I was recently asked, is evolution compatible with the Gospel?
So let’s talk about it. But first things first; to be productive, any good conversation needs to start with clear definitions.

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Definitions

First, by “evolution,” I mean “common descent.” This is the idea that diverse living things today can be traced back to a common ancestor.  Evolution means, in essence, “change over time.” From the National Center for Science Education,

evolution is a scientific theory that explains the emergence of new varieties of living things in the past and in the present; it is not a “theory of origins” about how life began.

Evolution has a few constituent parts; it needs reproduction and death to occur over many many generations, which typically requires long periods of time.¹In some cases, it can go much much faster. In terms of where it meets “doctrinal” debates, evolution needs

1) an old earth and

2)  reproduction and death of many generations during the earth’s long existence.²With some species, microbes, etc., changes can occur relatively quickly; the whole history of living things would require millions of generations and billions of years.

Reproduction introduces small changes, and over many generations those small changes can add up to large divergences, differentiation and speciation.³This is simplified; there is also “punctuated equilibrium” in which changes can happen very quickly, and then be stable for a long period. Change is not always gradual. Of course, many changes have no effect or negative effect. So scientifically speaking, “evolution” is not a synonym for “improved” (as it might be with the tech industry).

We need to be careful to distinguish the science  of evolution— as done by biologists, paleontologists, etc.—  from the philosophies people attribute to evolution. For example, the science of evolution has nothing to say either way about the existence of God.

But both extremes of the spectrum have used evolutionary philosophies to make certain claims that evolutionary science has nothing to say about;  hardcore atheists have tried to use evolution as a club against religion, and hardcore creationists— including some Latter-day Saints— have blamed evolution for pretty much everything wrong everywhere.  As historian of science Adam Laats writes,

Evolution didn’t just represent a scientific idea…. For many creationists, evolution came to symbolize and cause everything that was wrong with America.

It is because so many people mix up evolution-as-science with evolution-as-philosophy that it causes so many problems. But as Laats says, those problems are “not really about evolutionary science itself.”

So for my purposes here, we’re talking about evolution-as-science, not evolution-as-philosophy. Those are very different things, and I want that clear. So having defined “evolution,”  let’s define our second important term.

What is “the gospel”?  Our English word “gospel” translates a Greek word euangeliōn meaning “good news” (See Matt 4:23, Mark 8:35, Romans 1:3, others).  Drawing on the language of 1Co 15:1-4, Joseph Smith taught that

the fundamental principles of our religion is the testimony of the apostles and prophets concerning Jesus Christ, “that he died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended up into heaven;”

At its core, the “good news” is that God sent his divine son Jesus as the messiah, to die and be resurrected, thereby making it possible for us to overcome sin and death through grace and covenantal fidelity.

There is nothing in that good news inherently in conflict with evolution, even human evolution; the breadth and variety of Christians who have spoken positively of evolution stands as proof of that. You can skip the rest of this section, but know that most of Christianity doesn’t have major problems with evolution.

Among the prominent Christians who have embraced evolution are

• Various Popes
  • Pope John Paul  II, in 1996 spoke to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said
    

    Pope John Paul II

    Today, almost half a century after publication of [the Catholic document allowing for evolution], new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.

    He went on to call it “an effectively proven fact.”

  • Pope Benedict XVI has an entire book explaining Genesis and creation from a Catholic perspective, ‘In the Beginning…’: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. The purpose of Genesis, what it revealed and taught, was not truths of a scientific nature. (See also here for a fascinating 12th century Catholic perspective. )
• Billy Graham
  • A prominent Southern Baptist minister mid-20th century, Graham led revivals and “crusades” for Christianity all over the world. (You can see him represented in The Crown S2Ep6, as Queen Elizabeth is impressed with him and invites him to preach in England.Graham wrote,
    

    I don’t think that there’s any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think we have misinterpreted the

    

    Billy Graham

    Scriptures many times and we’ve tried to make the Scriptures say things that they weren’t meant to say, and I think we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course, I accept the Creation story. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man … whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man’s relationship to God.

