The new Church History evolution topic essay, with commentary

A new Church History Topic essay on Organic Evolution appeared recently. These are not full-blown essays, like the Gospel Topics. Rather, they are meant as concise historical/conceptual summaries provided as background for the Saints volumes, not as a stand-alone lengthy exploration of a subject. You can find them linked, in footnotes, in Saints online.  I’d like to provide some notes and comments on this short background essay.

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1. A number of people have already asked, so,  no, I didn’t write this. But I did provide feedback on it. The Church History Department frequently asks outside scholars and experts to review and comment on work-in-progress, and that’s how I was consulted.
2. “it’s just a history of past statements; it doesn’t say anything new.” That is one way of looking at it, but I disagree. As above, the genre of this thing— short background summaries— does not create for me the expectation of new or comprehensive information. Moreover, all history-writing involves conscious choices about emphasis, about what to include and what to leave out. While the 1980 Old Testament Institute manual isn’t a “history” it was certainly trying to use history to portray a Church position, and it conveniently left a lot of things out.
   By contrast, this essay is quite balanced—albeit short— in how it acknowledges the diversity of views among Church leaders, and the scientific and historical contexts, from highly reputable sources. (Again, in contrast to the 1980 Manual, which approvingly cited Velikovsky and Seventh-day Adventist creationism.)
   So that approach, in itself, is something new and significant. Could it have gone further, or into more detail? Of course.
   I’d also suggest that for those unfamiliar with the historical literature on this topic— and there is much— this WILL have something new. And it will definitely be new to the many non-English speaking Latter-day Saints who only have access to material in translation.
   I’m also sensitive to the many constraints on the writer(s), who have to speak to an introductory audience on a complex historical/scientific/religious topic, meet a low word count,¹It is far more difficult to write a 3-page paper than a 10-page paper pass academic muster, and clear Correlation and Apostolic approval.

Below, I post some annotations to the essay, some further expansive details and commentary. Italicized text comes from the essay.

