New Video on Evolution and Latter-day Saints

[Risingtide]

On 11/8/2021 at 11:34 AM, Canadiandude said:

Maybe these are exactly the members worth challenging though?

I mean, aren’t these the same kinds of members that alienate marginalized members and pretend their social & political views are exclusively divine?

There are many lazy learners in the world, but I can’t help wonder if these aren’t the members least encouraged to think critically and deeply about the issues.

I for one am glad the Church allows for diversity of opinion, even if some members are dogmatic in there views about evolution. I'm grateful for mercy and tolerance. I've heard the worth of souls is great. I don't think our opinion on evolution is a deal breaker in our relationship with God. This is a very sensitive topic and many who have much to contribute to the Church would be lost in trying to cram their opinions on persons with deeply held but divergent views. I see wisdom in the cautious approach. 

[jotorious]

@JustAnAustralian I think we might be talking past one another on the plant death thing...the point I attempted to make is that the fruit of the plant is not the plant itself and, when eaten, does not constitute the death of the plant. Therefore, death need not be invoked by Adam and Eve's existence and consumption of fruit in the Garden prior to the Fall.

You seem to be making the point that if an organism is killed, even if DNA or individual cells do not die immediately, that constitutes death. May be I'm not getting your full point, but to be clear, I do not dispute this point.

[jotorious]

@MrShorty I appreciate the link. I had not previously heard of concordism. I would say that some of views do have a basis in concordist thought. At this point, with this new tool that Ben presents which he seems to call literalism, I'm having to sort through a lot of old data through a new lens and make a judgment on where I think I fit in. With that said, I take no issue with Ben's approach, which is to understand scripture, we must get as close as we can to the original text and the context in which it originated.

Assuming a break from concordist interpretation of scripture allows me to pull my religious thought away the requirement of conforming to a modern scientific worldview, then I would anticipate the following:

• My comments about human mutation rates, soft tissue and radiocarbon in dinosaur fossils, mathematical challenges to the probability of abiogenesis, geologic evidence for a catastrophic flood, etc., become purely critiques of the neo-darwinian evolutionary synthesis
• I'm now to exegete scriptures, such as 2 Nephi 2:22, with a new "literalist" lens and examine potential problems that arise from that interpretation

Knowing that Spackman proposes accommodation as a mechanism to be used with judgment to explain apparent discrepancies between reality and revelation, I'd be interested to know specific areas where you or he may invoke accommodation as an explanation.

[MrShorty]

Where we are talking about cosmology and Genesis, I think the first example of accommodation would be the "flat earth" model that Moses (assuming Moses is the author and this is an accurate recounting of his revelation) describes. For whatever reason, God decided it was best to describe the universe in terms that ancient people, who almost exclusively believed in a flat earth, would understand. I have sometimes felt to extend this to Joseph Smith when he talks about "element being eternal" as an accommodation to a Newtonian universe (static and eternal backward and forward in time), unlike our current understanding where the universe has a clear and distinct beginning. Accommodation is also how I best understand the priesthood and temple ban, where God had to tolerate a lot of ugly beliefs in the Church because we were unable and unwilling to consider that we could be wrong about racial issues.