• Francis Collins
  

  Francis Collins

  • A convert from atheism to Evangelical Christianity, Collins received a MD/PhD and headed the Human Genome Project before running the US National Institute of Health.  You can read his conversion story here. Collins has authored books like The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief and started a science-religion site well worth reading, biologos.org

 

 

• C.S. Lewis
  • Yes, that Lewis! He wrote in The Problem of Pain,
    

    

    C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Via wikipedia

    For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself …The creature may have existed for ages in this state before it became man …But it was only an animal because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say ‘I’ and ‘me,’ which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past.

  • In a 1952 letter,⁴There are various editions of Lewis’ letters. This is 10 January 1952 to Sister Penelope, CSMV. Lewis wrote that he
    

    had pictured Adam as being, physically, the son of two anthropoids, on whom, after birth, God worked the miracle which made him Man: said, in fact, ‘Come out – and forget thine own people and thy father’s house’. The call of Abraham would be a far smaller instance of the same sort of thing.

  • And what of Genesis? Lewis argued that God had purposes other than science in Genesis, and had spoken to the Israelites on their level.

People like Lewis, Graham, Collins, and the popes are neither unaware of the issues nor secretly rejecting God, scripture, and Jesus. They were about as committed to Jesus and the Bible as you can get.

Well, you might say, “that’s all fine and dandy for regular Christians. But Latter-day Saints have our own authoritative leaders whom we sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators, as well as modern scripture. What about them?”

Church Leaders 

Church leaders have not been unified on evolution or the age of the earth or death. However, that disunity has not been well known. Those who did see compatibility between evolution and the Gospel didn’t spend their public speaking time on it; others who saw evolution as a threat or incompatible with the Gospel were quite vocal about their opposition to it. So the public got an unbalanced perception of how Church leaders felt about it.

You might be familiar with statements particularly from Presidents Benson and Joseph Fielding Smith, as well as Elder Bruce R. McConkie and President Boyd K. Packer. Such statements are often quoted by people who want to claim that the Church formally rejects evolution. These, however, have not been united declarations, and the individual proclaimers were often reproved in private, or made to edit their public statements.  As President Packer said, “We follow the Brethren, not the Brother.” That is, we follow the collective and united position of Church leaders, not individual statements.

So what is said in the most authoritative united statements?

First Presidency Statements 

There have been two relevant statements by the First Presidency, in 1909 and 1925.  Neither explicitly says evolution is false or contradictory to Church doctrine, and from other contemporary events, journals, and letters, we know that was not their intention.⁵I have a lengthy paper coming out on this topic soon. While the 1909 statement is easily read between the lines as hostile to evolution, it may be significant that the original draft of the 1909 had all kinds of stark anti-evolutionary language, and the First Presidency⁶presumably, though I have no documentary evidence; I don’t know who else would have authority to do so took it out. They had the opportunity to draw a line in the sand, to commit the Church against evolution… but chose not to do so.

Other statements by Church leaders.

I do not reprint here the significant number of individual statements by Church leaders against evolution, because they are so well known. Since those Church leaders have held evolution to be compatible with revealed scripture are far less known, I provide some examples:

In his journal in 1884, James E. Talmage allowed that the origin of the physical “animal” body could be through evolution, but God was still involved.⁷To be clear, Talmage was speaking hypothetically here. He never fully embraced evolution, though he thought the earth was old and death operative.

I can see no reason why the evolution of animal bodies cannot be true—as indeed the facts of observation make it difficult to deny—and still the soul of man is of divine origin.

In the 1930s, Elder Stephen L Richards spoke of evolution as compatible several times, in General Conference  and Church magazines.

 

 

 

President David O. McKay in private described himself as “an evolutionist, ” and stopped just short of preaching evolutionary ideas in General Conference. Moreover, he explicitly approved the most evolution-friendly article ever in a Church magazine, which was part of a pro-science series of articles (see here.)

 

Elder Neal A. Maxwell, though skeptical of evolutionary science, acknowledged that his opinion was that of a non-scientist, and that evolution was compatible with the gospel. He opposed a creationist filmstrip being shown in Church schools.

