Mormons and Evolution

As I mentioned in the previous post there are other, currently less popular, versions of the preexistence which we would do well to not ignore in our discussion. Here we should consider the following doctrines, both of which were believed by Joseph Smith during periods of his life: 1) that our we as spiritual being always existed without beginning, and 2) that we merely preexisted in God’s mind.

The idea that our we as spirits always existed in explained best in Joseph’s King Follet discourse wherein he compares our spiritual existence with a ring; there is neither a beginning, nor an end. “I might with boldness proclaim from the house tops, that God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all.”

Smith’s.. doctrinal teaching was that the human spirit as a conscious entity is eternal–as eternal as God. It has no beginning and has no end. It was not created; it is self-existing. God, being more advanced than the other spirits, organized them and instituted laws to give them the privilege to advance like himself. He presides and will preside over them throughout eternity. Smith used the terms “spirit,” “soul,” “intelligence,” and “mind” synonymously to describe the inchoate, indestructible essence of life.
This summary is drawn from eight documentary sources–dating from 6 May 1833 to 7 April 1844. None of them suggest that God presides over the spirits because they are his begotten offspring, but because he was more intelligent, more advanced, than they and because he organized them into a premortal council. -Van Hale in Line Upon Line

How does this picture measure up to the difficulties we mentioned before? It’s a bit difficult to tell.

After all, what, under this model, is a spirit? Does it have a spirit body? Does this spirit body look like the organisms they would later become? What kinds of intelligences are there? Human? Cro-magnon? Jelly fish? Trees? Dirt? While its clear that Joseph believed that we were autonomous agents, such that we could choose a savior and be organized by God, it is not clear at all how far “down” we can extend this.

As we noticed before, evolution would seem to call for a somewhat vague idea of a spiritual identity, devoid of our current familial resemblances and traits which are inherited genetically. Do to historical contigency, randomness and free will we would not know for sure who our earth spouses would be or who our exact children would be. This model of the preexistence works quite well in this area.

There is also the issue of essentialism, some spirits were literally begotten of God and others were not. Under this model, noboby was literally begotten of God. They were only organized by God, analogous, I imagine, to adoption. This does leave a bit more space for gradualness. After all, when is something a member of your family? When they are a parent, a sibling, an aunt, a fouth cousin twice removed on your mother’s side, a pet dog, a pet gold fish, a box of silk worms, intenstinal worms, a cold, the mildew under the sink?

This question of where to draw the line may be difficult for some, especially cat lovers (pause for shudder), but the question only gets that much more difficult when we ask “when is somebody in the human family?” Is it possible to be partially adopted into the family of God? I answer, “Why not?”

We could speculate as to the possibility of generational adoption, where certain individuals (not just humans mind you) are adopted to individuals other than God. But again we must not commit ourselves to too much detail. But we must remember, that this model insists on a vague notion of each person’s preexistent spiritual identity. The more details we insist on applying to our preexistet selves, the more difficult it will be to harmonize with the utter randomness of evolution.

This lead us Joseph’s first notion of the preexistence, namely that we preexisted in God’s mind. This is what the Book of Mormon means that when Adam fell, all of mankind fell, for we all existed “in” Adam. This is what is referred to in the Books of Genesis as well as Mose by the spiritual creation. It does not mean spirit as in “finer matter”, but spirit as in God’s pre-knowledge of sorts.

We can see this is that in the Book of Abraham as well as in the temple depiction there is no mention of a spirit creation, only planning sessions. These planning sessions where what the Book of Moses meant by “spiritual creation.” While people can insist that the Lord knew what He was talking about, we should remember that he was speaking to Moses in Genesis and Joseph Smith and the earliest saints in the Book of Moses. They did not believe the same things then as we do now. We should stop trying to attribute things to the Lord which have no contextual credibility.

This first notion is very easy to reconcile with evolution, for it involves little more than God’s foreknowledge. Again, we must consider Mormonism’s unique limitations which are placed on God, but I doubt many Mormons would be comfortable fully adopting this model. Modern day revelation regarding the preexistence originally came in the context of this belief, because it was the belief held by most Christian churchs from which the early Saints came. The revelations were corrections of this view, not endorsements.

It would seem to me that Joseph’s doctrine of self-existent intelligences would be the best path to take in persuing a reconciliation of evolution with the preexistence. It also opens up other questions, which we probably cannot do other than speculate upon. Can intelligences evolve? I would answer yes it that they can become more or less intelligent, but I would say no to their evolving from one “kind” of intelligence to another.

