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Previous: The Latter-day Saint Doctrinal Stance on Evolution
The Consequences of Creationism
![Facebook poster: In deed [sic] we do not believe in EVOLUTION. We mormons are pure CREATIONists. <3 JESUS: creator of heaven & earth <3 / Every Member a Missionary (Facebook page): http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_science/Evolution/Official_stance/ / Original poster: Exactly! The belief of evolution is a doctrine of Demons. EVOLUTION is a religion because you have to believe that a person's ancestor was a ROCK!. No wonder they have stony hearts. No scientist has ever have [sic] the time to observe that many millions of years. So, Scientists have to have FAITH in what they imagine will happen! hahaha : )](/uploads/4/9/4/8/49486603/published/8853418.jpg?1563589611)
"At the time President Smith's book Man, His Origin and Destiny came out, I was working at Harvard under Dr. Ernst Mayr, a leading authority on evolution. I read President Smith's five chapters on evolution and felt they were inaccurate and unfair. But I was even more troubled by the inference throughout the book that one had to choose between the Church and evolution - that it had to be one or the other. I felt, and still feel, that honest Mormon college students facing biology courses should not be put in such a predicament. I had no desire to convert Church members to evolution, but felt that those who, like myself, already believed in evolution, or others who might become convinced, should not be pushed out of the Church."
- A. Kent Christensen, Latter-day Saint biologist, to President David O. McKay
"In my opinion it would be a very sad mistake if a parent or teacher were to belittle scientists as being wicked charlatans or else fools having been duped by half-baked ideas that gloss over inconsistencies. That isn't an accurate assessment of the situation, and our children or students will be able to see that when they begin their scientific studies." - Henry Eyring, Latter-day Saint theoretical chemist
"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist and poet
- A. Kent Christensen, Latter-day Saint biologist, to President David O. McKay
"In my opinion it would be a very sad mistake if a parent or teacher were to belittle scientists as being wicked charlatans or else fools having been duped by half-baked ideas that gloss over inconsistencies. That isn't an accurate assessment of the situation, and our children or students will be able to see that when they begin their scientific studies." - Henry Eyring, Latter-day Saint theoretical chemist
"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist and poet
The creationist movement is one of the youngest strains of Christianity in existence. It can trace itself to a renewed anti-evolution backlash in the 1920s, and especially to the work of a pseudoscientist named George McCready Price whose views were, in the words of Stanford University President David Jordan, "based on scattering mistakes, omissions, and exceptions against general truths that anybody familiar with the facts in a general way can not possibly dispute." When Price's work was cited by William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes Trial, defense counsel Clarence Darrow retorted, "You mentioned Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know that signs his name as a geologist that believes like you do... every scientist in this country knows [he] is a mountebank and a pretender and not a geologist at all." Around the time of his death in the 1960s, one of Price's works inspired Henry Morris (founder of the Institute for Creation Research) and John Whitcomb, whose subsequent work in turn inspired Ken Ham (founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum), and creationism as we know it today was born.
Price's works were also cited by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, despite Elder James E. Talmage soliciting rebuttals from his son Sterling and sharing them in Quorum meetings. (Of Price's book The New Geology, Sterling wrote, "All of Price's arguments... are not 'new'. They are certainly not 'geology'. With these two corrections, the title remains the best part of the book.") In fairness, Elder Smith's remarks came in response to very real attacks by scientists and liberal "Christians" who were turning to a materialist worldview and explicitly rejecting concepts such as sin and Atonement. Doctrines of Salvation cites several such examples. He, and later Elder McConkie, did their best to keep these views out of the Church and ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Something that Elder Smith wrote about John Wesley while discussing this very topic applies equally to himself, Elder McConkie, and all General Authorities: "He was great. He was mistaken in many things, of course, but he did the best he could under the circumstances, and I think the Spirit of the Lord was leading him in many things."
Latter-day Saints are of course doctrinally free to believe whatever they want about evolution and the age of the earth, but the truth is not found in doctrine alone. We don't have a doctrinal stance on gravity either. We do, however, have an injunction to encourage education and acquire secular knowledge, to "seek learning by study and also by faith", and with this being the case it's downright hypocritical for members to dismiss the unifying principle of biology just because it contradicts their preconceived assumptions and forces them to do a bit more thinking. I am also comfortable judging creationism by its fruits. Not only does it propagate and depend on lies and ignorance in order to continue existing in the twenty-first century, but it's a huge factor in unnecessarily turning religious believers - including Saints - into atheists when they realize they were duped. It may not be as great a problem as the materialism that Elders Smith and McConkie fought against, but it is a problem nonetheless.
