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Two Books

Two Books

Last updated on: July 1, 2026 at 2:18 pm by Dan Peterson

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Two Books 2026-07-01T14:18:07-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Joseph Smith falling from a second-floor window of Carthage Jail, in Illinois, on 27 June 1844 (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’m pleased to report that a full audio recording of John Donovan Wilson’s interview with Sam Weston is now available at BecomingBrigham.com:

On the 4th of April 2025, we recorded a conversation between Sam Weston and John Donovan Wilson, one of our hosts. It looks into the accusation by some—it’s one that crops up from time to time—that Brigham Young (Brigham Young!), orchestrated the killing of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Through careful testing and analysis, Sam explains why he feels this theory can be easily debunked.

By the way, did you know that you can subscribe (at no cost) to Becoming Brigham? A button that allows you to “Subscribe on YouTube” is available at the project’s official website.

A tidal pool on the southern coast of New South Wales, Australia. Charles Darwin proposed that life on Earth may have begun in just such a place. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I received a relatively short book in the mail (on Monday, I think) — sent to me by its author, Evan Farr Smith — and am about halfway through it. Self-published, it’s titled Machines Without Makers: Evolution’s Fatal Flaw. Since I didn’t know that it was coming, I had no expectations for it, but, to this point, I’m liking it.

Here, immediately below, is the summary for Machines Without Makers that appears on Amazon.com. It’s a pretty representative description of what I’ve read thus far:

What if the most accepted explanation for life is missing its foundation?

Evolution explains how life changes.
It does not explain how life begins.

Before natural selection can act, something must already exist:

A system capable of replication

Information stored and transmitted

Coordinated function across many parts

Without these, evolution has nothing to work on.

Despite decades of research, no experiment has demonstrated how nonliving matter becomes a functioning, self-replicating system. Chemistry can produce components. But components are not systems. Parts do not become life simply with time.

Machines Without Makers examines this gap directly.

Drawing on scientific literature and observable principles, this book separates what has been demonstrated from what has been assumed:

The difference between adaptation and origin

Why time does not create coordinated complexity

The role of information in living systems

The limits of undirected processes

This is not an argument against science.

It is an argument for completeness.

If life requires information, coordination, and structure, then any explanation must account for their origin—not assume them.

The question is not whether life changes.
The question is whether life can begin without intelligence.

Perhaps, if enough Americans had simply read this book, we would be doing a whole lot better, politically and economically, than we are.
(Cover image from Amazon.com)

And I think that I’ll mention another book, quite a different one, on an entirely different subject:

I hope that I’m not alone in being dismayed by the recent electoral successes of political candidates emerging out of the Democratic Socialists of America. I don’t think that that this is a good trend for America, nor even for the Democratic Party (about whose general welfare I’vc never really concerned myself). Polling indicates that socialism is increasingly popular among especially younger Americans, and I’m not happy about that.

Now, it’s not entirely clear what such young Americans — often ill-educated, economically clueless, and historically semiliterate, to say nothing of their inexperience with business and with providing for families in the real world of work — actually mean or understand by the word socialism. To the extent that they’re simply expressing a concern (whether sincere or merely signaling superior virtue) for the poor and the disadvantaged, I’m sympathetic. We should be — certainly we Christians should be — committed to the relief of refugees and the poor and those who are suffering.

One of my own personal interests, since an early age, has been utopian fiction, accounts of ideal societies. I’ve written here before of the influence that Nephi Anderson’s 1898 novel Added Upon had upon me in my early teens. For all its serious limitations and flaws, it provided me with my first real sense of the Plan of Salvation, a glimpse that proved transformative, firing my imagination and casting the world in a whole new light for me. Along the way, a small section of Added Upon takes its protagonists into the future city of the New Jerusalem, and Brother Anderson’s depiction of that ideal city was very much to my then-budding tastes.

To the extent, however, that the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow-travelers and the young impressionable “socialists” showing up in recent surveys advocate a real program of taking control of the means of production, harassing and punishing the creators of wealth, and decreasing human freedom, I’m fiercely opposed.

In the lower righthand corner of this NASA photograph is prosperous market-oriented South Korea. It looks like an island, but, of course, it’s not. Note the seeming sea that extends beyond the brilliant lights of Seoul. That’s not ocean water. It’s North Korea, the insular, repressive Communist tyranny that’s reduced its people to virtual starvation. Culturally almost identical, the two Koreas represent a neat laboratory test of competing political-economic visions.

Historically, such efforts have given us scores of millions of deaths in China, the Cambodian killing-fields of the Khmer Rouge, the economic dysfunction of Cuba, and the murderous Soviet Gulag, to mention only a few of the fruits of statist economics and the political systems such economic programs seem to require. In literature, George Orwell’s dystopian but sadly realistic 1984, with its Newspeak Ingsoc (“English socialism”), is the prominent and relevant text:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” (O’Brien to Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984)

It’s scarcely coincidental that the word utopia was coined in 1516 from ancient Greek by the Tudor-era English statesman Sir Thomas More — aka St. Thomas More, “A Man for All Seasons” — as the title for his Latin work Utopia. Coming from the Greek οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”), it literally means “no place.” I think, too, of Samuel Butler’s famous 1872 quasi-utopian novel Erewhon (think “Nowhere”).

I wish that everybody would read the late Henry Hazlitt’s brief and lucid little book Economics in One Lesson. (I know. I know. It’s an unrealistic hope — a utopian hope, if you prefer — rather like expecting every member of Congress to have read, at least once in his or her lifetime, through the Constitution of the United States.)

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abiogenesis

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