• The modern science of evolution can be traced back to the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s.
  • The “modern synthesis,” which began to come about in the very late 1920s to early 1940s, effectively melds Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Mendel’s ideas about parentage and inherited characteristics. (How that worked was a real mystery for a long long time. See Dolnick, The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks’ Teeth to Frogs’ Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From.)
  • The idea of animals developing or changing into other animals,  of animals differentiating in some way other than God zapping them into existence, goes back far beyond Darwin. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin wrote evolutionary poetry, the French scientist Lamarck posited evolutionary mechanisms in the early 1800s, and some Catholic theologians in the 1200s thought Adam and Eve developed according to natural laws. (See the popular history by Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution.) Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution, but made a strong argument for its reality, and proposed a mechanism for how it functioned.
• People of faith grappled with the implications of organic evolution for human origins, the Creation of the earth, and the meaning of scripture.
  • What might surprise many is that very few Christians objected at the time the way one might expect based Christian objections to evolution today.  The arguments that the Bible required or taught belief in a young earth, a global flood, and no death before 6000 years ago were quite rare in the 1800s and early 1900s. (These arguments only came to dominate such discussions starting in the 1950s, and really took off after 1961.)
  • Most Christian objections to evolution were philosophical/theological. That is, if humans evolved, were we simply animals and not created “in the image of God”? What did it mean for morality? And was the universe really run purely by chance, not God?
• Theologians were divided over whether the findings of scientists attested to God’s creative power or denied His role in the Creation.
  • A number of Christian theologians were neutral or favorable towards evolution, e.g. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, and Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929. Even those Christians who wrote the series The Fundamentals  (whence the term “fundamentalist” would be coined in 1920) didn’t make evolution a huge deal. See this article at Biologos.
• Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the time did not take an official stance on the theory of evolution, but they did take steps to clarify the Church’s teachings related to human origins.
  • 120 years ago, Church leaders operated in a different manner and a different environment. There was no Correlation, and little attempt to standardize or systematize public statements by Apostles. General Conference talks were spontaneously given, not carefully written-out and reviewed ahead of time. So you can find lots of statements by Church leaders on various aspects of this, many of them skeptical and negative (and these are well-known), but others much more careful and circumspect, even warily open.
• In 1909, President Joseph F. Smith and his counselors in the First Presidency published an official declaration entitled “The Origin of Man.”
  • It’s easy to read the 1909 statement as providing a bright-line doctrinal statement against evolution; however, this narrative of its function only arose through Joseph Fielding Smith  starting in 1953, and does n’t make much sense in light of other events and actions by Church leaders at the time and in the years to follow. See here for some background.
• The next year, President Smith urged Church leaders not to undertake “to say how much of evolution is true, or how much is false.”
  • A number of Church leaders did not heed this directive, and continued giving individual talks against what they (wrongly) perceived as an existential threat to Christianity.
  • In private, President Joseph F. Smith spoke very highly of Darwin but skeptically of his “theories” and what his students had done with them.
• In 1925, a high school science instructor named John Scopes stood trial in the southern United States for teaching human evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law prohibiting the promotion of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.”
  • John Scopes may not have even been a science teacher; regardless, he was willing to stand as a test case. Afterwards, Scopes went to the University of Chicago to pursue geology. Larson’s Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion is excellent, won a Pulitzer. The author knew he wanted to write about the Scopes Trial as a graduate student, so he interrupted his PhD in history of science (under Ronald Numbers) to get a law degree from Harvard.
  • If you mostly know the Scopes trial through the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, then you’ve inherited a distorted view. (Wind was, according to the 1955 play’s authors, really about the Red Scare in the 1950s.) A number of historians have looked at how Wind distorted understandings of William Jennings Bryan, the trial, and fundamentalism. See e.g. Larson, “The Scopes Trial in History and Legend” in Ronald Numbers and David C. Lindberg, eds., When Science and Christianity Meet
• The First Presidency issued a condensed version of “The Origin of Man” in 1925
  • I have a paper coming out on the 1909 and 1925 First Presidency statements which goes into great detail on this; when Elder Orson Whitney presented his draft of the 1909 statement, Church leaders stripped out his strongest anti-evolutionary language, like “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds to the doctrine of the fixity of species as against the evolution that disregards that doctrine.”
  • In the 1925 statement issued to the world as the “Mormon position on evolution,” Church leaders cut nearly 70% of the 1909 text.  If the core of the Church’s position expressed in the 1909 statement was “evolution is false”— as has been claimed by some General Authorities and a number of laypeople— then sixteen years later when the heavily anti-evolutionary national public  wanted to know the Church’s position on evolution, the 1925  First Presidency statement utterly failed to reiterate that supposed core position. Elder Whitney (and others like Joseph Fielding Smith who felt equally strongly) remained part of the Quorum, and their strong language was available; but instead, Church leaders again cut the antievolutionary phrasing, instead of centering and amplifying. That is historically significant.
  • The 1925 statement was not presented as a reiteration of 1909 or a republishing, but a new  statement, with new First Presidency signatures. (The wider American public knew nothing of the 1909 statement, only what was published in 1925.) Therefore, the 1925 First Presidency statement should be understood as superseding the 1909 statement in terms of date and relevance to biological evolution.
• “Modernist” Christians embraced scientific discovery and reasoning and were open to many approaches to biblical interpretation. Christians who opposed modernism, often labeled “fundamentalists,” regarded the idea that humankind evolved from other species as blasphemous.
  • I find the modernist/fundamentalist controversy fascinating, particularly because it’s not really over what one might think. In essence, modernists looked at Darwin and science, German Biblical scholarship about the authorship of Genesis and the Gospels, and archaeological/textual discoveries showing the Bible was, in fact, quite similar to its surrounding cultures. Modernists decided the necessary can’t-do-without-it core of Christianity was the social gospel— doing good to others— and things like the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, the virgin birth, etc…. just weren’t important. Fundamentalists countered that those aspects of Christianity were, in fact, the fundamentals of the Gospel. They also defended traditional views of Biblical authorship and other issues, but did not quibble much about the flood, the age of the earth, or evolution. The fundamentalists of the 1910s became (more or less) today’s Evangelicals, whereas today’s “fundamentalists” don’t really have a large analogue group  in 1910.
  • It is not surprising that Church leaders largely identified with fundamentalists; President Grant went so far as to declare in General Conference, “I rejoice that we are fundamentalists.”
  • On this topic, see my 2021 FAIR Conference talk, “Through a Glass, Less Darkly: The Twentieth Century History of Genesis and Evolution.” Text and slides, and audio. (The text is edited slightly, since I prefer to speak extemporaneously from notes and slides.)