Summary:
Having found problems with the notion of a literal spirit birth, we must consider Joseph’s doctrine of self-existing spirits. This doctrine, though currently not endorsed by most church members, was able to address many of the problems raised by the other preexistence doctrines rather successfully.

I have gone back to each of my posts and added a summary at the end of each so as to briefly state my arguments and conclusions reached. This, I feel will help keep the comments more confined to the real issues at hand. It will also help to clarify what in the world I am trying to say.

As I said in the last post, if we believe in evolution it becomes difficult to believe that we knew our spouses in the preexistence, or that we even knew who our families would be or that we even had the same “physical” appearance that each of us enjoys now. Of course one can, and probably should, maintain that organization into families is an ongoing process which is happening as we speak. All in all, however, each person’s preexistentent individuality is becoming more generic.

These problems are nothing, however, compared to the notion of spirit birth. Remember, Joseph Smith didn’t believe (or at least didn’t teach) that we were born to spiritual parents. He believed us to be uncreated spirits with no beginning or end. But this is not what we teach now so we must address this issue.

All things, especially living things, were created spiritually before temporally. We are the spirit children of God, while the animals are…. what? Usually it is believed that animals are formed, somehow, but this goes against the logic of those 19th century Mormons who believed that the only real way to create is through procreation. This is why they taught that Adam was literally a son of God. This is one of the reasons why some adopted the idea of spirit birth in the first place. So maybe animals were born spiritually to some resurrected and glorified animal. But here is where the problems arise.

In the geological strata we can go back in time and see that man evolved from an ancestor which we share with chimpazees. There was no definite break. No place where we can say, this son was a human while his parents were cro-magnon. No place where we can say, this son was a spiritual son of God while his parents were spiritual creations of God, or even a spirit child of a cro-magnon-God.

We can say that all of the children of Adam were spirit children of God, but this brings up other issues which we will address later. One that I will mention here, however, is that we are related quite intimately to animals. Which means that if we all go back to an Adam, this Adam goes back to a cro-magnon. The same logic can be applied to any “species” as we humans have labeled them for convenience if we are to attribute spiritual birth to them. We can’t say that each animal from any given species were spiritually born to a single “God” of that species. This destroys the continuity displayed by evolution.

Put another way, evolution effectively destroyed what has been called essentialism as applied to organisms. Aristotle taught that we could define everything, in our case organisms, by its essential properties, properties which if any given organism did not possess it would no longer be classified as a member of that particular species. The whole point of evolution is that there are no essential properties in life. Numberless intermediate life forms make it impossible to categorize each organism according to essence. In fact, all life forms, including us, are intermediate, on their way to becoming something else. Dennett describes the predicament of the essentialist paradigm as follows:

You may think you’re a mammal, and that dogs and cows and whales are mammals, but really there aren’t any mammals at all-ther couldn’t be! Here’s the philosphical argument to prove it.

1. Every mammal has a mammal for a mother.
2. If there have been any mammals at all, there have been only a finite number of mammals.
3. But if there has been even one mammal, then by (1), there have been an infinity of mammals, which contradicts (2), so there can’t have been any mammals. It’s a contradiction in terms.

The way around this, according to Darwin, is that things gradually became more and more mammal-ish until enough separation has been established between them and what we now call non-mammals to officially declare a difference between the two.

But this doesn’t work for spiritual birth. Can creatures gradually become more and more born-of-God-ish? No, a creature is either a spirit child of God or not, there is no grey area.

Let’s consider an alternative which was actually tossed around by Orson Pratt. We are not so much children of God as much as we are spirit grand children of God. This, Elder Pratt speculated, would releave our Mother in Heaven from having to give birth to the billions of people of the earth. This idea has some advantages in this context, for it allows us to be related to our earthly family members and thereby let’s us think that our spirit displayed our current family resemblances and so forth.

This leads us to talk of (please hold back the laughter) “spiritual genetics” and “spiritual evolution.” This would help eliminate the issue of essentialism in the spirit realm as it has here. It could also give us a place to maintain that God actually did control evolution, again, somehow.

But problems still remain in addition to a new one. We are saying that evolution took the exact same road twice. This is a direct violation of Dollo’s Law:

Dollo’s Law is really just a statement about the statistical improbability of following exactly the same evolutionary trajectory twice… in either direction. A single mutational step can easily be reversed. But for larger numbers of mutational steps… the mathematical space of all possible trajectories is so vast that the chance of two tragectories ever arriving at the same point becomes vanishingly small. -Richard Dawkins

Also, unanswered are the issues surrounding free-will (the ability the have children with whoever you want) and historical contigency (extinctions, bodily dismemberments and so forth).

