ worth of instrumentation – a century and a half later.

There’s truth, and then there’s Truth.

            An old joke among mathematicians goes like this: “One plus one equals three. (Pause.) …for very large values of one.” Anyone who survived (and still remembers) calculus will find this hilarious. Well, at least slightly funny.

            The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States essentially gives us the right to say that 1 + 1 = 3. But saying that doesn’t make it true. In fact, a mathematical framework built on that fundamental premise will not safely land a lunar module on the Moon. A famous Abraham Lincoln quote says it even more clearly: “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

            For different but related reasons, worshiping a golden calf (or making a personal god of Darwinian natural selection, or financial derivatives, or the Large Hadron Collider, or political power) will not make everything work for you.

            Believe what you want, but if your belief is not based on fundamental truth, it will get you nowhere. It certainly won’t buy you happiness – that $20 million yacht derived from your dishonestly earned bonuses and compensation notwithstanding. We are reminded of a Gary Larson cartoon. At the end of a funeral reception, a grand piano, a refrigerator, a television, and a set of golf clubs all fly out the front door of the deceased man’s house, and zoom up into the clouds, while his wife wails “Aaaugh! It’s George – he’s taking it with him!”

            Arthur R. Bassett (Bassett, 1977) wrote in the Ensign, “One of the facets of the Lord’s way of teaching that has continued to fascinate me is his ability to interlace simplicity and profundity. His gospel offers a mental challenge to the most profound scholar and yet has attraction even to a small child. Its doctrines range as wide as the entire human experience, yet all truth can be circumscribed within the bounds of a few simple, central principles” (emphasis added).

            Don Lind, the Church of Jesus Christ astronaut, earned a PhD in high-energy physics from the University of California, Berkeley (also our alma mater). After retirement from NASA, he also served as a member of the Portland, Oregon, Temple presidency from 1995 to 1998. Don once gave a lecture which we attended at the University of Arizona. During his talk he made several statements that have stuck with us ever since, including the following:

            “This is the only religion that I can adhere to and not have to believe one thing on Sunday and another thing the other six days of the week.”

            His point here was this: there is no incompatibility between my faith and my science. They are not mutually exclusive. Implicit in this is also his clear understanding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 9th Article of Faith:

            “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”

            Our point here is this: science and religion are different means for reaching the same end – the Truth with a capital “T” that does not change over time – and science and religion are definitely converging.

We’re all atheists. And we’re all believers.

            As an eleven-year-old, I began to notice a problem. I reasoned: If the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus were not real, what else were the adults telling me that might also not be real? What about God? And so I became an agnostic, although I didn’t know the word. By the time I was 12 my sense of betrayal had hardened into an amorphous anger, and I became acutely critical of everything adults told me, trying to outline the boundaries between truth and kindly intended adult fiction.

            I had careful arguments with the Catholic nuns in my elementary school about Limbo (where, according to Catholic dogma, unbaptized infants and children are trapped for all eternity), and about papal infallibility. Those arguments with the nuns were “careful” in the sense that, if we were perceived to be arguing with – sassing – a nun, we would be quickly beaten. And we really were beaten. I remember being slapped several times so hard that it set me staggering, and always having bruises on my hands from being whacked with wooden pointers and rulers.

            I learned altogether too much about the history of the Papacy. As a twelve-year-old I was given a homework assignment to research the life of a Pope. At the local library I got permission to go into the “adult stacks” and pull a volume at random of the history of the Catholic Church, and so, randomly, I picked one. I learned he was the son of a Pope, had fathered a subsequent Pope (with his sister), and was stricken with paralysis and died while committing fornication with a mistress (McCabe, 1939; McBrien, 1997; Maxwell-Stuart, 1997). The Vicar of Christ? A direct link in the line of authority from Peter?

            As a result of all that I became pretty sure that the faith my Mom had raised me in was hooey. My Mom still made me go to church, though, so for three more years I was a Catholic Atheist Altar Boy. However, I never said this to her face, nor to the nuns, nor later to the Christian Brothers who taught us at Garces Junior High School. THEY could hit you so hard that you would hit the wall first, then slide down to the floor. By this time, I had learned those words “agnostic” and “atheist.” Still, I could wear the cool cassock (robes), light and put out candles, ring bells loudly, and sometimes even sneak a taste of some of the wine.