• Latter-day Saints and their leaders found themselves on both sides of this issue.
  • This is an understatement— and I’m not going to go into detail— but it’s useful and important for people to understand that church leaders did not all have the same views. The Church was not monolithic about scripture or science or evolution; only those who have been presented with highly selective and biased histories can come to that conclusion.
• James E. Talmage and John A. Widtsoe, two professional scientists who became Apostles, regarded scientific discovery of truth as evidence of God’s use of natural laws to govern the universe.
  • Lest anyone read it in, neither Talmage nor Widtsoe were unambiguously in favor of Darwinian evolution. Evolution requires 1) long periods of time and 2) the operation of death. Both Talmage and Widtsoe argued strongly for the reality of those two things. As for evolution itself, Talmage expressed a number of views over his life, both vaguely supportive and skeptical. Widtsoe    wasn’t opposed to evolution per se, but didn’t think the science had yet proven it in the case of the human body.
  • Another important aspect of this— a number of Church leaders thought that science was a legitimate means of discovering truth about the age of the earth, human origins, etc. The flip side of this is that they did not think scripture meant what Joseph Fielding Smith claimed.
• Meanwhile, Apostle and future Church President Joseph Fielding Smith believed that the Biblical account of the Creation did not allow for the long spans required for species to multiply through evolution.
  • With very rare exceptions, Smith took a hard line in public and private on the earth being young, and he called out anyone who thought otherwise, including more senior Church leaders. Smith’s assumptions about the nature of revelation, prophets, scripture, and interpretation were at odds with his Apostolic colleagues; regardless, those assumption led him to preach strongly that scripture required a young earth. To believe otherwise was to reject God, revelation, prophets, scripture, and the temple, and to subordinate purely divine revelation to fallen human reason. (I have a lot of posts here about these aspects.)
  • Smith looked for support among Seventh-day Adventists and creationists, and found it. He exchanged letters with the father of modern creationism, Adventist George McCready Price, and touted his books from at least 1926 up through the 1960s. He cited them in public and in private. I have detailed this in a number of posts, but again, see my 2021 FAIR Conference talk, “Through a Glass, Less Darkly: The Twentieth Century History of Genesis and Evolution.” Text and slides, and audio. (The text is edited slightly, since I prefer to speak extemporaneously from notes and slides.)
• Church President Heber J. Grant and his counselors in the First Presidency urged leaders not to take sides on the issue… in 1931
  • There is a lot of historical context to this, which was effectively lost and unknown until the 1970s.
    • In April 1930, Joseph Fielding Smith gave a talk called “Faith Leads to a Fulness of Truth and Righteousness.” He made a number of assertions some other Church leaders were not comfortable with,  which began to achieve a quasi-orthodox status after the 1950s. In essence, he read scripture as providing infallible scientific facts about history, geology, and biology. They are now taken for granted by many members and Church leaders as long-established doctrine taught “clearly” by scripture, because they’ve been written-in to Church materials like the Old Testament Institute manual, the Bible dictionary, chapter headings, etc.  On the latter, as pointed out by Philip Barlow, “Therefore, so far as scriptural understanding goes, and despite the diversity that exists at every level of its membership, the… Church has unofficially but effectively chosen to present a certain kind of fundamentalism as normative.”
    • BH Roberts’ manuscript,The Truth, the Way, the Life, which was sponsored by the Church, went up for review and was rejected. Roberts’ refused to remove the offending aspects, which included assertions about “preadamites.” Joseph Fielding Smith in particular had issues with Roberts’ manuscript. Both had dogmatic personalities and strong feelings. The core but unrecognized issues between Smith and Roberts were the nature of science, the nature of scripture, and how to interpret them. Roberts and Smith both presented lengthy written arguments to the Quorum of the Twelve, who then deferred to the First Presidency, who then made the statement quoted in the essay. (Next bullet point.)
    • “leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church.”
      • This was part of a longer First Presidency directive distributed privately to Church leaders. According to Talmage and Widtsoe, the First Presidency ruled that the Church had no doctrinal position on either the existence of preadamites OR death before the Fall.
      • Several Apostles felt (and had, since 1909) that since the Church had no such doctrinal stand, a public statement needed to be made to counterbalance Smith’s April 1930 talk and pamphlet. Talmage wrote “The Earth and Man” and delivered it in public, by approval of President Grant (this was later contested, but we have the journal entries), and it was distributed as a pamphlet.
      • The scientific debate did not stop, however, and carried over into the 1934 newspaper proxy war.
      • See
        •  James B. Allen, “The Story of The Truth, the Way, the Life,” BYU Studies
        • Richard Sherlock, “‘We Can See No Advantage to a Continuation of the Discussion’: The Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair,” Dialogue
        • Jeffery Keller, “Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair,” Dialogue
        • Duane Jeffery,  “Seers, Savants, and Evolution: The Uncomfortable Interface,” Dialogue
          • This was one of the first papers to “rediscover” the LDS history around this issue
        • Several of these are reprinted (edited) in Oberg and Sessions, The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism
• As time went on, faithful Latter-day Saints continued to hold diverse views on the topic of evolution.
  • Neal A. Maxwell and Stephen L. Richard were both open to evolution or at least saw it as compatible with scripture.
• Joseph Fielding Smith in his influential writings maintained the reliability of scripture as a guide to the Creation timeline.
  • I argue in my dissertation that Joseph Fielding Smith’s approach to scripture came to dominate common LDS views and published LDS materials after 1954.
• Henry Eyring, a prominent scientist and Sunday School general board member, welcomed evidence of evolutionary change and reiterated the teachings of Brigham Young, who taught that the gospel encompassed all truth, scientific or otherwise.
  • I’ve written a good bit about Eyring on this blog. He was first trained as a geologist before going into chemistry. Although he didn’t push evolution, it was his view; he did, however, push hard for an old earth.  When Elder Widtsoe died in 1953, Eyring was nominated to replace him. That was private, of course, but Eyring’s boss at the University of Utah sent him a letter congratulating him on his new calling; there had always been a scientist in the Quorum to provide that kind of consulting, and no one fit the bill but Eyring. Instead Adam S. Bennion (who was pro-evolution, but a businessman) received the call, and joined the Quorum of the Twelve in 1953.
• In 1965, Church President David O. McKay worked with Bertrand F. Harrison, a botany professor at Brigham Young University, to foster greater understanding between Saints with differing viewpoints on evolution.
  • On this article, McKay, and evolution, see my post here and here. I’ve presented at the Mormon History Association on the question of McKay and evolution.
  • The article Harrison wrote, and McKay read and approved, was part of a series of articles on science and faith, written by scientists. It was the brainchild of Lorin F. Wheelwright, who was in charge of Church magazines, but Henry Eyring was also involved. He wrote an article on the age of the earth, and was also involved in other ways, as part of the Sunday school Presidency. (See here for a funny Eyring story about the magazines.)  I wrote about that magazine series and its fallout here.  While it was generally well-received, those who held to a young earth and creationism did not care for it, and wondered how such a thing could be published by believing Latter-day Saints.
  • Joseph Fielding Smith wrote his opinion to the managing editor of the Juvenile Instructor,
    