All in all, I simply cannot find a footing for a literal spirit birth in the preexistence. There are other options however. There is the “eternal spirit” doctrine taught by Joseph Smith which involves a kind of spiritual adoption into God’s family. There is also the idea of our having preexisted in God’s mind, but having no actual preexistent identity.

Summary:
The literal doctrine of a spirit birth inevitably gives rise to essentialism in our classifying living creatures. Evolution, however, has thoroughly demolished essentialism as applied to living creatures. Thus, it is very difficult if not impossible to reconcile evolution with a literal spirit birth.

Some might be surprised that Darwin actually addressed, though very briefly, the subject of the preexistence:

Commenting on the claim that Plato thought our “necessary ideas” arise from the pre-existence of the soul, Darwin wrote: “read monkeys for preexistence.”

Here, he is addressing the things that we just seem to know without us having learned it anywhere. This, as a mater of fact, was one argument a friend of mine put forth against evolution. “When the kangaroo is born, it knows where to crawl to find its mother’s pouch and nipple. It must be God which is doing it.” Needless to say, I didn’t buy it.

My friend’s argument is based on his believe that when we are born, aside for inspiration from God, our mind is a blank slate. This assumption is false. (See Steve Pinker’s book Blank Slate for details.) Sometimes I have wondered if this same concept is one of the big reasons why Mormon’s believe in a preexistence or at least in many of the details we attribute to it.

Let us first address the modern-day version of the preexistence story as described in the Proclamation on the family.

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a
beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a
divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

What we learn about this version of the preexistence is that (1) we were born “spiritually” (whatever that might mean), (2) we had gender there, judging by the context of the statement it is intended to mean the same gender which each of us has here. And that’s about it.

There are not too many problems here (aside from humans being born while other creatures created) unless we try to extend our beliefs into meeting our spouses there or knowing which family we would be in or any other prediction as to what would happen to any given individual in this earth life. This is where evolution weighs in with its utter randomness as well as its reliance on historical contingency.

This cannot be overstated.

1. Since our physical appearance is contingent upon genetics, nutrition as well as what has happened in our lives (losing an arm and such), our premortal selves could not have born too much of a resemblance to our current physical selves.
2. Each organism’s physical existence is based on their genetic sequence, which is random, as well as our parent’s ability to survive and reproduce (historical contingency). Each individual could not have been organized according to family with too much detail. This completely throws out the romantic idea of meeting ones spouse in the preexistence.

These points are not only true for humans, but for everyliving thing as Elder Mc Conkie asserts.

We can argue that God knew who would do what and when but this raises other issues.

1. The Mormon God is in time, just like us. He does not know the future as He does the past, He predicts the future though with much greater precision than we are familiar with. There is no guarantee that He could physically know about each and every living organism which would later appear on earth.
2. Even if we did believe that He knew all of that, and it is a big if, knowing the future and doing something before hand which will exactly match it are two very different things. We have already seen that the God that uses evolution is limited by natural law. To assume that God can “spiritually” create all of the exact life forms which would latter arise on this earth physically through random variation and contigency is a big stretch. If God is powerful enough to do that then He should have been able to avoid all of the prodigious waste in this planets past.

This brings up the question of how was spirit life created? Was it through birth? That is certainly what the proclamation seems to be saying for us, but what was it through birth for other animals? If so birth from who? Bear-God? Jelly fish-God? Virus-God? Regardless of the answer, evolution says there is no line between animals and man. Is there a line between spiritual animals and spirit men?

We will address these questions in the next post.

Summary:
Each person’s spiritual individuality comes under attack when applied to evolution. Issues of randomness, historical contingency and well as free will make many of our personal characteristics seem anachronistic in the preexistence. It is not at all clear that a finite God would have the foreknowledge or power to precreate what would later play out in evolution.

Over at LDS Science Review I’ve posted a review of Defeating Darwinism. I make an argument about Intelligent Design that I want to post here. It’s not that, in my opinion, there is something wrong with believing that God took an active part in creating the world and life on it. The problem is that we have no idea what exactly that involvement is. Furthermore, even under the best of circumstances ID is of very little help in dealing with science and LDS theology.

The critical problem with ID, in terms of science, is testability. If God has intervened in the development of life on earth, how would we know it? Proponents of ID argue that design can be detected by positive evidence. What is this positive evidence? The answer is IC. But the very notion and implications of IC are disputed–or ignored–by mainstream science. And at root, IC is an argument from ignorance–we don’t know how something could have evolved by natural means and therefore it must have been designed. It is a subtle trick to turn an argument from ignorance into “positive evidence”–create a category that is derived from an argument from ignorance, find a biological system that fits the criteria of your category, then call that positive evidence for design.