 

 

From a young age, President Gordon B. Hinckley was a fan of geology. It’s reading between the lines a little,⁸I detail this in my forthcoming article but he favored an old earth, death, and evolution. For the 1992 Encyclopedia of Mormonism, President Hinckley himself ghost-wrote the short article on Evolution.⁹This comes out of my dissertation research and interviews. It echoed the 1909 and 1925 First Presidency statements, as well as private 1931 First Presidency minutes which said that science belonged to the scientists, and biology, geology, etc. was not central to the Gospel. Notably, that essay Hinckley wrote did not decry evolution as false, only affirmed divine creation and the existence of “Adam as primal parent of our race.”

And on the other hand, when President Joseph Fielding Smith published his anti-evolution young-earth creation book in 1954, Man: His Origin and Destiny, President McKay took a series of private steps to make clear that Man did not represent the position of the Church nor was it “doctrine.”  (See some of the history here. )

When Elder McConkie included evolution as one of the “seven deadly heresies,” more senior Church leaders required him to soften his language in print and make clear he was speaking on his own, not representing a Church position. President Packer gave a talk at BYU in 1988 with seven reasons evolution was false, and had made preparations to publish it in the Ensign and as a pamphlet. Instead, his senior, President Hinckley, halted those publications, and required the printing of a lengthy disclaimer that Packer’s talk did not represent Church positions.

All this to say, there is no unified statement from Church leaders against evolutionary science because Church leaders have held a variety of views about it!

What about Revelation and the Scriptures?

One of the more recent publications of the Church said, “Nothing has been revealed concerning evolution.” President Brigham Young reportedly preached about what to expect when there is no revelation on a topic. (I say “reportedly,” because of this important article about the Journal of Discourses.)

Were the former and Latter-day Saints, with their Apostles, Prophets Seers, and Revelators collected together to discuss this matter,¹⁰The matter in question was not evolution. I am led to think there would be found a great variety in their views and feelings upon this subject, without direct revelation from the Lord.

If there is no revelation on evolution, then Church leaders are left entirely to their own mortal resources for their perspectives. This is often how prophets must work. They will interpret the science differently depending on the state of science at the time and how well they understand it.¹¹The idea of evolution long predated Darwin, but the science did not clearly demonstrate it until the late 1940s. And similarly, leaders will interpret scripture differently based on their own knowledge and assumptions.

Elder Stephen L Richards taught in the April 1932 General Conference  that

the revelations of the new dispensation, as well as those of the Bible, were in the beginning and are now interpreted by men, and men interpret in the light of experience and understanding…. In the interpretation of scripture and doctrine they are dependent on their knowledge and experience… Old conceptions and traditional interpretations must be influenced by newly discovered evidence. Not that ultimate fact and law change, but our understanding varies with our education and experience.

This is a fairly complex subject; we all approach scripture with different assumptions, and those differing assumptions produce different understandings of What Scripture Teaches. The key assumptions that divided Church leaders can be boiled down to two questions:

1. To what degree are there human aspects to revelation, prophethood, scripture, and interpreting scripture?
   • 

     President Smith (1876-1972) in 1910

     President Joseph Fielding Smith thought there were no significant human aspects to revelation, prophets, scripture, or interpretation. That assumption drove his understandings of science and scripture; other Church leaders fundamentally disagreed.

2. What is the relationship between scripture and science, i.e. human knowledge?
   • Joseph Fielding Smith thought scripture was divinely-revealed science, and therefore imperfect human science should conform to what Genesis “revealed” about geology, biology, etc.; other Church leaders fundamentally disagreed. Smith buttressed his minority position by drawing heavily on Seventh-day Adventists and other creationists (also here,  here, and here) which caused some problems when those arguments and sources  were brought into Church materials.

One important aspect of argumentation— presenting evidence to convince people of a claim— is recognizing what assumptions and presuppositions you bring to it; these are often unstated, maybe even unconscious. And indeed, Church leaders who debated this topic were rarely able to make explicit what their assumptions were.