By denying the obvious, creationists hurt not only themselves but believers everywhere. James E. Talmage (before becoming an Apostle) once heard a minister preaching against evolution and wrote in his journal, "I certainly think 'tis the ministers themselves who have bred the disgust with which most scientific people regard them - because they will dabble with matters from which their ignorance should keep them at a safe distance... Darwin wrote for those who can understand him: some of whom will agree with and others oppose him: but he did not write for ministers who never read beyond others' opinions of the man."
In fairness, some scientific people view anything of a religious or spiritual nature with contempt, but this militant anti-science stance only widens the gap between faith and reason in many people's eyes, thus making all religious people look like simpletons and alienating people who might otherwise have been more interested. It gives militant atheists a weapon that they shouldn't have. It leads Christians themselves, particularly the rising generation, to discard religion and God entirely when they find out how strong the evidence for evolution actually is, and how thoroughly the arguments against it have been answered. I'm not suggesting that any religion should incorporate evolution into its doctrine. What I am urging is for Latter-day Saints and other Christians to acknowledge it as scientifically valid and not a threat to their belief system.
Brigham Young's position on this sort of thing was a great one: "I am not astonished that infidelity prevails to a great extent among the inhabitants of the earth, for the religious teachers of the people advance many ideas and notions for truth which are in opposition to and contradict facts demonstrated by science, and which are generally understood. You take for instance, our geologists, and they tell us that this earth has been in existence for thousands and millions of years. They think, and they have good reason for their faith, that their researches and investigations enable them to demonstrate that this earth has been in existence as long as they assert it has; and they say, 'If the Lord, as religionists declare, made the earth out of nothing in six days, six thousand years age, our studies are all vain; but by what we can learn from nature and the immutable laws of the Creator as revealed therein, we know that your theories are incorrect and consequently we must reject your religions as false and vain.'
"In these respects we differ from the Christian world, for our religion will not clash with or contradict the facts of science in any particular. You may take geology, for instance, and it is a true science; not that I would say for a moment that all the conclusions and deductions of its professors are true, but its leading principles are; they are facts---they are eternal; and to assert that the Lord made this earth out of nothing is preposterous and impossible. God never made something out of nothing. How long it's been organized is not for me to say, and I do not care anything about it. As to the Bible account of the creation we may say that the Lord gave it to Moses. If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant."
Price's works were also cited by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, despite Elder James E. Talmage soliciting rebuttals from his son Sterling and sharing them in Quorum meetings. (Of Price's book The New Geology, Sterling wrote, "All of Price's arguments... are not 'new'. They are certainly not 'geology'. With these two corrections, the title remains the best part of the book.") In fairness, Elder Smith's remarks came in response to very real attacks by scientists and liberal "Christians" who were turning to a materialist worldview and explicitly rejecting concepts such as sin and Atonement. Doctrines of Salvation cites several such examples. He, and later Elder McConkie, did their best to keep these views out of the Church and ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Something that Elder Smith wrote about John Wesley while discussing this very topic applies equally to himself, Elder McConkie, and all General Authorities: "He was great. He was mistaken in many things, of course, but he did the best he could under the circumstances, and I think the Spirit of the Lord was leading him in many things."
Latter-day Saints are of course doctrinally free to believe whatever they want about evolution and the age of the earth, but the truth is not found in doctrine alone. We don't have a doctrinal stance on gravity either. We do, however, have an injunction to encourage education and acquire secular knowledge, to "seek learning by study and also by faith", and with this being the case it's downright hypocritical for members to dismiss the unifying principle of biology just because it contradicts their preconceived assumptions and forces them to do a bit more thinking. I am also comfortable judging creationism by its fruits. Not only does it propagate and depend on lies and ignorance in order to continue existing in the twenty-first century, but it's a huge factor in unnecessarily turning religious believers - including Saints - into atheists when they realize they were duped. It may not be as great a problem as the materialism that Elders Smith and McConkie fought against, but it is a problem nonetheless.