            For 10 years, then, I was an atheist. By the time I entered college I was a militant, abrasive atheist. I held the belief that if I couldn’t see something with my own eyes, or derive it from Maxwell’s equations, I wouldn’t believe it. This is a classic example of being determinedly self-limiting – self-blinded, excluding evidence. By the way, excluding evidence is a Really Bad Thing in science – it’s generally considered inexcusable, in fact. It’s called “cherry-picking.”

            Many atheists now, like me then, don’t accept the fact that there might be routes other than scientific experiment to gaining knowledge. Many atheists… but not all. As an example of these other routes to truth, however, I would note Einstein’s “Gedankenexperiment” (thought experiment) that led to his multiply-verified special relativity and general relativity, so well proven by now with experimental evidence that they are no longer called “theories.”  I would also note the famous manner in which Pauli and Fermi postulated the neutrino decades before there was evidence to prove it, even indirectly. They had faith.

            Many of our friends still subscribe to the atheist tradition, and we use here the word “tradition,” in the same way that non-religious individuals refer to “religious traditions.” However, they don’t like being called an atheist – it has negative connotations, more so in some countries than in others. No, we don’t understand that, either – atheists for the most part are just trying to be honest. However, atheist organizations cannot pin down Neil DeGrasse Tyson to even admit he’s an atheist; he tries very hard to avoid that label, because it isn’t helpful to his marketing. In some places and times, like Voltaire’s France, being an atheist was fashionable. However, if you wish to enter Saudi Arabia, and you identify yourself as an atheist, you will not get a visa (they do ask). In fact, it is so NOT OK to be an atheist there that a Saudi who declared himself an atheist could be beheaded unless he publicly recanted.

            Therefore, many of us atheists called ourselves “skeptics.” This provided camouflage – you couldn’t quite pin us down, while we could stand back, in a passive-aggressive way, and demand that people from a faith tradition prove things to us. It’s a classic “Heads I win, tails you lose” way to load the argument up front. I have to admit that I used this one a lot. I wasn’t above using ridicule to embarrass devout Christian friends who were scientists. Atheists have at least one thing in common with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormons): they both are seeking the honest truth.

            As atheists we also called ourselves “humanists” – in part to allay accusations that without religion we had no morals, but in part to also put us on the side of the “humans” on the planet. Who could object to that? As part of this, we argued that religious wars were the reason for most of the suffering and misery of humanity. Therefore, religions must be bad.

            The problem with this approach is that it overlooks some of the most basic evidence of human history. Almost all conflict has been political (to gain power) or xenophobic (fear of outsiders) at its core. Attackers just used religion as a cover to justify the atrocities that almost all human beings know to be wrong. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is a classic example of this. They call themselves “Islamic” but are rejected by 99% of the Muslim world as false Muslims, violators of the core precepts of the Qur’an. They also murder Muslims almost exclusively. Faith-based, indeed.

            Oddly, I don’t think that anyone ever counted how many human beings were killed by three atheist regimes in the 20^th Century. I can count Pol Pot (about 2 million), Josef Stalin (estimates generally exceed 20 million), and Mao Tse-Dung (estimates of the people killed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution alone are up to 70 million). These deaths in the 20^th Century exceed the deaths of all so-called “religious” wars in the previous millennium. 

            By the time I was 22, I was a “Mormon” – a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wait – what?!?? How did that happen?

            It happened because I began having problems again, this time with the logic (or lack thereof) of my thought system – my belief tradition – as an atheist. It was a problem of assumptions, of voids, and of functionally parallel belief frameworks. Atheism was just another religion, but it had no explanations. We have a cartoon on our refrigerator: two young men in white shirts have given a pamphlet to a man at his front door. “But this is blank,” says the man. “We’re atheists,” replies one of the young men.

            I think most of us would agree that people from a faith tradition have a belief framework.  By that I mean that they accept some basic premises: for instance, that God exists, that our existence has a purpose. From these premises, everything both good and bad in their life experience can then be more or less understood. Our improbable human existence can be explained, pain and suffering can be explained, a reward system is laid out, and what happens when we die more or less inevitably follows.