So, let me briefly make explicit some of my assumptions about the nature of scripture— a topic of professional and personal interest— and then discuss the implications for this topic. Scripture is…

1. Accommodated: God comes down to our level in order to communicate 
   • God speaks to people in their own time, place, culture, and circumstances, in a way they will understand. He often speaks in the way we culturally expect, whether through dreams, a divining cup, a rod, a vision, or flipping the pages of scripture.  God accommodates or condescends to human understanding in order to teach some kind of truth. This means that revelation may not be complete or full  when given; it may accommodate some things that aren’t strictly true, even. This principle is taught throughout LDS scripture and history, as well as the Bible.
   • See at length the FAIRMormon talk here and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, “The Lord Guides His Church According to our Language and Understanding,” Liahona, August 2022.
2. Composite: scripture contains both divine and human elements,
   • Only rarely does God dictate to prophets, and when He does, He must speak the prophet’s literal— and cultural— language. Most of scripture is prophetic expression of revelation. A number of LDS leaders and scholars have expressed this truth or analyzed it in D&C, the Book of Mormon, and the Joseph Smith Translation. Scripture, then, is mediated through human conceptions and languages and culture; it is a composite of both divine and human elements.
   • Whether due to accommodation— where God communicates through cultural aspects— or the prophet expressing divine communication in the ways he knows how, scripture represents a human/divine composite.
   • See the references here along with Elder Richards’ discussion, and this FAIRMormon Conference talk.
3. Imperfect: Scripture is fallible and contains inaccurate information of various kinds
   • Accommodation and the principle of line-upon-line go hand in hand. They strongly imply that more will be known in the future, then is known in the present, and that less was known in the past. We should not expect scripture, particularly ancient scripture, to know all that we know now. Add to “accommodation” that Latter-day Saints formally reject the idea of prophetic inerrancy; even the Book of Mormon may have “mistakes of men” in it. And of course, then there are potential errors of transmission (copying, printing, translation), expression, and interpretation. Taken together, these mean that scripture is not a divine encyclopedia of eternal facts whose meaning is equally clear to everyone in all times and places. As Elder Widtsoe wrote that scripture “is not a treatise on science. Naturally, the knowledge of the day is reflected in the telling of the story.” But the “knowledge of the day” changes! Genesis and the entire Old Testament presuppose a flat earth with a solid dome overhead, restraining the cosmic waters. God accommodated this incorrect knowledge to teach key doctrines to the Israelites, instead of engaging in pedantic correction.
   • See e.g. 1 Corinthians 13:9, this lengthy post, and this video.
4. Adaptive: Scripture is not entirely novel and unique in its environement
   • That is, God often draws elements from the prophet’s environment and transforms them, giving them new meaning and purpose. This principle of adaptation is found pretty much everywhere; for one example, circumcision existed before God commanded Abraham to adapt it as a sign of the covenant in Genesis 17:11. It was so common, in fact, that to not be circumcised was something worth mocking, i.e. “uncircumcised philistines.” Of course, it meant something different to the Israelites than to their non-covenant neighbors.
   • See the numerous examples and details in this post.
5. Responsive: revelation comes in response to circumstances and questions
   • That is, the revelations recorded in scripture typically come in response to a particular circumstance— like Moses at the Red Sea, per D&C 9:8-9 — or a question. Many of the doctrines that set apart Latter-day Saints from other Christians came as a result of Joseph Smith studying the Bible, and asking questions about what he found. Study of the patriarchs led to the revelation of D&C 132 and plural marriage. Study of John 5:29 in February 1832 resulted in D&C 76, revealing three divisions in the heavens. Study of 1 Corinthians led to baptism for the dead. And, in a different direction, the circumstances of missionary work to the Shakers led to D&C 49.
   • See particularly the discussion of D&C 9 and Moses in this talk by Elder Holland, and the section “Questions often precede Revelation.”

So with all of those principles together, what did Genesis mean to the Israelites? Did they understand it?

Our contemporary [scientific] preoccupations could hardly have been the preoccupations of ancient Israel…. It is quite doubtful that these texts have waited in obscurity through the millennia for their hidden meanings to be revealed by modern science. It is at least a good possibility that the “real meaning” was understood by the authors themselves.

-Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

Indeed, if God spoke to the Israelites “in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24), then we should expect that they understood it. So what were the Israelites’ pressing questions? The age of the earth? The physical origins of human bodies?  That’s very unlikely.

What did exist–what very much existed–and what pressed on Jewish faith from all sides, and even from within, were the religious problems of idolatry…. The critical question in the creation account of Genesis 1 was polytheism versus monotheism. That was the burning issue of the day, not some issue which certain Americans 2,500 years later in the midst of a scientific age might imagine that it was…. On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed. These, O Israel, are no gods at all— even the great gods and rulers of conquering superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely habitation. The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not divine.

– Conrad Hyers, “‘Dinosaur Religion’: On Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Creation Texts”

The very pressing question for the Israelites was, who is really in charge of the universe? The God of Israel, who created earth for humans and declared creation good? Or is it multiple competing gods who don’t seem to care at all about humans?

So, what will it be? God of Israel? Or polytheism, which made a lot of sense to people back then? (See this post, starting with “From an Israelite perspective, especially one living in or under Babylonian rule and influence, the doctrine was that Israel’s God was The God, that these other things were not gods at all. This was Doctrine with a Capital D, centrally important to their concerns.”)

This concern is evident throughout Genesis 1-11. Many of the aspects of Genesis we read today as “clearly” speaking to scientific concerns only appear to be doing so because of our own cultural “distance” from Genesis. That is, we are not ancient Israelites.

We cannot simply abstract scripture from its original context of meaning, as if the people to whom it was most immediately addressed were of no consequence. And, having created a vacuum of meaning, we cannot then arbitrarily substitute our own issues and literary assumptions.

-Hyers

But that is what we tend to do. We read out of context by default because so much of that context went unsaid; ancient Israelites didn’t need to be told polytheism was a problem any more than I need to explain to my Sunday school class that an airplane is a means of very fast transportation. It’s known; it’s in the culture.

 Scripture, in other words, is often trying to answer questions and respond to problems different than the ones we assume, because we live in different cultures and contexts. Genesis has implicit contexts that the Israelites didn’t need explaining to them. (On implicit contexts, see here and here.)

So, for example, people get really concerned about the “days” of Genesis; this stems from a common-but-wrong assumption about the relationship between science and scripture called concordism. As applies here, concordism assumes that Genesis and science must match up for Genesis to be true. I’ve argued that the days of Genesis were indeed intended as 24-hr days… but not as scientific, historical days.  And furthermore, this is the literal way Israelites would have understood Genesis to function! (See also here.)

Questions

Q: But what about the creation accounts of Moses, Abraham, and the Temple?

A: These are important and relevant, but just too much for this summary. See here and here, for example.

Q: But doesn’t Genesis say God created Adam in his image? 

A: Yes, but what did that mean to Israelites? In order for this to rule out the evolutionary process, it must be interpreted a very particular way.

From a scholarly Hebrew perspective, would “create” exclude evolution as a means of creation? No.

Although Genesis does not have science in mind, why is the evolutionary process significantly different from forming “a human” (which is what ‘adam means) from “the dust of the ground”  per Gen 2:7? Some who misunderstand the science ridicule evolution as teaching we “came from monkeys”; well, would you prefer to be made from dirt per a strictly historical/scientific/”literal” reading of the Biblical account?

As for being created “in God’s image,” this meant much more to the Israelites than LDS assume.  Whereas in surrounding cultures only the king was the image of deity, for Israelites every human being bore the image of God. We might ask, with one Bible scholar,

What are the implications of this picture of God consecrating and vivifying a lump of dirt in Genesis 2:7 to become the imago Dei? Is this picture suggestive for understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens, whether their evolution from previous hominin ancestors or their development of religious and moral consciousness (which seems to have occurred long after anatomically modern humans had evolved)?

-J. Richard Middleton, “Reading Genesis 3 Attentive to Human Evolution: Beyond Concordism and Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” in Evolution and the Fall.

There is also an instructive bit of relevant LDS history on this question. After the 1909 First Presidency statement, a lot of people wrote in to Church HQ for clarification. An unsigned editorial was published in response, which said two key things.

First, Scripture did not fully explain how the bodies of Adam and Eve were created. But second, the legitimate options for Latter-day Saints included evolution.