What I don’t think many people realize is that ID really cannot get them what they want. For the sake of argument, let’s say that IC is a legitimate concept and really does indicate ID. The reason it can detect design is because it is the only marker that can distinguish natural processes from intelligent ones. In other words, it distinguishes organisms created with ID from those related just by common descent. The IC systems that have been proposed thus far might distinguish some higher taxa, but most species and genera would probably be unaffected. For example, what kind of IC system would distinguish chimpanzees from humans? The only IC systems proposed so far are things like vision, the immune system, blood clotting, and cilia. Both humans and chimpanzees–most vertebrates for that matter–have all of those. Given the very high degree of DNA identity between these two species, I think it is highly unlikely that any IC biochemical systems will be identified to differentiate them. With the main tool of ID being useless in distinguishing between humans and chimpanzees, we are left with naturalism. So we can infer ID throughout the tree of life except where it really counts–us. The concepts of IC and ID are therefore useless to anybody hoping to establish that humans are uniquely created apart from the rest of the animal kingdom and we are essentially left with a concept that Johnson finds unacceptable–naturalism/materialism responsible for the ultimate creation of humans!

My point here is not to argue that mankind are merely animals or that God has nothing to do with our creation. It is to show that ID is utterly useless to show otherwise where the theological stakes are highest. If the tools of ID cannot establish a unique creation for humans, does the rest really matter?

Rather than help push an agenda that has a shallow rooting in science (some would say none) and is of very little help to us theologically, let’s focus on making mainstream science the best it can be.

The nature of God, serves as a good spring board into one of the more difficult topics to reconcile; the pre-existence. Elder Mc Conkie’s objections are as follows:

PRE-EXISTENCE. — Life did not originate on this earth; it was transplanted from other and older spheres. Men are the literal spirit children, spirit offspring, of the Eternal Father; they were born to him as his spirit progeny, as spirit entities having bodies made of a more pure and refined substance than that comprising these mortal tabernacles.
Further, every form of life had a spirit existence in that eternal world before it came to dwell naturally upon the face of the earth; and that prior existence, for all forms of life, was one in which the spirit entity had the exact form and likeness of its present temporal body. Animals, plants, fowls, fishes, all forms of life existed as spirit entities in pre-existence; their number, extent, variety, and form were known with exactitude before ever the foundations of this earth were laid. They were all destined to live in their time and season upon this particular globe. There was no chance whatever connected with the creative enterprises. All things were foreknown to that God who fathered man in his own image and who created all other forms of life for the benefit and blessing of man. Evolutionary speculation takes no account of any such revealed knowledge as this.

If all of this is true, then we are in for a very difficult time in our quest for reconciliation. But first let’s put this statement is perspective. Blake Ostler said in his essay “The Idea of Preexistence in Mormon Thought”:

Since 1960, a philosophy in contrast to traditional Mormon thought has gained some popularity in Mormon circles. Known as Mormon neo-orthodoxy, it emphasizes human contingency, the creation of humankind as conscious entities, and God’s absoluteness and complete otherness. The most influential proponent of Mormon neo-orthodoxy was probably Apostle Bruce R. McConkie.

He considers Mc Conkie to have been one of the more influential in a long line of people who modified “the view that individual spirits existed without beginning… in favor of a concept of contingent preexistence more congenial to classical Christian absolutism.”

In other words, when we speak of reconciling the preexistence with evolution we need to specify what version of the preexistence.

Joseph Smith did not distinguish between a time before which these spirits/intelligences were organized and a time after they were “born” as “spirit children”–in fact, the contemporary Mormon notion that God is the literal father of individual spirits through spirit birth would probably have been foreign to him. He taught that spirits were eternal and uncreated and used the terms “spirits” and “intelligences” synonymously.

Thus, the current idea of preexistence in the church was not Joseph’s. How such a view became so wide spread is not an issue for the topic at hand, but it would be useful to review what Joseph did say about the preexistence.

The Book of Mormon foreshadowed a kind of preexistence by treating the Adamic myth as an expression of generic human experience. Book of Mormon prophet Alma explained the necessity of the Atonement by noting that “mankind” had fallen from God’s presence and could “return” only through the Atonement (Al. 42:7, 14; see also 2 Ne. 2:21, 25; Al. 34:9; 41:9). The Book of Mormon inculcated (to borrow Orson Pratt’s term) the belief that humanity existed in God’s presence–at least, on a mythic level–prior to the Fall, and identified all humans with Adam in a corporate existence. If one were to identify a point from which the Mormon idea of preexistence developed, this description of humanity’s fall from the presence of God would be, in my opinion, the best candidate.

