BYU Studies on evolution and faith

[The_Monk]

Hello all. BYU Studies is soliciting articles on evolution and LDS faith. Linked call for papers and some clarifying details here. 

Cheers

[mfbukowski]

On 10/24/2019 at 5:12 PM, The_Monk said:

Hello all. BYU Studies is soliciting articles on evolution and LDS faith. Linked call for papers and some clarifying details here. 

Cheers

Thanks, and bump!

Sounds interesting

[blueglass]

The official position of the church is that it has no position on evolution.  Once I purchased a kindle book on all the official statements published by BYU. 

https://www.amazon.com/Mormonism-Evolution-Authoritative-LDS-Statements-ebook/dp/B005H7UMJA

Here's a short article on evolution in the Ensign which is brief and maddening and worthless. 

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution?lang=eng

Elder Holland on what really matters about evolution:

"I do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that [don't buy Yuval Harari's book - you're wasting time and money], but I do know these:

1)  two were created under the divine hand of God

2)  for a time they lived alone in a paradisiacal setting

3)  there was neither human death nor future family

4)  through a sequence of choices they transgressed a commandment of God which required that they leave their garden setting but which allowed them to have children before facing physical death.

5)  their transgression had spiritual consequences as well, cutting them off from the presence of God forever.

 

Edited November 3, 2019 by blueglass

[sunstoned]

It sounds like Jeffrey Holland is a believer in the traditional Genesis version of creation.  if there was neither human death nor future family, then that pretty much rules out evolution.  Perhaps he is just speaking his personal thoughts.  It is hard to tell sometimes.

[blueglass]

18 minutes ago, sunstoned said:

It sounds like Jeffrey Holland is a believer in the traditional Genesis version of creation.  if there was neither human death nor future family, then that pretty much rules out evolution.  Perhaps he is just speaking his personal thoughts.  It is hard to tell sometimes.

Should we send Holland a 23andMe DNA report? 

[Calm]

3 hours ago, sunstoned said:

It sounds like Jeffrey Holland is a believer in the traditional Genesis version of creation.  if there was neither human death nor future family, then that pretty much rules out evolution.  Perhaps he is just speaking his personal thoughts.  It is hard to tell sometimes.

I thought he was possibly referring to the Garden environment (the for a time in the paradiscal setting) , not everywhere else.

Edited November 3, 2019 by Calm

[blueglass]

11 hours ago, Calm said:

I thought he was possibly referring to the Garden environment (the for a time in the paradiscal setting) , not everywhere else.

We could call this garden under a glass dome in Missouri Biosphere 0.

https://biosphere2.org/

[mfbukowski]

17 hours ago, sunstoned said:

It sounds like Jeffrey Holland is a believer in the traditional Genesis version of creation.  if there was neither human death nor future family, then that pretty much rules out evolution.  Perhaps he is just speaking his personal thoughts.  It is hard to tell sometimes.

test

It appears I am unable to post what I like here- very odd keep getting 403 error

 

Edited November 3, 2019 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

test 2

[katherine the great]

15 hours ago, Calm said:

I thought he was possibly referring to the Garden environment (the for a time in the paradiscal setting) , not everywhere else.

He may have been. But he also says, "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."  I don't see any room at all for human evolution there (and I think human evolution is the biggest issue for most of our church members).  Unless he doesn't consider anyone born before, say, 10,000 b.c. fully human.

[2BizE]

I wonder if the people in this article lived before or after Adam and Eve?

http://westerndigs.org/12000-year-old-camp-found-in-utah-may-have-experts-adjusting-their-theories-archaeologist-says/

[Teancum]

19 hours ago, blueglass said:

The official position of the church is that it has no position on evolution.  Once I purchased a kindle book on all the official statements published by BYU. 

https://www.amazon.com/Mormonism-Evolution-Authoritative-LDS-Statements-ebook/dp/B005H7UMJA

Here's a short article on evolution in the Ensign which is brief and maddening and worthless. 

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution?lang=eng

Elder Holland on what really matters about evolution:

"I do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that [don't buy Yuval Harari's book - you're wasting time and money], but I do know these:

1)  two were created under the divine hand of God

2)  for a time they lived alone in a paradisiacal setting

3)  there was neither human death nor future family

4)  through a sequence of choices they transgressed a commandment of God which required that they leave their garden setting but which allowed them to have children before facing physical death.