            However, atheists – like me once – also have a belief framework. Like the religious belief framework, it begins with certain unprovable assumptions, one of which is that God doesn’t exist. The corollary is that the universe just sort of magically (with a Big Bang) came into existence.  This can be argued with just as much basis, with just as much evidence, as a belief in God. Also, atheists assume the physical laws of the universe just exist, and can’t be explained. As an atheist I never tried to jump off a building, because I accepted gravity as a fundamental physical law. That’s a fancy way of saying I wasn’t that stupid. (Or that I had faith.)

            Another basic assumption that we atheists built on is that the Anthropic Principle (outlined in a subsequent chapter of that name) is just a lucky accident. Twenty-six physical constants all line up to values within a few percent of what is required in order for life to exist in this universe. “Lucky” actually fails to express the improbability adequately. Try multiplying two percent (0.02) by itself twenty-six times. It’s that improbable. A common argument to explain these amazing multiplicative coincidences is that our universe is one of an infinite number of parallel universes – the multiverse. Ours just happened to be the one that had all the constants line up just right. Ummm… then where did all the energy and matter come from to make all these infinite universes? And while we’re at it, can anyone test for a multiverse? Not even remotely (by definition everything else is a different universe and is un-reachable and un-testable), but there are a lot of highly educated people who still believe in this.

            They have faith.

Atheism has prophets – the guardians and promulgators of the Ain’t-no-God belief framework – who also write books. For reasons that escape me as a former atheist, some of these are even proselytizing atheists – preachers. I suspect this doesn’t make sense to you either – on several levels (for instance, why would they even care?). I think this proselytizing may have a lot to do with seeking fame, with craving attention.  Some of it may come from the human desire to have fellow-believers and even – especially – followers. Atheism also comes with temples and idols – the Large Hadron Collider comes to mind. I have a book on my shelf in which a theoretical physicist appears to be worshipping this human construct. It’s gold-plated, too (Randall, 2005).

            Finally, there’s the Big Bang. There is abundant evidence that all matter and energy in our universe suddenly exploded into existence from a tiny point about 13.8 billion years ago. What triggered this? What preceded it? Like the anthropic principle, this constitutes what I call a void – something that I couldn’t understand or explain – so as an atheist I ignored it. By age 20, I found myself ignoring more and more voids, and I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with my basic assumptions. I felt increasingly dishonest.

            Like many others, I conflated science with atheism. As I mentioned earlier, I accepted as reality only those things I could sense or test physically, and as a budding scientist I thought that was the only intellectually honest path. I hadn’t seen anything that I could consider a proof in the existence of an imminent God (a God who answers prayers, and cares about His individual creations), so I didn’t want to waste time thinking about it. This approach may actually fall into the domain of agnosticism. Some atheists and most agnostics will readily admit that the vastness and order of the universe argues at least for the existence of a transcendent God (a Being who started this vast universe, but who could care less about some puny, late-arrival sentient creatures on an average planet in the outer fringes of a smallish galaxy). This way of thinking is actually being more honest, in my view: because no one can explain the reason for the physical laws, the Big Bang, nor the Anthropic Principle. Arguing for a multiverse is NOT an explanation – it’s just another belief system, because it’s un-testable and thus unscientific.   

            I began looking again at the belief systems behind faith traditions. I searched widely. Eventually, I came across the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They had a belief system that was internally consistent and didn’t require me to believe one thing on Sunday and something else during the rest of the week. There were no huge voids I was expected to ignore. They were very open about there being some unanswered questions; one-third of the Book of Mormon was sealed by metal bands against immediate translation, for instance. However, I learned that we were expected to seek and could get answers for ourselves – if we were willing to expend personal energy to get them. I found the fact that we are actually encouraged to get answers truly startling – and profoundly exhilarating. True science and true religion should both encourage us to explore, and endeavor to find answers to things we don’t yet understand.

            What struck me most, however, was that there was no fear of science, no fear of education among the members of this Church – and they showed me a way to prove it all was correct.

            It was testable.