Regarding the spiritual creation mentioned in the Book of Moses:

First, it should be noted that the term “spirit” was not clarified in Mormon usage until 1843 to mean “pure” or “refined” matter, and “to create” was not clarified until 1842 to mean to “organize” rather than creation out of nothing. Prior to this, Mormon use of these terms was similar to the Christian definition of creation ex nihilo… Further, the early nineteenth-century usage of the word “spiritual” often implied a conceptual or intellectual blueprint without connoting real (i.e., mind-independent) existence. Moses 3:7 indicated that the physical creation proceeded “according to [God’s] word.” That is, God formed the idea and spoke the command before the actions occurred. This is consistent with Smith’s later redaction in the Book of Abraham. (See also Moses 6:61-63, which identifies God’s plan of salvation as the spiritual likeness of temporal things).

As to the spiritual creation of Adam:

Adam did not exist until he was spiritually created in the Garden of Eden. The notion that everyone preexisted in the Garden of Eden in Adam is also reinforced by the Book of Moses’ comment that Adam “is many” (1:34). This theme of identifying all humans in a corporate existence in Adam was adopted in the later temple endowment creation narrative… The notion that “man was also in the beginning with God” and that “every spirit of man was innocent from the beginning” was simply a confirmation that Adam was innocent when placed in the Garden of Eden prior to mortal existence. However, the identification of individuals with Adam was actualized in the revelation so that every individual human had the same moral qualities (i.e., innocence) as Adam prior to the Fall.

Then we come to the Book of Abraham:

The Book of Abraham speaks of intelligences/spirits being “organized before the world was” (v. 22). However, “organization” did not mean organization of spirit body through spiritual birth, but social organization of the spirits into a heavenly council of preexisting entities.

Well, which version of the preexistence is more correct? Which is more Mormon? Which agrees more with what we observe as to the earth’s history? I would suggest the second.

The belief that humans necessarily exist provides philosophical justification for the idea that they may ultimately become like God. It stresses the positive aspects of human existence, rejects the dogma of original sin and salvation by grace alone, and emphasizes works and personal ability to do good. It accentuates freedom of the will, explains the existence of evil and the purpose of life, and, most importantly, asserts that God is a personal being conditioned by and related to the physical universe.

Clearly our ideas regarding the preexisence are nowhere near clear enough, or back up by enough revelation to be dogmatic about its proving anything, let alone a scientific theory backed by as much evidence as evolution.

To be continued….

Summary:
In order to discuss the relationship between evolution and the Mormon belief in a preexistence, we much first try to understand that preexistence. The Mormon doctrine of preexistence has, by no means, been uniform over the years.

I recently posted that Evolution does leave room for God, but only certain versions of Him. I also insinuated that the finite God of Mormonism probably qualifies. But we should be a bit more specific. How finite?

Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion posits a God, which Dennett thinks is strikingly similar to what is proposed in Darwinism. This God is

a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving(.) Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out: And a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making… Why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world? This is only so much greater similarity to human affairs… If such foolish, such vicious creatures as man can yet often unite in framing and executing one plan, how much more those deities … whom we may suppose several degrees more perfect?

If we ignore the exaggerated rhetoric we are left with a model which closely resembles the Mormon idea of creation. Hugh Nibley (as Mormon as they come) said, “The creation process as described in the Pearl of Great Price is open ended and ongoing, entailing careful planning based on vast experience, long consultations, models, tests, and even trial runs for a complicated system requiring a vast scale of participation by the creatures concerned.” The similarities are striking.
Dennett continues:

The task of the wise God required to put this world into motion is a task of discovery, not creation, a job for a Newton, not a Shakespeare. What Newton found… are eternal… fixed points that anybody else in principle could have discovered, not idiosyncratic creations taht depend in any way on the particularities of the minds of their authors… So, as we follow the Darwinian down this path, God the Artificer turns first into God the Lawgiver, who now can be seen to merge with God the Lawfinder. God’s hypothesized contribution is thereby becoming less personal - and hence more readily performable by something dogged and mindless!

This is also rather harmonious with Mormon doctrine for God once, just as some of us will in the future, had to learn (discover) the laws by which creations are created. Do we really think that God is continually making the Hydrogen in the Sun fuse to create that energy or does it make more sense to say that He leaves it to act according to physical law?