So, if particular scriptures appear to our eyes and our assumptions today to oppose evolution, we should recognize that  we are not necessarily understanding them the way the original audiences did, ancient scripture was highly unlikely to be addressing scientific issues like evolution, and scripture in general may be fallible, misunderstood, incorrect, or humanly wrong because that is the nature of scripture.

Some scriptures get cited to argue for 1) a young earth and 2) no death before 6000 years ago (sometimes called “no death before the fall.”) Both of these would undermine evolution. There’s not space here to treat these in depth, so let me take a different tack.

The vast majority of Church leaders have held to an old earth, and understood scripture to teach or allow for that possibility.

• Some people want to have Adam and Eve be in the Garden for a long time. In this argument, the earth looks old, but really death has only been going on for 6000 years. See this post for why that “solution” doesn’t work well.
• Others who are committed to a young earth misconstrue a statement of Joseph Smith, to claim that dinosaur and humanoid fossils were parts of other planets that were used to put this one together, Lego-style.  That is, the fossils embedded in the pieces of the earth are old, but the earth itself was constructed of those pieces only 6000 years ago. That idea was shot down 100 years ago by Elder Talmage and others, but you can read about it from a scientist in a BYU journal for Seminary and Institute teachers here.
• In 1986, Church leaders asked BYU Geology prof (and stake President) Morris Petersen to write an Ensign article on an old earth and fossils. It was unanimously approved and published.

What about death?

• In 1931, the First Presidency made an internal declaration to other Church leaders to leave science to the scientists; this part was quoted by President Hinckley in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism article
  

  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

  More importantly, at the same time in 1931, the First Presidency made clear that the Church had no doctrine on “death before the fall.” ¹²This comes from contemporary private journals and letters. They refused to assert that as a doctrine of the Church!

• In the 1930s, the Church published Elder Talmage’s Tabernacle speech Earth and Man speech as a pamphlet. Talmage himself had a PhD in geology, and that informed his speech, which included statements like this.
  

  According to the conceptions of geologists the earth passed through ages of preparation, to us unmeasured and immeasurable, during which countless generations of plants and animals existed in great variety and profusion…. The oldest, that is to say the earliest, rocks thus far identified in land masses reveal the fossilized remains of once living organisms, plant and animal. The coal strata, upon which the world of industry so largely depends, are essentially but highly compressed and chemically changed vegetable substance. The whole series of chalk deposits, and many of our deep-sea limestones contain the skeletal remains of animals. These lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation.

  That’s Talmage arguing for an old earth and death long before humans came along. ¹³That’s not to say Talmage embraced evolution; he didn’t. But he certainly saw strong evidence for its constituent parts in science, and didn’t see scripture as opposed. In making that argument, Talmage had the support of all but four Apostles, and the President of the Church— President Grant— explicitly approved it for publication.¹⁴There is some historical dispute about this issue; however that dispute came about, we have President Grant’s journal now. Indeed, the Church published it in the Deseret News, in their UK publication The Millennial Star, and even in Der Stern, the Church’s publication in Germany.  It was distributed by tens of thousands of copies as a Church-published pamphlet, and reprinted later in Church magazines. Clearly, Talmage’s talk with an old earth and death had the backing of Church leaders, who wanted it distributed far and wide.

 

• President J. Reuben Clark— a member of the First Presidency from 1933-1961— thought that there was at least some kind of death going on, even in the Garden!

 

In 1934, Elder John Widtsoe, a Chemistry PhD and Apostle who had been present through various internal debates, First Presidency statements, and arguments, wrote that he had no doctrinal reasons for opposing evolution, but he just didn’t feel the science was there yet. And in the 1930s, it wasn’t! That would have to await the discovery of DNA almost twenty years later.

 

• And perhaps most interesting, on April 28, 1844, Joseph Smith approved of his brother’s preaching that there were prophets before Adam! That certainly implies death, and the existence of humans/humanoids before our scriptural story begins. Indeed, it implies that our scriptural record should not be understood as a strictly scientific/historical record.