By denying the obvious, creationists hurt not only themselves but believers everywhere. James E. Talmage (before becoming an Apostle) once heard a minister preaching against evolution and wrote in his journal, "I certainly think 'tis the ministers themselves who have bred the disgust with which most scientific people regard them - because they will dabble with matters from which their ignorance should keep them at a safe distance... Darwin wrote for those who can understand him: some of whom will agree with and others oppose him: but he did not write for ministers who never read beyond others' opinions of the man."
In fairness, some scientific people view anything of a religious or spiritual nature with contempt, but this militant anti-science stance only widens the gap between faith and reason in many people's eyes, thus making all religious people look like simpletons and alienating people who might otherwise have been more interested. It gives militant atheists a weapon that they shouldn't have. It leads Christians themselves, particularly the rising generation, to discard religion and God entirely when they find out how strong the evidence for evolution actually is, and how thoroughly the arguments against it have been answered. I'm not suggesting that any religion should incorporate evolution into its doctrine. What I am urging is for Latter-day Saints and other Christians to acknowledge it as scientifically valid and not a threat to their belief system.
Brigham Young's position on this sort of thing was a great one: "I am not astonished that infidelity prevails to a great extent among the inhabitants of the earth, for the religious teachers of the people advance many ideas and notions for truth which are in opposition to and contradict facts demonstrated by science, and which are generally understood. You take for instance, our geologists, and they tell us that this earth has been in existence for thousands and millions of years. They think, and they have good reason for their faith, that their researches and investigations enable them to demonstrate that this earth has been in existence as long as they assert it has; and they say, 'If the Lord, as religionists declare, made the earth out of nothing in six days, six thousand years age, our studies are all vain; but by what we can learn from nature and the immutable laws of the Creator as revealed therein, we know that your theories are incorrect and consequently we must reject your religions as false and vain.'
"In these respects we differ from the Christian world, for our religion will not clash with or contradict the facts of science in any particular. You may take geology, for instance, and it is a true science; not that I would say for a moment that all the conclusions and deductions of its professors are true, but its leading principles are; they are facts---they are eternal; and to assert that the Lord made this earth out of nothing is preposterous and impossible. God never made something out of nothing. How long it's been organized is not for me to say, and I do not care anything about it. As to the Bible account of the creation we may say that the Lord gave it to Moses. If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant."
Sadly, despite being a purely scientific concept, evolution has also been politicized right from the beginning, when capitalists and socialists alike cited Darwin's reasoning as a template for their own ideologies. Nowadays, the political issue lies in the religious right's reluctance to accept it or let it be taught in schools. The original picture above had it right. Questions cease to be "legitimate" when they've been answered thousands of times, and especially so when they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of science to begin with. Evolution is taught for the same reason anything in a curriculum is taught; because it represents the current state of our knowledge. There's a big difference between challenging conventional wisdom and just being too ignorant to grasp why it's conventional wisdom in the first place, dismissing it as "nonsense" because you don't understand it.
But I am far less concerned about people being driven away from the Republican Party than about people being driven away from Christianity. This is hands down the biggest reason why I promote evolution and oppose creationism. For most Latter-day Saints, at least, it seems to be only a contributing factor at most in their faith crises, but I encountered one in a Facebook discussion for whom it had been a major issue, and the worth of souls is great in the sight of God. This man, Cameron Earl, wrote that "I do hope to find a way to reconcile church doctrine with human evolution, as some others have done. I'm not arguing that the church must be false due to evolution. I will, however, argue that evolution is real. Being taught that it must be false for the church to be true, and later finding out that it was true, was very damaging for my testimony. I don't wish that to happen to others if the two don't necessarily conflict."
The problem is much more widespread in evangelical circles. Rachel Held Evans, author of Evolving in Monkey Town, wrote: "What we are searching for is a community of faith in which it is safe to ask tough questions, to think critically, and to be honest with ourselves. Unfortunately, a lot of young evangelicals grew up with the assumption that Christianity and evolution cannot mix, that we have to choose between our faith in Jesus and accepted science. I've watched in growing frustration as this false dichotomy has convinced my friends to leave the faith altogether when they examine the science and find it incompatible with a 6,000-year-old earth. Sensing that Christianity required abandoning their intellectual integrity, some of the best and brightest of the next generation made a choice they didn't have to make."