But this is also where people get nervous as we said before, for it is a slippery slope to saying God did nothing at all! But do we think the same thing when somebody builds a beautiful house? Yes, but the person clearly intended to build the house. His method of building the house is not near as wasteful as is evolution either.

There are two questions which much be addressed: (1) couldn’t God have done it any better way? (2) What was His intention? What was His purpose? With regards to (2) the answer is easy. We are His purpose, or so we like to think. The answer to (1) is not so simple. Science has shown that the earth has existed for billions of years, and during much of that time it was teaming with life which was struggling to survive. There was no bambi. “Nature red in tooth and claw” it has been said. Couldn’t God have done it a different way?

This is what philosophers have called the problem of evil, natural evil to be exact which precludes any appeal to free agency. Either God could not have prevented all that waste and suffering (suffering didn’t really come into play until there was a conscious animal), or God could have prevented it, but for some reason did not want to. Remember, we cannot appeal to free agency. Is God less kind than we have always thought, or is He less powerful? The Mormon tradition has generally been that He is less powerful:

Traditionally, the affirmation of God’s sovereign power is expressed philosophically by the concept of “omnipotence,” which means that God can do absolutely anything at all, or at least anything “logically possible.” This often accompanies the dogma that all that is was created ex nihilo (from nothing) by God. The conclusion follows that all forms of evil, even the “demonic dimension,” must be directly or indirectly God-made. In Latter-day Saint sources, God is not the only self-existent reality. The creation accounts and other texts teach that God is not a fiat creator but an organizer and life-giver, that the “pure principles of element” can be neither created nor destroyed (D&C 93; TPJS, p. 351), and that the undergirdings of eternal law, with certain “bounds and conditions,” are coexistent with him (cf. D&C 88:34-45). “Omnipotence,” then, means God has all the power it is possible to have in a universe—actually a pluriverse—of these givens. He did not create evil. -Encyclopedia of Mormonism.

Now we are better equiped to answer the original question: What kind of God uses evolution? Answer: a God you has limitations put upon Him. This is an issue which people must deal with if they are to accept evolution. Luckily the Mormon doctrine is far more accomodating in this regard than is strict ethical monotheism.

Evolution tells us that life as we know it has been evolving for billions of years in order to “reach” mankind. This process involved prodigious amounts of waste and suffering, couldn’t God have done it a better way? Mormons will want to answer “no” so as to maintains God’s omnibenevolence, but this is at the expense of His omnipotence.

There are two very common lines of though when it comes to evolution and the existence of God.

1. They are completly at odds and a person cannot believe in both.
2. Evolution cannot disprove that there is a God.

With regards to (1), take the statement by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith:

I commented elsewhere that I get very nervious when I hear people, usually religious people, claim that the two points of view are completely at odds and cannot be reconciled. This, in my opinion, was the most innappropriate thing JFSII ever said in the docrines of salvation. If he hadn’t believed the theory, great. If he wanted to show us why, even better. But to declare with ringing finality that the gospel and evolution cannot coexist in the same mind seems to me to be a way of scoring easy wins. Obviously the people who read his writings are more than somewhat partial towards the gospel so if it has to be one or the other, his readers will usually choose the gospel. He wins the fight without ever throwing a punch.

Worse still is that these people now feel obligated to act like idiots in the rest of the worlds opinion by denying carbon dating, fossil records, the age of the earth and so on. And all this through no great fault of their own. Sometimes I feel that theists need to be a little bit more careful in reading atheistic, or better yet, non-theistic literature. There is a difference between saying “since evolution is true, there must be no God” and “since there is not God, evolution must be true.”

And so we come to (2). The theory of evolution is about life evolving based on scientific data. This can never prove the non-existence of something, let alone God. Therefore, it is claimed, we have little to worry about. This is what we discussed in the science and religion post.

It must be confessed, however, that evolution does have a lot to say about what religions have said about creation (man, animals, timescale, machanisms) and man’s place in the world today. It is at odds with many widely accepted religious notions. While it may not prove that there is no God, it certainly shows that a particular version of God, namely the most popular one until recently, does not exist. The God who created everything in 7 24 -hour periods never existed. The God who created every species we see around us independently never existed. The God who created the first man, the father of us all a mere 6,000 years ago never existed. And so on.

But perhaps worst of all, it seems to show that God was not necessary. Even if Darwin’s idea did not deliver the death blow to teleology as Marx claimed it had, it appears to have dealt the death blow to the teleological argument for God’s existence. After all, if we really don’t believe in miracles as stated in the last post, and God must adhere to physical laws, what is there left for Him to do?