    With some surprise I opened the pages of the July [1965] number of The Juvenile Instructor and read the article by Bertrand F. Harrison entitled: “The Relatedness of Living Things.” Then with still greater surprise, I opened the pages of the [July 1965] “Improvement Era,” and read the article “The Gospel and the Age of the Earth,” by Henry Eyring. Then in my surprise I wondered if these two valuable magazines, published for the uplifting of the YOUTH of the Church, had sold out to the evolutionists!

• In the late 20th century, Church-sponsored schools expanded their educational offerings in the sciences.
  • Evolution— or at least evolutionary constituent components like an old earth and death— was taught at BYU from at least 1903 to 1911 (see below), and then from the 1920s onwards. Dedicated evolutionary biology courses started c. 1971, with repeated approval from both Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee.
  • 1911 saw what has been called the “evolution crisis” at BYU; a number of people see this as proof of an official anti-evolution position. However, given other events that were happening, I’m less convinced this was solely about taking a doctrinal hard-line against evolution, and more a constellation of clashing ideas and personalities. See Bergera, “1911 Evolution Controversy at Brigham Young University.”  (In The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism but also here.)  Thomas Simpson describes it as the “evolution and higher criticism controversy” in American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867-1940 (highly recommended). Drawing on the official history of BYU, however, Thomas M. Martin, Duane E. Jeffery, and Randy L. Bennett state that the faculty issues were “a matter of personality conflicts and confrontational attitudes perhaps as much as conflicts over basic Church doctrine.” Martin, Jeffery, and Bennett, “Christ Is Scientist of This Earth: President Joseph F. Smith’s Attitudes and Policies Towards Science”
• In 1992, the First Presidency and board of trustees at Brigham Young University approved a packet of reading material
  • The packet grew directly out of the process of writing and editing multiple science-related articles for the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. There were two Apostles doing doctrinal oversight, and all articles ultimately went through them. It’s entirely online today, via BYU. Check out the articles on “evolution,” (which went through a dozen writes, rewrites, and authors, to a surprising end, below)  “origin of man” (which had none of the same problems) “science and religion,” “creation, Creation Accounts.”
•  The packet also included an entry from the 1992 publication The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, produced with Church leader approval, which explained that “the scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how.”
  • What very few people know is that the “evolution” article was ghost-written by President Hinckley, a counselor at the time.  As I detail in my forthcoming BYU Studies article (cited in footnote 9 of the essay), part of a special issue dedicated to evolution, Hinckley had family and educational experiences which left him open to evolution, though he never made any detailed public comment on it.
• In 2016, the Church’s youth magazine published articles on the pursuit of scientific truth. 
  • There is one on evolution and one on dinosaurs. Both of these seem to imply an acceptance of the scientific consensus, without providing any explicit reconciliation. (I recently made a presentation at the Mormon History Association on the history of dinosaurs and LDS thought.) What stands out from both of these articles is an idea I want to close with, so I’ll end my bulletpoints here.