5)  their transgression had spiritual consequences as well, cutting them off from the presence of God forever.

 

Why do you say Yuval Harari's books are a waste of time and money? I have read two by him I find them very interesting and thoughtful.

[OGHoosier]

23 minutes ago, katherine the great said:

He may have been. But he also says, "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."  I don't see any room at all for human evolution there (and I think human evolution is the biggest issue for most of our church members).  Unless he doesn't consider anyone born before, say, 10,000 b.c. fully human.

My take, unsolicited though it is, that Adam and Eve were the first of God's spirit children to be sent to earth. There are, to my mind, two ways in which this could be compatible with the idea of human evolution.

We don't know much about spiritual biology, as it were. We don't know what makes spirits more intelligent than others, for instance. We don't know much about the spirit world and spiritual realities at all, as President Oaks taught at this last General Conference. I think a strong case can be made, from Revelation ch. 4 and D&C 77, that all spirits, animals included, are what we would call intelligent, and that differences in capabilities in this life are based on mortal tabernacles. We also know that not all spirits are created equal; ie not all spirits are children of God in the same sense that human beings, we, are. 

Therefore, it would not surprise me if primeval man, homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, had spirits that were not of the divine descent. They were, as proponents of evolutionary biology suggest, advanced forms of great ape whose biology permitted their spirits a wider range of intelligence than other animals. 

Hypothesis #1:

God permitted, perhaps encouraged, these great apes to advance until He was satisfied with their growth, at which point He was ready to begin putting His children on earth. Adam and Eve, spirits of the divine descent, were thus born in the usual fashion, and were taken into a temple context (the Garden of Eden) to prepare for their role (much like Christ in the Wilderness of Temptations) and make a covenant like the Abrahamic covenant, ie their descendants shall be God's children sent to earth. Their descendants then propagated across the earth until all of the homo sapiens population carried the spirits of children of God. 

Hypothesis #2: 

This one's a little simpler with the scriptural record and I personally prefer it. Basically, God created the earth and let/led evolution to get to a point where He was ready to start putting His children on earth. However, He also planted a Garden eastward in Eden which was sort of separate from the lone and dreary world wherein all the creative destruction was going on. He created Adam and Eve in a paradisaical state in the Garden of Eden, where they had a temple experience like I described in Hypothesis #1.  The Fall happened, Adam and Eve became mortal, and their children went out into the world and married and reproduced with the extant non-Adamite population. Eventually the whole global population was descended from Adam and Eve, with all being children of God. 

[InCognitus]

Hugh Nibley's "Before Adam" address given on April 1, 1980 is relevant to this discussion.  It can be found here:  http://scottwoodward.org/Talks/html/z-Scholarly%20Articles/NibleyH_BeforeAdam.html.   This link was also recently shared by Ahab in response to a post by Kevin Christensen, here.

Edited November 3, 2019 by InCognitus

[CV75]

21 hours ago, blueglass said:

Elder Holland on what really matters about evolution:

"I do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that..."

Not knowing what happened on this planet before the Fall leaves room for all sorts of opportunities for evolution to bear sway prior to the arrival of Adam and Eve as fallen mortals some 6,000 years ago.

For example, evolution can be viewed as a valid telestial process operating under telestial law, along with all the other telestial-level processes going on after the so-called big bang. It came about after Adam and Eve transgressed the celestial and paradisaical processes and laws that were placed under their stewardship. As a result, all paradisaical existence -- possibly the universe -- was obliterated and had to be recreated through telestial processes (the scientifically observed and theorized physical laws as we understand them so far), much as the spiritual estate was forever changed when it was recreated naturally (Moses 3:5). As a result, the spirits of Adam and Eve eventually showed up as fallen mortals at the right time.

Yet the story as Elder Holland tells it in uncommon or unfashionable terms still makes the salient points. We sometimes need to stretch our creative thinking and non-rational intelligence to transcend the science that restricts our spirituality when operating in a vacuum.

[blueglass]

1 hour ago, InCognitus said:

Hugh Nibley's "Before Adam" address given on April 1, 1980 is relevant to this discussion.  It can be found here:  http://scottwoodward.org/Talks/html/z-Scholarly%20Articles/NibleyH_BeforeAdam.html.   This link was also recently shared by Ahab in response to a post by Kevin Christensen, here.

I don't understand Nibley's take on evolution.   He portrays science as a big mess of confusion. 

He does take a clear and direct position on who Adam is though which is good. 