This was essentially the final blow in the block which science had been chipping away at for some time, the block of no-holds-barred supernaturalism. When people pray for a sick person and they get better, was it the prayer or the medicine which did it? When the sun stood still in the sky, did God stop the sun as the scriptures say, did He stop the earth from rotating (bad idea) or was it a change in the refraction of light in the earth’s atmosphere? When there was no darkness for one night, was it just glowing from everydirection thanks to God, or was it a supernova in the sky, or some other meteorological phenomenon?

The Mormon answer, I suspect is yes, it is both. God made the patient better with the medicine. God Caused the change in the refraction of light to make the sun appear to stand still. God also timed Christs birth perfectly with the super nova or whatever it was. God is using natural law in a manifestation of intention so as to help us. He can, in Mormon doctrine, do it no other way.

This is quite unique and revolutionary. To borrow another metaphor from Dennett (I’m a big fan if you can’t tell), we dont’ believe in skyhooks. To lift something into the air there are two ways of doing it according to medieval lore. We can use cranes like we use today or we can use skyhooks, “an imaginary contrivance for attachment to the sky; an imaginary mean of suspension in the sky.” (Oxford English Dictionary) A crane is how we lift things according to natural laws. Skyhooks are supported by nothing at all and are absolute miracles, flagarant disregards for natural law. “Cranes can do the lifting work our imaginary skyhooks might do, and they do it in an honest, non-question begging fashion.”

We believe that God was once a man, subject to very much the same physical laws that we are. He then became God, again in accordance with physical law. He then created us, following and using physical laws. We are now men, subject to physical laws, just like God in the beginning. There never is a presto moment when a skyhook is magically lowered out of the sky. Instead we have cranes lifting God, us and everything else bit by bit. Cranes can even lift parts so as to make a bigger and better crane, thus enabling God or anybody else for that matter, to do greater, more “miraculous” things. Thus design can come from God above, or the “sludge” below, by a big crane already built in some other “eternity” or big cranes built by smaller cranes built by even smaller cranes all the way down to mindless stuff here. But there never were and never will be, according to my understanding of Mormon doctrine, any skyhooks.

This is why Intelligent Design as it is commonly meant leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It smacks of skyhooks. But with Intelligent Design, understood as God using physical laws to crane-by-crane create us using evolution, there is no problem with this in theory. However, we must admit that there is no evidence for this imposition of intentionality on life in the earth’s history, but this does not mean it could not have happened. Thus there is room for God, but only certain kinds of God.

Summary:
While evolution does not deny the existence of God, it does disprove many of the ideas which we may have about Him. This is especially true for the Mormon doctrine which denies the occurance of absolute miracles and posits a God subject to natural law.

Mc Conkie’s first objection which we mentioned was that the theory of evolution does not take into accout God:

GOD: CREATOR AND RULER OF MANY WORLDS. — While it is true that evolutionists may be divided between theistic and atheistic groups, yet most of those professing belief in God consider him to be an indefinable force, essence, or power of an incomprehensible nature. According to revelation, however, he is a personal Being, a holy and exalted Man, a glorified, resurrected Personage having a tangible body of flesh and bones, an anthropomorphic Entity, the personal Father of the spirits of all men. (”D&C 130:22″D&C 130:23; “moses 6:51; “abr. 3:22″abr. 3:23″abr. 3:24; Jos. Smith 2:16-19.)

This Person, in whose image and likeness man is created, has ordained the same plan of creation and salvation for this earth, and all the varieties of life on its face, that he has ordained with reference to the infinite number of worlds elsewhere created by him. (”moses 1:1; “D&C 76:22″D&C 76:23″D&C 76:24.) Obviously the eternal truths concerning the nature of the true God and his creative enterprises have received no consideration in the formulation of the theory of organic evolution.

The same can be said for Einstein’s theory of relativity, Newton’s laws of motion and Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system. Why don’t we make a big fuss about them? Because we are talking about the creation of man, and if God has ever done anything it must have been this.

Some things must be cleared up first. Elder Mc Conkie mentions that some evolutionists believe in God, but it is a very different God than ours. This is true, but since when is that anything new? What is our God like? The reason why most evolutionists believe in such a non-personal God, is because they have been forced to reject the traditional Judeo-Christian God. We did that almost 200 years ago, but instead of accepting a “life force” type of God, we went even more anthropomorphic than they did. We do not believe in the utterly infinite and absolutistic God of ethical mono-theism, but believe in a God which is to one extent or another, finite (though there may be considerable difference as to how finite He is according to each individual Mormon).

