Science
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“Since the Gospel embraces all truth, there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion…I am obliged, as a Latter-day Saint, to believe whatever is true, regardless of the source.”– HENRY EYRING, FAITH OF A SCIENTIST, P.12,31
This is from Henry Eyring, the father of current apostle Henry B. Eyring, and an award-winning chemist. They are actually two related quotes, three chapters apart, rather than a single quote.
The first quote is from the second chapter, "The Gospel and Modern Science" where he makes the comparison between Newton and Descartes, that Newton stuck with things that could be shown experimentally, while Descartes used philosophy to try and explain things beyond what he could observe. Henry Eyring compares these two methodologies to religion, that there are those things we know by revelation and long experience, and then there are those who go off and try to explain all the mysteries to their own satisfaction. In this comparison, Henry Eyring says that we are closer to Newton.
He then goes on to explain how radio-carbon and uranium dating methods can tell us how old something is, and that
all these wonderful findings in nature should increase our reverence for the omniscient wisdom of the Creator in fashioning this exquisitely complex universe as a school for His children. Since the Gospel embraces all truth, there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion.
The second quote comes from the fifth chapter, "Religion in a Changing World" Here, he speaks of things Joseph Smith taught as revolutionary, one of them being the idea that the Gospel embraces all truth, whatever its source.
He said that once after giving a talk about man in the cosmos, someone asked a question accusing him of putting his "religion in one compartment and [his] science in another." But Henry Eyring explained that he is only obliged to accept the truth. He took the opportunity to talk about how we don't believe prophets to be infallible, and that "The Church would have been perfect if the Lord had not let people into it."
Later he said
The scriptures record God's dealing with His prophets and they are as accurate as He, in His wisdom, requires. They are spiritual guides to religious questions and treat only incidentally scientific and other non-religious questions. In these areas, they should be supplemented by all relevant information. Viewed in this light, most problems disappear. I am obliged, as a Latterday Saint, to believe whatever is true, regardless of the source. Questions involving pre-Adamic man, organic evolution, or who shall be given the Priesthood at present, are interesting and important questions. They will all receive adequate answers in accord with the truth in due course. Whatever the ultimate answers are, the Gospel will remain and new questions will take the place of those we solve. For me, the truth of the Gospel does not hinge on such questions, interesting as they are.
It appears to me as though Jeremy didn't read the book, and instead just copied the quote to begin this section as if to say, "there's no contradictions? Let me show you some contradictions!" If he had read the book, he should have realized that Henry Eyring believed in the scientific consensus. It also doesn't seem that Jeremy believed what Henry Eyring said. Rather than a "gotcha!" quote, he could've used it to answer all his questions here.
“Latter-day revelation teaches that there was no death on this earth before the fall of Adam. Indeed, death entered the world as a direct result of the Fall.”– 2017 LDS BIBLE DICTIONARY TOPIC: DEATH
This entry comes from the first Latter-day Saint edition of the Bible, first published in 1979. It was not changed for the second edition in 2013. The reference to 2017 is probably just when Jeremy last accessed it.
Death before the fall is also a question for mainstream Christians too, as that is something Paul also taught (Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22). You can find various explanations, but one that I like is an idea that Hellenistic Jews and early eastern fathers believed in was an atemporal fall, meaning that the fall was a literal fall from the presence of God, from a place outside time as we know it, and so all of creation and its history is affected by the fall.
Anyway, if you had read Henry Eyring's book, you know that we only have to accept things that are true. He clearly believed in death before the fall. These fringe ideas of the gospel should not be confused for the gospel itself.
Jeffrey R. Holland taught in April 2015 regarding the fall, "I do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that". The important part of the fall is that Jesus Christ redeemed us from the fall.
“4000 B.C. – Fall of Adam”– 2017 LDS BIBLE DICTIONARY TOPIC: CHRONOLOGY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Bible Chronology also includes this statement:
Bible chronology deals with fixing the exact dates of the various events recorded. For the earliest parts of Old Testament history we rely entirely on the scripture itself; but the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint or Greek translation, and the Samaritan Pentateuch do not agree together, so that many dates cannot be fixed with certainty. From the time of David onwards we get much assistance from secular history, such as inscriptions on monuments and other state records. Much work has still to be done in this direction. The dates found at the top of many printed English Bibles are due to Archbishop Ussher (1581–1656). Some of them have been shown to be incorrect.
The 4000 BC is a date calculated using the dates in the Bible, and is not exact. If you are interested in calculated dates, I recommend this video from UsefulCharts on Biblical Chronology. But I don't think it is the date of the fall that Jeremy has a problem with, but death before the fall, which I've already addressed.
