Evolution and Mormonism: A Quest for Understanding - Tapa blanda

Duane E. Jeffery (B.S., Utah State University; Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is Professor of Zoology at BYU. He has published in such professional journals as Genetics and the Journal of Heredity, as well as in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a contributor to Science and Religion and The Search for Harmony.

Forrest B. Peterson is an award-winning writer and movie producer. In 1990 his Trouble in Oz won five Crystal Reel prizes from the Florida Film Festival. His church duties have included elders quorum president and gospel doctrine teacher.

by Duane F. Jeffery

There is a certain irony in the fact that the twentieth century in Mormonism begins and ends with the teachings of Joseph F. Smith. He became president of the church in 1901, and from then until his death in 1918, he presided over a major consolidation of doctrines that, up to that time, had not been particularly well defined. This consolidation or reconstruction, as historian Thomas G. Alexander has called it was driven primarily by three prominent Mormon writers and doctrinal commentators whose roles in this area have not been fully recognized by the church at large: B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, and John A. Widtsoe.

These three were far more sensitive to the life of the mind than were many of their religious contemporaries; they believed deeply that the gospel was too precious to be defended with anything but the best scholarship and honesty the Saints could muster. They believed in an ultimate synthesis of truth, and that God reveals his truths through both prophets and academicians. And their names have come to symbolize that commitment. Talmages two seminal works Jesus the Christ and Articles of Faith remain the foundations of Latter-day Saint doctrinal study. Roberts s Comprehensive History of the Church still stands as the church s official history for its first century; his priesthood manuals for the years 1907-12 still constitute the high-water mark of our organized doctrinal study courses. Widtsoe s long history of doctrinal writings (Evidences and Reconciliations) in the church s official magazine continues to exert considerable influence.

Not to be ignored or forgotten is Nels L. Nelson, an English professor at Brigham Young University who during the early years of the twentieth century enjoyed an unusual relationship with church president Joseph F. Smith. President Smith was known to send drafts of his speeches to Nelson for editing and suggestions, and it was Nelson who produced Mormonism s first book on that most controversial of issues: science and religion.

The book appeared in 1904 and was considered a missionary tract by both its author and by the church s governing First Presidency. Nelson envisioned it as the first of at least two books aimed at making Mormonism noticed and noted by the world s academic fraternity. He titled it Scientific Aspects of Mormonism, and aimed to show that not only was Mormonism compatible with then-current scientific thought, but that indeed it had arrived at many of the basic philosophical positions before science did. Of particular interest is his teaching of a rather thorough-going brand of organic evolution he saw it as fully compatible with Mormon teachings and revelations.

Demonstrating such a consilience of science and religion was necessary, Nelson believed, because a religion which is not scientific is scarcely worth the credence of our enlightened age. And while he recognized that he could not deal with all concepts of science, he insisted that he could show that Mormonism s basic data are not out of keeping with those general laws of nature on which all the conclusions of scientists rest, and that science and Mormonism see things in this world primarily in the same way, and also reason as to the purpose of things in the same way. For him, the book of nature is (like scripture) a direct revelation of God; the laws of the universe are nothing more than the general divine laws of God. Mortality was meant to be a glorious university the only real university for the development of (God s) sons and daughters.

Unfortunately, Nelson was not trained in science and his treatise suffers from that fact. His overall outlook was laudatory but ultimately flawed, both by his own limitations and those of the science of the day. For evolution is surely the most controversial philosophical concept of the modern world, and its mechanisms were only dimly seen in 1904. T