I’ve linked below to the video of my recent talk at the University of Utah, and further reading for those interested.
This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.
First, please note this was an academic talk given in an academic setting. Each Fellow of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah gives a work-in-progress talk.
Second, I will be giving a second talk in mid-April, focused on some of these ideas, but in the 1950s and 60s, with Henry Eyring Sr. and Melvin Cook. Announcement here.
Third, I’ve added several slides, which means they don’t have any voiceover. Also, note shortly after minute 24, I’m summarizing Pack’s critique of Webb’s argument and misspoke; I say “Webb” when I mean “Pack.”
Books and papers referenced
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- Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority
- Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science
- Hyers, “Dinosaur Religion: On Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Creation Texts,” online.
- Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture
- Numbers, The Creationists
Further publications on the 1930s Smith-Roberts-Talmage episode
- A number of the original documents are reprinted with commentary in the short volume by Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements
- Ditto (with little overlap) Sterling Talmage’s augmented manuscript, Can Science Be Faith-Promoting?
- This has a lot of internal letters.
- Some excellent historical essays are collected in The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism (esp. Sherlock&Keller, Jeffery, and Sherlock)
- More recently, there’s a chapter on “evolution and its discontents, 1896-1920” in Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867-1940
- Roberts’ manuscript was eventually published in two editions, one by BYU Studies and one by Signature Book. Both include lengthy analytical and historical material telling the story. However, the BYU Studies story is available online here, and James B. Allen does an excellent job with it.
My posts about these stories, personalities, ideas, and history.
- On Frederick Pack and another scientist the First Presidency consulted.
- Joseph Fielding Smith on “If I am Wrong, the Revelations are Wrong” and what he saw as the possible options.
- On Smith and Seventh-Day Adventist George McCready Price
- the immediate aftermath of the Smith-Roberts-Talmage episode, the 1934 Newspaper Proxy Wars.
- The “Fundamentalist Turn” from 1954 onwards
- The Results of the Fundamentalist Turn in 1980
- What is Literal Interpretation of Scripture?
- A presentation on the history of Genesis and Evolution and LDS in the 20th century.
- And the Mother of All Posts, a guided syllabus of my posts, podcasts, and videos on scripture, science, creation, and evolution.
As for Latter-day Saints and evolution itself, see
- comments on a recent Church essay on evolution
- My own essay on the compatibility between evolution and Church teachings
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here via GoFundMe. *I am an Amazon Affiliate, and may receive a small percentage of purchases made through Amazon links on this page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box below) and can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.
April 3, 2023 at 10:30 am
I really enjoyed this presentation. Thank you.
April 4, 2023 at 7:05 am
I enjoyed listening to your presentation.
One question I have is: despite Smith’s underlying assumptions is it possible that there was an even deeper rationale for his fixed position on these questions? It seems to me that perhaps the way that the science of the time seemed–in the minds of many–to do violence to some of the foundational claims of the restoration may have caused him to embrace those assumptions more readily than he might have otherwise.
Of course, if that was indeed the case then we have to look at a whole other set of assumptions having to do with how the scriptures themselves might be interpreted. Even so, the scientific claims of those days were very difficult for a lot of folks to reconcile with the scriptures because of how they had been interpreted (generally speaking) up to that point–especially those passages having to do with the creation narrative and the garden story, etc. And on top of that members of the church had an even greater obstacle (to reconciling the two) because of the doctrine of premortal life and the anthropomorphic nature of God.
And so, all of that said, I’m just suggesting that a lot of folks had a built in bias against some of those scientific claims because of how they read the scriptures more than anything else. And I mean–what they believed the texts actually meant more than how they categorized them in terms of their purpose and function generally speaking.