Libby Anne: "If my parents had not elevated creationism to the same importance as the virgin birth, I would never have had my crisis of faith. Doing so gave my faith an Achilles heel. I'm not saying this happens to everyone raised to equate creationism with Christianity - it doesn't. What I am saying is that elevating things like capitalism and spanking to the same level of truth as the trinity creates a Christianity in a box. It shuts off questions and exploration. It closes the door to differences of opinion. It creates a situation where you are either in, or out. And, more importantly, it creates a situation where questioning something as simple as capitalism means rejection and changing your mind on something as little as anti-gay rights means potentially throwing everything from the trinity to the divinity of Jesus into question. My parents reacted negatively to me not because I had rejected Jesus but because I had rejected creationism."
Jeri Lofland: "Many, many followers of Jesus doubt Young Earth Creationism, and even St. Augustine considered the Creation account to be allegorical. But no one told me that. I swallowed the whole Ham sandwich: you couldn't have faith, or sin, or Jesus, or heaven, or God... without Adam, Eve, Eden, a global flood, and less than 10,000 years. The only problem was, when I could no longer believe in a young earth, the rest of the story disintegrated, too. Once upon a time, my meager tithe checks helped build Ken's creation museum. Today I am one of his 'atheist friends', taking my kids to see dinosaur footprints and ancient rocks. Ham's cartoons (the red 'Abortion' balloons flown from the castle founded on Evolution) and his jokes ('God didn't make Adam and Steve', 'fossils don't come with labels!') led directly to my atheism. My life is neither sad nor purposeless. But if it makes him feel better, Ham can thank his God that I'm finally wrong."
Next: The Origin of Humanity
But I am far less concerned about people being driven away from the Republican Party than about people being driven away from Christianity. This is hands down the biggest reason why I promote evolution and oppose creationism. For most Latter-day Saints, at least, it seems to be only a contributing factor at most in their faith crises, but I encountered one in a Facebook discussion for whom it had been a major issue, and the worth of souls is great in the sight of God. This man, Cameron Earl, wrote that "I do hope to find a way to reconcile church doctrine with human evolution, as some others have done. I'm not arguing that the church must be false due to evolution. I will, however, argue that evolution is real. Being taught that it must be false for the church to be true, and later finding out that it was true, was very damaging for my testimony. I don't wish that to happen to others if the two don't necessarily conflict."
The problem is much more widespread in evangelical circles. Rachel Held Evans, author of Evolving in Monkey Town, wrote: "What we are searching for is a community of faith in which it is safe to ask tough questions, to think critically, and to be honest with ourselves. Unfortunately, a lot of young evangelicals grew up with the assumption that Christianity and evolution cannot mix, that we have to choose between our faith in Jesus and accepted science. I've watched in growing frustration as this false dichotomy has convinced my friends to leave the faith altogether when they examine the science and find it incompatible with a 6,000-year-old earth. Sensing that Christianity required abandoning their intellectual integrity, some of the best and brightest of the next generation made a choice they didn't have to make."
Libby Anne: "If my parents had not elevated creationism to the same importance as the virgin birth, I would never have had my crisis of faith. Doing so gave my faith an Achilles heel. I'm not saying this happens to everyone raised to equate creationism with Christianity - it doesn't. What I am saying is that elevating things like capitalism and spanking to the same level of truth as the trinity creates a Christianity in a box. It shuts off questions and exploration. It closes the door to differences of opinion. It creates a situation where you are either in, or out. And, more importantly, it creates a situation where questioning something as simple as capitalism means rejection and changing your mind on something as little as anti-gay rights means potentially throwing everything from the trinity to the divinity of Jesus into question. My parents reacted negatively to me not because I had rejected Jesus but because I had rejected creationism."
Jeri Lofland: "Many, many followers of Jesus doubt Young Earth Creationism, and even St. Augustine considered the Creation account to be allegorical. But no one told me that. I swallowed the whole Ham sandwich: you couldn't have faith, or sin, or Jesus, or heaven, or God... without Adam, Eve, Eden, a global flood, and less than 10,000 years. The only problem was, when I could no longer believe in a young earth, the rest of the story disintegrated, too. Once upon a time, my meager tithe checks helped build Ken's creation museum. Today I am one of his 'atheist friends', taking my kids to see dinosaur footprints and ancient rocks. Ham's cartoons (the red 'Abortion' balloons flown from the castle founded on Evolution) and his jokes ('God didn't make Adam and Steve', 'fossils don't come with labels!') led directly to my atheism. My life is neither sad nor purposeless. But if it makes him feel better, Ham can thank his God that I'm finally wrong."
Next: The Origin of Humanity