David L. Paulsen’s Doctoral dissertation, “Comparative Coherency of Mormon (Finistic) and Classical Theism, is a great resource for this. He describes how Mormonism believes in God which resides in Space (somewhere) and in Time. He had a beginning (in some sense), just like us (in the very same sense). He did not create elements (matter) or physical, eternal law. Instead, He is, to some extent, subject to physical law. This is why we don’t really believe in miracles.

Here is Brigham Young:

The providences of God are all a miracle to the human family until they understand them. There are no miracles only to those who are ignorant. A miracle is supposed to be a result without a cause, but there is no such thing. There is a cause for every result we see; and if we see a result without understanding the cause we call it a miracle. This is what we have been taught; but there is no miracle to those who understand. (JD 14:79, 13:140)

George Q. Cannon also said:

I know that miracles are said to be suspension of law; but instead of their being a suspension of law, they are due to a knowledge of a higher law, to a comprehension of greater laws, by the knowledge of which, what are called miracles are wrought. (JD 25:149-150)

Paulsen concluded in his dissertation:

The hypothesis of a finite God coheres more closely with the findings of evolutionary studies than does the hypothesis of an omnipotent God. This position is based principally on (1) the apparently extremely long periods of time necessary for the development of man; and (2) the staggering waste ensuing in the evolution of life-forms. There is no logical inconsistency in the notion of God’s creationg men without (a) resort to evolutionary process, (b) taking millions of year and/or (c) producing staggering waste… The conflicting data point (one) toward the hypothesis of a loving and benevolent God hampered by obstacles and instruments to His will.

to be continued…

Summary:
Evolutionists have rejected the more traditional forms of God in favor of a more abstract version of Him which amounts to little more than the natural laws of the universe. Mormons, however, have rejected the traditional form of God since the beginning and have tended to believe in a radically anthropomorphic Deity. Strangly enough this idea of a finite God may be fairly well suited for dealing with evolution.

I believe that much of the anxiety that people express about evolution is rooted in a single concept–its randomness. After all, if evolution accounts for the existence and diversity of life and is truly random, we have a number of theological difficulties on our hands. The scriptures clearly teach concepts of planning and foreordination, and so would seem to be at odds with evolutionary theory. As we shall see, if we really probe this problem to its depth we will get into unanswerable questions concerning the foreknowledge of God. These kinds of questions have been kicked around for a long time by people much smarter than I am. I doubt that definitive answers are available in this life. Rather than get into philosophical speculation I want to discuss the nature of science and its limitations.

Like many other fields of study, evolution is usually a study of history. Based on present experiments and observation, and on evidence from the past, scientists are able to reconstruct processes and events that have lead to conditions we see today. However just like other studies of history, reconstruction of the past is of limited use in predicting the future with precision.

Let’s take climatology and meteorology as an example. If we wanted to learn about past weather conditions we would pursue several avenues of research. We would gather records that contained measurements of past weather data. We would look at things affected by weather such as agriculture. We might also look at remaining physical evidence, such as tree rings, for indications of flood, rain, or drought. All of this together would give us a good picture of what happened in past weather systems. But as we all know, it is of limited use in making specific predictions about future weather. This is because the number of variables involved are enormous. But we can ask a rhetorical question here: does God know whether it will rain on my house a year from today?

Let’s look at a biological example: cancer. In many types of cancer the root genetic problem can be identified. While some people may have a predisposition to certain cancers, others apparently do not. Yet exact predictions about whether a person will get cancer cannot be made because of the enormous number of variables in play. On the predictive side, all we can do is talk in terms of probabilities.

Now let’s ask some questions: Does God know who will get cancer? Does he know which particular cell will start the cancer? Does he know what the specific cause will be? Does God cause all cancers? Are all cancers a result of pure chance? If God did, from time to time, cause a person to get cancer (as a trial, for example), could we identify those instances by scientific means?

These same types of problems and questions apply not only to evolution, but other areas of biology, medicine, public health, multiple areas of physics, cosmology, astronomy, linguistics, anthropology, ecology, geography–all areas of life, really. We do not have a way to distinguish any direct role God has played in these things from natural processes, except through revelation. But since revelation is largely non-transferable, we prefer natural explanations until God specifically identifies his role. (These issues also touch on why I am not hot on the intelligent design movement.)

So let’s not fret over whether life’s origin and diversity is a result of chance or not. Scientists talk in terms of chance and randomness because, whether they believe it’s the whole story or not, they cannot do otherwise.