"Adam becomes Adam, a hominid becomes a man, when he starts keeping a record. What kind of record? A record of his ancestors—the family line that sets him off from all other creatures. Such records begin very early, to judge by the fabulous genealogic knowledge of the Australian aborigines (A. P. Elkin) or the most "primiitive" Africans (L. Frobenius)."

"That gap between the record keeper and all the other creatures we know anything about is so unimaginably enormous and yet so neat and abrupt that we can only be dealing with another sort of being, a quantum leap from one world to another. Here is something not derivative from anything that has gone before on the local scene, even though they all share the same atoms."

So we can track writing systems to the Sumerians at 3200BC and call one of these guys Adam? 

[blueglass]

36 minutes ago, CV75 said:

Not knowing what happened on this planet before the Fall leaves room for all sorts of opportunities for evolution to bear sway prior to the arrival of Adam and Eve as fallen mortals some 6,000 years ago.

For example, evolution can be viewed as a valid telestial process operating under telestial law, along with all the other telestial-level processes going on after the so-called big bang. It came about after Adam and Eve transgressed the celestial and paradisaical processes and laws that were placed under their stewardship. As a result, all paradisaical existence -- possibly the universe -- was obliterated and had to be recreated through telestial processes (the scientifically observed and theorized physical laws as we understand them so far), much as the spiritual estate was forever changed when it was recreated naturally (Moses 3:5). As a result, the spirits of Adam and Eve eventually showed up as fallen mortals at the right time.

Yet the story as Elder Holland tells it in uncommon or unfashionable terms still makes the salient points. We sometimes need to stretch our creative thinking and non-rational intelligence to transcend the science that restricts our spirituality when operating in a vacuum.

Are you pretty convinced on this 6000 years ago time period for the fall of adam and eve, death, and sin in Missouri north america? 

[blueglass]

2 hours ago, Teancum said:

Why do you say Yuval Harari's books are a waste of time and money? I have read two by him I find them very interesting and thoughtful.

No - I also read both of Harari's books and I don't have a well-kept lawn or treat my dog poorly.  I'm saying that Holland won't be lining up to get his greedy hands on Harari's latest book.  he doesn't care to read science books. 

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, katherine the great said:

He may have been. But he also says, "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."  I don't see any room at all for human evolution there (and I think human evolution is the biggest issue for most of our church members).  Unless he doesn't consider anyone born before, say, 10,000 b.c. fully human.

One could postulate a spiritual change beginning with a certain generation, not unlike perhaps the incarnation might have been interpreted, if Jesus had descendants. 

The children before A&E were not spirit children, yet all their descendants were. Perhaps as a kind of "mutation"

I don't personally believe that but that would be one way to solve the puzzle.

Adam and Eve would be the first generation of the "chosen people",to whom Father revealed the "covenant path", the first "Jews" as it were.

There is already a precedent there for blessings to follow lineal descent 

Edited November 4, 2019 by mfbukowski

[OGHoosier]

15 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

One could postulate a spiritual change beginning with a certain generation, not unlike perhaps the incarnation might have been interpreted, if Jesus had descendants. 

The children before A&E were not spirit children, yet all their descendants were. Perhaps as a kind of "mutation"

I don't personally believe that but that would be one way to solve the puzzle.

Adam and Eve would be the first generation of the "chosen people",to whom Father revealed the "covenant path", the first "Jews" as it were.

There is already a precedent there for blessings to follow lineal descent 

That basically constitutes my take on it. 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

My take, unsolicited though it is, that Adam and Eve were the first of God's spirit children to be sent to earth. There are, to my mind, two ways in which this could be compatible with the idea of human evolution.

We don't know much about spiritual biology, as it were. We don't know what makes spirits more intelligent than others, for instance. We don't know much about the spirit world and spiritual realities at all, as President Oaks taught at this last General Conference. I think a strong case can be made, from Revelation ch. 4 and D&C 77, that all spirits, animals included, are what we would call intelligent, and that differences in capabilities in this life are based on mortal tabernacles. We also know that not all spirits are created equal; ie not all spirits are children of God in the same sense that human beings, we, are. 

Therefore, it would not surprise me if primeval man, homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, had spirits that were not of the divine descent. They were, as proponents of evolutionary biology suggest, advanced forms of great ape whose biology permitted their spirits a wider range of intelligence than other animals. 