“More than 90 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct...At least a handful of times in the last 500 million years, 50 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a geological blink of the eye.”– NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, MASS EXTINCTIONS
They have apparently since updated their article to say more than 99 percent, unless Jeremy misquoted it. And yes, this is true. Jeremy answered his own questions with the first quote that we only have to believe things that are true. The remaining questions are variations on this theme, but where Jeremy forgot the answer.
Not everything has been revealed, and leaders have differences of opinion, but that's okay. We are all imperfect human beings trying to figure this out all together.
The problem Mormonism encounters is that so many of its claims are well within the realm of scientific study, and as such, can be proven or disproven. To cling to faith in these areas, where the overwhelming evidence is against it, is willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication.
I'm always surprised when mainstream Christians share the CES Letter with me. The same arguments Jeremy makes against Latter-day Saints here also apply to mainstream Christians, who can answer them just as easily.
Assumptions of young-earth creationism comes from a naïve view of the gospel, and although some or even many may hold such beliefs, is not representative of the Church as a whole or what it teaches.
1. 2 Nephi 2:22 and Alma 12:23-24 state there was no death of any kind (humans, all animals, birds, fish, dinosaurs, etc.) on this earth until the “Fall of Adam,” which according to D&C 77:6-7 occurred about 7,000 years ago. It is scientifically established that there has been life and death on this planet for billions of years. How does the Church reconcile this?
In the first edition of the CES Letter, this is how it started, and this is what was expanded to fill the opening quotes. So I'll also just repeat myself a bit. These are also claims made in the Bible, but perhaps not surprising, the scriptures don't actually say "humans, all animals, birds, fish, dinosaurs, etc." To hold that interpretation requires you to bring in your own assumptions as to their meaning.
The Church doesn't attempt to reconcile this. As I said before, I think what Jeffrey R. Holland said sums it up nicely, "I do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that".
As a correction, Doctrine and Covenants 77 doesn't necessarily require a literal 1,000 years per seal, but even if it did, the fall would be some 6,000 years ago, not 7,000 years, a figure Jeremy uses throughout this section. The end of the 7th thousand years would put us at the end of the millennium.
How do we explain the massive fossil evidence showing not only animal deaths but also the extinctions of over a dozen different Hominid species over the span of 250,000 years prior to Adam?
I explain it by saying that plants and animals have lived and died for billions of years. The fossil record gives us a window into the past and I think learning new things is exciting.
2. If Adam and Eve are the first humans, how do we explain the dozen or so other Hominid species who lived and died 35,000 – 2.4 million years before Adam?
The Church doesn't have a position:
The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution. Organic evolution, or changes to species’ inherited traits over time, is a matter for scientific study. Nothing has been revealed concerning evolution. Though the details of what happened on earth before Adam and Eve, including how their bodies were created, have not been revealed, our teachings regarding man’s origin are clear and come from revelation.Before we were born on earth, we were spirit children of heavenly parents, with bodies in their image. God directed the creation of Adam and Eve and placed their spirits in their bodies. We are all descendants of Adam and Eve, our first parents, who were created in God’s image. There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created. In addition, “for a time they lived alone in a paradisiacal setting where there was neither human death nor future family.” They fell from that state, and this Fall was an essential part of Heavenly Father’s plan for us to become like Him.
Personally, I explain it with evolution. We already reject creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, so personally I don't find a meaningful distinction between dust → man and dust → ape → man.
When did those guys stop being human?
I'm confused by this question. Perhaps he means, "when did they start being human?" or maybe "when did we stop considering those guys human?" The important part, religiously speaking is that our spirits are literally children of God. You are free to think what you like about the other Hominid species, as nothing has been revealed about them.
3. Genetic science and testing has advanced significantly the past few decades. I was surprised to learn from results of my own genetic test that 1.6% of my DNA is Neanderthal. How does this fact fit with Mormon theology and doctrine that I am a literal descendant of a literal Adam and Eve from about 7,000 years ago?
I'll get to Neanderthals in the next item, but here I just want to address this apparent misunderstanding that because one is a descendant of someone that lived tens of thousands of years ago, they cannot also be a descendant of someone only thousands of years ago. Stated that way, the answer becomes obvious. But perhaps the question is more about how can we all be descended from a pair of people who only lived a few thousand years ago?
Actually, according to mathematical models, that is exactly the case. Consider that you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so forth, doubling every generation. After 40 generations, that's a trillion people. There weren't a trillion people living a thousand years ago, so there has got to be a lot of overlap with people marrying related people.
Using a mathematical model that if people occasionally leave their village to one nearby, you only have to go back as little as 3000 years before you reach a point where everyone living at that time who has descendants today, is an ancestor of all living people.
No, it is not just one pair, but it goes to show how connected we are that you don't even have to go nearly as far back as Adam and Eve to to find a common ancestor.
Where do the Neanderthals fit in? How do I have pre-Adamic Neanderthal DNA and Neanderthal blood circulating my veins when this species died off about 33,000 years before Adam and Eve?
