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“The Scientist is Wrong”: Joseph Fielding Smith, George McCready Price, and the Ascent of Creationist Thought among Latter-day Saints in the Twentieth Century

A few notes, followed by the Dissertation Abstract, and my story:

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  • CGU requires the submission of a dissertation to ProQuest, which sells it. I do not set these terms, but ProQuest pays me 10% of sales. If you’re at a college/university, you should be able to log-in to ProQuest and read it through your academic institution.
  • This is a doctoral dissertation. If you’ve never read one, it is supposed to be dense, technical, academic, secular; it’s not expected that anyone will really read a dissertation except for the dissertation committee. I assume no knowledge or familiarity with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so explain some key aspects that make this story different than the typical Protestant or Catholic story of evolution/creation conflict.
  • It is not a treatise on evolution or creationism,  nor arguments pro/con. Rather, it is a history of high-level Latter-day Saint approaches to  these things, how/why/when those approaches changed, and under what influences. It began as a study of the history of lds approaches to biological evolution, but it quickly became apparent that the history of attitudes towards evolution mirrored the attitudes towards creationism; positive adoption of creationist hermeneutics and materials eventually resulted in negative attitudes towards biological evolution.
  • After my defense, I had three people proofread my dissertation for errors at the grammar/syntax level, and then I went through all their corrections. I am embarrassed to say, it appears that in fixing the errors they caught… I introduced a few new typos. And as with all dissertations, I’m already wishing I’d written parts differently.
  • That minor embarrassment aside, my dissertation committee remarked that they have never seen a dissertation so thoroughly researched; 300 pages, 900 footnotes, that vast majority from archival research, interviews I conducted, or family materials not donated.
  • There is a LOT that did not go into the dissertation. Readers of the blog will both recognize certain themes and stories I’ve told here, as well as wonder why X I talked about here did not appear in the dissertation. Well, I came into my doctoral program knowing what topic I wanted, and started researching immediately.  After coursework and exams, my proposal ran 50+ pages and proposed a 7-chapter dissertation. (One committee member gently remarked that each proposed chapter could be its own book.)  My advisor— who recently published an intellectual biography of Joseph Fielding Smith— said this. “You’re in an unusual position. Most people come to the proposal stage having done enough research for the proposal… but then they really have to dig in. By contrast, you’re coming to the proposal stage with enough material for two books and half a dozen papers, so your challenge will be to winnow down and find the narrative core of your argument.” I think I did that. But it means…
  • The eventual books— both academic and popular, I’m already in talks with publishers— will cover more territory than the dissertation and speak to different audiences. I anticipate the academic book will extend back more into the 19th century and forward into the 2010s, instead of stopping c. 1980. And of course, in a non-academic LDS book, I can talk more about the theological and scriptural aspects, and potentially address questions more related to faith and belief, not merely the history.  There will likely be other related books as well, such as my Genesis 1 book… which I haven’t worked on in a while.
  • The full abstract is below, but the quick summary is this: The attitude of church leaders and lay Latter-day Saints towards evolution underwent a major change between the first half and the last half of the twentieth century because of a major and largely unrecognized shift in the dominant hermeneutical assumptions. This change resulted in quasi-official adoption of creationist positions in the 1970s and 80s, most strongly the rejection of the science of evolution on a scriptural basis. That LDS shift generally mirrored the broader American shift, with creationism really increasing in the 1950s and 60s. While Joseph Fielding Smith and George McCready Price were both outliers in the early 1900s with their young-earth views, they were also pioneers whose views would come to be widely accepted.

Abstract:  

At the beginning of the twentieth century, leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints took a wary but open position regarding the burgeoning science of evolution. By the end of the century, Latter-day Saints had effectively become old-earth creationists. Through implicit hermeneutical framing and explicit statements, Church-published interpretive materials created a strong perception of a Church orthodoxy; scripture might allow for an old earth, but nothing died before the fall of Adam c. 4000 BC. Such a time frame ruled out the possibility of the evolution of plants, animals, and humans, and attributed the formation of fossils of dinosaurs and humanoids to recent causes. Particularly since this shift in attitude and position runs counter to the historical trend of increasing scientific evidence and acceptance for evolution throughout the century— including among highly trained scientists at Church-sponsored Brigham Young University— what factors account for this change?