Hypothesis #1:

God permitted, perhaps encouraged, these great apes to advance until He was satisfied with their growth, at which point He was ready to begin putting His children on earth. Adam and Eve, spirits of the divine descent, were thus born in the usual fashion, and were taken into a temple context (the Garden of Eden) to prepare for their role (much like Christ in the Wilderness of Temptations) and make a covenant like the Abrahamic covenant, ie their descendants shall be God's children sent to earth. Their descendants then propagated across the earth until all of the homo sapiens population carried the spirits of children of God. 

Hypothesis #2: 

This one's a little simpler with the scriptural record and I personally prefer it. Basically, God created the earth and let/led evolution to get to a point where He was ready to start putting His children on earth. However, He also planted a Garden eastward in Eden which was sort of separate from the lone and dreary world wherein all the creative destruction was going on. He created Adam and Eve in a paradisaical state in the Garden of Eden, where they had a temple experience like I described in Hypothesis #1.  The Fall happened, Adam and Eve became mortal, and their children went out into the world and married and reproduced with the extant non-Adamite population. Eventually the whole global population was descended from Adam and Eve, with all being children of God. 

There you go, I hadn't seen this.

[mfbukowski]

6 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

That basically constitutes my take on it. 

Want to take literally the idea that there was no death before the fall- ?  Does something exist before we have a concept of it? Do dinosaurs and primates contemplate "death" and its ramifications for an afterlife? 

I think not!   If there is a world out there that we cannot in principle know anything about, does it exist for us?

Imagine right at this moment, there are interplanetary wars happening in "a galaxy far far away".

Do those wars "exist" for us?

So to with the concept of “death”

Before creatures could foresee their own ends and wonder about what happened after them, I would argue that there WAS no “death” practically speaking.

The concept of individual beings who ceased to move or interact at some point was not "death" as we know it.

There was no name for such a cessation nor contemplation of how an individual could somehow continue after stopping activity and decomposing

The idea had to be invented!

 

Edited November 4, 2019 by mfbukowski

[OGHoosier]

Just now, mfbukowski said:

Want to take literally the idea that there was no death before the fall- ?  Does something exist before we have a concept of it? Do dinosaurs and primates contemplate "death" and its ramifications for an afterlife? 

I think not!   If there is a world out there that we can in principle know anything about, does it exist for us?

Imagine right at this moment, there are interplanetary wars happening in "a galaxy far far away".

Do those wars "exist" for us?

So to with the concept of “death”

Before creatures could foresee their own ends and wonder about what happened after them, I would argue that there WAS no “death” practically speaking.

 

Hmmm. That certainly is an interesting possibility. The idea of existence following concept in the mind somewhat accords with Alma 40:8, which states that time doesn't exist for God but is measured only by man. 

I would argue, however, that animals are aware of the phenomenon of death, especially social animals. They might not have the capacity to muse on it and what comes next, but they at least know what death is. However, if Adam and Eve and their descendants did not exist to have the concept we now hold, would it still exist?

Interesting stuff. 

[mfbukowski]

22 hours ago, sunstoned said:

It sounds like Jeffrey Holland is a believer in the traditional Genesis version of creation.  if there was neither human death nor future family, then that pretty much rules out evolution.  Perhaps he is just speaking his personal thoughts.  It is hard to tell sometimes.

Being a believer or being able to frame a story for children in order for them to learn something simply are two different things. 

 

[katherine the great]

19 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

One could postulate a spiritual change beginning with a certain generation, not unlike perhaps the incarnation might have been interpreted, if Jesus had descendants. 

The children before A&E were not spirit children, yet all their descendants were. Perhaps as a kind of "mutation"

I don't personally believe that but that would be one way to solve the puzzle.

Adam and Eve would be the first generation of the "chosen people",to whom Father revealed the "covenant path", the first "Jews" as it were.

There is already a precedent there for blessings to follow lineal descent 

I don't have a problem at all with the belief that Adam and Eve were the first "covenant" people. It's really the only way I can believe that they were literal people (which I see as actual doctrine). I can't, however believe that 1. They were the first human beings on the planet.  2. Their children married each other. or 3. the millions of human beings that lived on the planet before them were some sort of sub human and did not have the same type of spirit the rest of us had. If Ted Bundy is a spirit child of God then so we the people of Cro Magnon. 😊 Besides, I really don't think that Elder Holland believes anything less than the traditional view of Adam and Eve as first parents of all earthlings; no birth and no death before them.