If God is behind both scripture and scientific discovery and progress— and Joseph Fielding Smith preached repeatedly that such was the case— than what we have is something akin to Paul’s confusing conversion on the road to Damascus. Paul had persecuted Christians on the basis of his scriptural conviction that the Messiah couldn’t be crucified, which was a mark of God’s curse and displeasure. (See here.) And yet, here was the glorified resurrected Jesus in front of him on the road, declaring himself to be the Son of God and crucified now-resurrected messiah.

Crucially, Jesus did not explain to Paul how to reconcile these things. Paul was “left to himself” to work it out. No doubt he experienced a good bit of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance until he did, but it took some time.

Neither of these recent articles about dinosaurs and evolution explain how to square things, but neither do they diminish the (apparently) contradictory truths we think we have: the earth is very old, death has been happening for a long long time here, and the evidence for evolution is quite strong.

Whether through divine or human-but-inspired means like science, God gives us new information, but rarely tells us how to make sense of it, how to make it square with what we thought we knew. Being able to productively work through and live with that ambiguity, contradiction,  or cognitive dissonance is an important spiritual skill, connected to intellectual humility and resilient faith.

Interesting times. I’m excited to see this essay, and hope it helps people who might be struggling.

For those interested, you can see all of my evolution posts here; a syllabus of readings about science, creation, and LDS creation accounts here. My podcasts, videos, and interviews on the topic are all here. There are other categories of my posts on the left side, below the menu.

For the history of creationism/anti-evolution thought in America, I strongly recommend Ronald Numbers, The Creationists. (It is my constant dissertation-writing companion.) For other book recommendations, see my books category.

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