President Smith in 1910

Based on extensive archival research, interviews, and family materials, I argue that this shift represents the triumph of a particular hermeneutic, promoted heavily by a prominent Church leader, Joseph Fielding Smith. Three key assumptions drove Smith’s consistent views: 1) Concordism, the idea that scripture contains scientific facts and should be understood as recounting the natural history of the earth. 2) Plain reading, the idea that scripture’s original meaning is available to any reader, without recourse to extra-scriptural information, contexts, or expertise; God’s truths had been expressed in timeless, transhistorical ways. 3) Inerrancy, or a particular LDS form of it, in which scripture’s inspiration entailed its absolute correctness. From these three interpretive assumptions flowed Smith’s consistent teaching of a young earth and the Satanic falsehood of evolution.

Smith’s ecclesiastical peers did not share his assumptions or his positions, and so Smith recruited the authority of science. An early adopter of the arguments of Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price, Smith contended that true science had to begin with scripture as its primary data point. These arguments took place during a time of transition for the concept of “science,” as well as its relationship to “religion.” By the early 1930s, the highest body of Church leadership had rejected Smith’s paradigm and positions, and moreover, had invited several science PhDs into its Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, one level below the First Presidency. None of the internal arguments from more senior ecclesiastical authority or the combination of scientific and ecclesiastical authority (i.e., Apostles with PhDs) shifted Smith from his positions.

1954 marked a major turning point. By that year, Smith had become one of the senior Church leaders, and highly respected for his scriptural knowledge. All the scientists in the Quorum had died, and replacement Apostles had been raised on Smith’s preaching. A new Church President was reluctant to impose his own views. These and other factors allowed Smith to publish Man, His Origin and Destiny; not merely publish, but impose it upon Church-employed teachers as scriptural truth and Church orthodoxy, and present it to the public without dissent from other Church leaders. Drawing heavily upon Price and others, Smith argued that the scientific consensus of an old earth and evolution were false, but scripture and Price’s true science proved a young earth. The President of the Church strongly disagreed but refused to take any public action. Consequently, Smith’s book with the positions and paradigms rejected by the First Presidency in 1931 gained significant backing among local Church leaders, professional and lay teachers, and even a few LDS scientists.

By the 1970s, Smith’s positions had received broad and forceful public support and amplification from younger Apostles, such as his son-in-law Bruce R. McConkie, [note this new biography of McConkie] and become common thinking among Church education employees, particularly among BYU’s Religion professors. Price and his now large school of thought among Protestants had significant intellectual capture among this group of Religion teachers. BYU scientists and historians who discovered the breadth of Church thought earlier in the century found that historical data ineffective in changing the minds of those who accepted Smith’s implicit hermeneutical construction of scripture and interpretation. Two significant publications pushed out Smith’s hermeneutics and positions internationally with Church imprimatur. Both were largely produced by BYU religion professors and Church education employees who tended to read scripture through Smith’s lenses. First, a new edition of LDS scriptures included various study aids for the first time, including chapter headings and a Bible Dictionary. These implicitly modeled Smith’s hermeneutics, but bluntly stated in multiple places that no death occurred before 4000 BC, effectively ruling out evolution. Second, a manual of Old Testament interpretation— effectively a commentary of sorts— aimed at college students amplified Smith again, citing Church authorities very selectively on the question of creation and evolution. Adventists of Price’s creationist school of thought were favorably cited, as well as catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky. These two publications, translated and distributed internationally, reflected Smith’s hermeneutics, thus steering Latter-day Saints into an old-earth creationist position as a historical Church orthodoxy and scriptural truth.