Concluding Thoughts

Both science and revelation are ongoing, iterative processes.

The Lord uses imperfect people. He often allows their errors to stand uncorrected. He may have a purpose in doing so, such as to teach us that religious truth comes forth ‘line upon line, precept upon precept’ in a process of sifting and winnowing similar to the one I know so well in science.”

-Henry Eyring Sr., Reflections of a Scientist, 47.

Church schools have been teaching and researching evolution for over a century; President Hinckley’s favorite uncle, BYU geologist Edwin Hinckley, taught a “Geological Biology” class  in 1903 which studied “fossil forms, their life-history, and the evolution of our earth and its organisms.”

We seek further knowledge by every human and divine means possible. In the view of President Hugh B. Brown¹⁵Served as an Apostle from 1958 onwards, and Counselor in the First Presidency from 1961 onwards.

President Brown (1883-1975)

we should all be interested in academic research. We must go out on the research front and continue to explore the vast unknown. We should be in the forefront of learning in all fields, for revelation does not come only through the prophet of God nor only directly from heaven in visions or dreams. Revelation may come in the laboratory, out of the test tube, out of the thinking mind and the inquiring soul, out of search and research and prayer and inspiration.

-Brown, Memoirs, 138.

 

So, what are we to make of all of this? I think there is a useful model from the New Testament.  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, the glorified resurrected Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, declaring himself in glory to be the Son of God, the crucified and resurrected messiah.
Jesus did not explain to Paul how to reconcile these things. Paul was “left to himself” to work it out. No doubt Paul experienced a good bit of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance until he did.

None of these recent articles from the Church about dinosaurs and evolution explain how to square things, but neither do they diminish the (apparently) contradictory knowledge we think we have: the earth is very old, death has been happening for a long long time here, and the evidence for humans to be related to and descended from humanoid fossils is quite strong, across numerous scientific fields. 98% of scientists polled accept the science of evolution as the best explanation for the evidence we have. Science has demonstrated much (though not all!) and “that which is demonstrated, we accept with joy,” said the First Presidency in 1910.

Through divine or human-but-inspired means like scientific, historical, and scriptural research, God gives us new information;  but He 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. Until then, we live with unanswered questions and loose threads, while recognizing  the best information we have, and choosing to go forward with faith.

Elder Stephen L Richards preached that

There never will be discovered a fact in science, which is really truth, which will not comport with the revealed word of God, if the revealed word of God is understood and properly interpreted. There are mistakes in interpretation, misunderstandings of words, wrong ideas conveyed. But when the truth of Scripture can be correctly interpreted there will be no clash between any revealed word of Scripture and the facts of science.

And Elder Talmage literally went to his grave saying that

within the Gospel of Jesus Christ there is room and place for every truth thus far learned by man or yet made to be known.

Further Reading and Resources:

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Basic Church references

• The Church’s recent short essay on evolution which is part of Saints volume 3. I offered historical commentary on it here.
• Read Saints v. 3 chapters 16 (Scopes trial), and 21 (the 1931 conflict), and listen to the Saints podcast for chapter 21.
• “What does the Church believe about Dinosaurs?” New Era, February 2016
• “What does the Church believe about Evolution?” New Era, November 2016

More technical Church history/scripture references

• I have a lengthy series here walking people through scripture, science, and interpretation.
• See my conference presentation, “Through a Glass, Less Darkly: The 20th Century History of Genesis and Evolution,” here.
• Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements
• The collected essays in The Search for Harmony
• Simpson, “Evolution and Its Discontents, 1896-1920” Chapter 3 in his American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867-1940

Sources for the broader historical context

• Adam Laat’s book Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution is a great concise and accessible history of the evolution/creation conflict in the US. It covers a lot of territory quite well.
• Edward Larson’s Pulitzer-winning book, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion
• Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea is dense and technical, but the reference work.
• For a history of creationism, Ronald Numbers has written a very accessible reference work. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design

Sources for scripture, creation, and science

I have more of these than I can list, so I’ll keep it very short

• I would start with John Walton’s books on Genesis are very accessible; The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, which I reviewed favorably here; and The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate  
• See this list of ten books and this list of three.

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