My story:

I became very interested in biblical languages as a missionary in France, came home, signed up for a major in Linguistics with Greek and Hebrew as my two languages, and went on a study abroad to the BYU Jerusalem center. All the while I planned to go to medical school, and was taking science classes. However, Organic Chemistry for majors couldn’t compete with the languages, so I graduated in Near Eastern Studies and went to the University of Chicago for a MA/PhD in Semitics from their eminent department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

I received my MA at year 2— The L-stem in Biblical Hebrew—and finished my coursework. I had classes in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), Ugaritic, Old South Arabian, and Ge’ez/Ethiopic, plus a bit of history and linguistics. My doctoral exams tested my Classical Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian, Aramaic,  Comparative Semitic Linguistics and Syrio-Palestinian history.  I passed all but Akkadian. Ultimately, they felt I could not sight-read Akkadian well enough, so I was not permitted to move on to writing a dissertation. (I wrote about this process several times on various LDS blogs as it happened, but can’t find them anymore.) This experience sent me into a deep personal funk for several years. My self-conception had been closely tied to years of “I’m an academic, and this is What I Study” and just didn’t know where to go from there with myself.

Meanwhile, my wife had started graduate school at UI-Urbana/Champagne, known for its graduate programs in hard science. I taught volunteer Institute to a few dozen return-missionary PhD students in biology, physics, chemistry, etc. Knowing my area of study, they asked me to teach a class on Genesis, and asked lots of good questions. I started studying the American and LDS histories of approaches to creation, as I hadn’t really before.

We moved to New York for my wife’s PhD, and I got a part-time job while going back to school for a post-bac pre-med; I completed all the pre-med classes at City College of New York, took the MCAT and did decently well, and logged all my hospital volunteer hours. I also kept teaching volunteer Institute, and repeated the Genesis class, refined and improved this time. I had started reading a LOT, and realizing how much LDS fit into the American context of creationism while also noticing the relatively low amount and amateur quality of the LDS history. That’s not  a slight; rather, much of the LDS history was written by scientists trying to defend the legitimacy of their field, not historians and certainly not historians with a grounding in both ancient Near East and modern American history.

In order to do the topic well, I felt one needed a strong base in three areas: 1) the ancient Near Eastern contexts of Genesis. I had that, in spades. Scientists and most LDS historians did not. 2) A basic understanding of evolutionary science (which I had, thanks to my pre-med courses). Scientists had this, most LDS historians did not.  3)  An understanding of the history of religion (and science!) of the last few hundred years, which shaped and reshaped religious understandings of Genesis in different directions and generated a variety of interpretive assumptions. LDS historians certainly did American religious history, but none had focused on this question, and of course, they did not bring the ancient Near Eastern contexts or scientific background the way I did. I knew I needed #3.

Fortunately (I can only say that in retrospect), I did not get into medical school, and my wife landed a post-doc at Harvey Mudd, one of the Claremont Colleges. I knew Claremont Graduate School had a PhD in American Religious History, and had just started a Mormon Studies program with some luminaries like Richard Bushman. So it was once more unto the breach and back to academia.

I steered all my course papers towards creationism/evolution, as much as possible. I had to choose from a secondary field of either Early Christianity or Reformation. I’d done some of the former, and Reformation history provided the background to much American culture and religion, particularly around questions of the nature of religious authority, the nature of scripture, and interpretation. I chose Reformation, and added to it my tertiary area, History of Science. Those were my three doctoral exam areas, which I passed, and then.. the dissertation.

I occupy an unusual position. I’m a pastoral academic trying to use my knowledge to help us understand scripture better and mitigate obstacles to faith, while also, I hope contributing to my academic field of history.  I’d like to teach and write and research professionally. The future, I feel,  is bright. It’s likely a few years before these books hit the public, but in the meantime I’ll keep blogging and posting about spin-off papers, and public speaking.

Merry Christmas

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