We are still learning, and there are a few different theories on the timeline and ancestry, but as I understand it, about 2 million years ago, Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis, possibly from a group that was isolated in West Asia from the rest in Africa. They spread through West Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, back to Africa, and to Europe.
Between 1 million to 500,00 years ago or so, Homo heidelbergensis evolved from Homo erectus and then in Europe evolved into Homo neanderthalensis, the Neanderthals. Neanderthals lived in Western, Central, Eastern, and Mediterranean Europe, as well as Southwest, Central, and Northern Asia.
Meanwhile, Homo heidelbergensis, still in Africa, evolved into Homo sapiens (modern humans) about 300,000 to 200,000 years ago. It is believed that there were several waves of human migration out of Africa. They encountered archaic humans, including Neanderthals, and interbred with them about 47,000-65,000 years ago. Neanderthal-derived DNA accounts for 1-4% of modern genomes for people outside Sub-Saharan Africa, varying by region. The Neanderthals went extinct about 40,000 years ago, replaced by European Homo sapiens.
4. Other events/claims that science has discredited:
- Tower of Babel: (a staple story of the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon)
I was not familiar with the term "staple story" and tried to look it up. Unless I'm mistaken, it seems to refer to an often-repeated story. Except the Book of Ether only mentions the "great tower" three times, all in Ether 1, the first two Moroni introducing the work.
Perhaps Jeremy just means a foundational story, or something like that. Here are some things to consider before thinking that one must take the Tower of Babel story literally.
The book of Ether was originally written by Ether, over a thousand years after the tower of Babel. He does not explain where he gets his information from (whether oral history, revelation, or elsewhere) but apparently God had revealed to him at least one piece Israelite history, the knowledge of Jerusalem (see Ether 13).
The book of Ether was then abridged by Moroni. He didn't include everything that Ether had written. Moroni would have also needed to translate it. We can see that Moroni added in his own thoughts through the story, so he may have brought in his own cultural understanding as well. We don't know how literal of a translation he was making. For that matter, we don't even know how literal the translation revealed to Joseph Smith is.
Even ignoring that, perhaps we are reading too much into Ether based on our knowledge of Genesis. The part of the tower of Babel story that has been discredited by science is the idea that everyone spoke the same language before then, and everyone spoke a different language afterwards. The Book of Ether only speaks of the time "the Lord confounded the language of the people" and doesn't make the specific claim that "the whole earth was of one language and of one speech" like in Genesis. Jared also described the confounding of languages differently, as they would "not understand our words" rather than "not understand one another's speech" as in Genesis.
Consider also that the book of Ether wasn't intended for the people of his day, but were hidden in a way that the people of king Limhi would find them.
Meanwhile on the other hand, one piece of evidence in favor of the antiquity of the book of Ether is that the ships would be lighted by stones. Take a look at the footnote on Genesis 6:16 where God instructs Noah, "A window shalt thou make to the ark". The footnote says, "HEB tsohar; some rabbis believed it was a precious stone that shone in the ark." Also transliterated tzohar, there is an ancient Hebrew tradition that says it referred to a very large pearl or gem that Noah hung in the rafters of the ark which gave light to the ark.
- Global flood: 4,500 years ago
Since I'm only responding to the criticisms Jeremy brings up, and because I don't like linking to videos critical of the Church, I've removed most links to videos here and throughout the CES Letter. I didn't know where Jeremy was getting the date from, since it wasn't in the Bible Chronology that he referenced earlier. But the video Jeremy linked said "about forty-four hundred years ago" and used an image from the September 1980 Ensign as a source.
Anyway, I recommend reading the "Thoughts to Keep in Mind" section in the Come Follow Me manual for the Old Testament. There, they say:
Don’t expect the Old Testament to present a thorough and precise history of humankind. That’s not what the original authors and compilers were trying to create. Their larger concern was to teach something about God—about His plan for His children, about what it means to be His covenant people, and about how to find redemption when we don’t live up to our covenants.
You don't have to believe in a literal global flood if you don't want to. You only have to believe things that are true.
- Noah's Ark: Humans and animals having their origins from Noah’s family and the animals contained in the ark 4,500 years ago. It is scientifically impossible, for example, for the bear to have evolved into several species (Sun Bear, Polar Bear, Grizzly Bear, etc.) from common ancestors from Noah’s time just a few thousand years ago. There are a host of other impossibilities associated with Noah’s Ark story claims.
The Etuscan bear lived 5-1.3 million years ago and is believed to be the ancestor of modern bear varieties. Latter-day Saints don't make a claim as to whether extinct bear species from millions of years ago were on the ark or not, so I'm not sure what Jeremy is talking about here. Generally, those who reject evolution... reject evolution, so I don't know that anyone claims the Etruscan bear was on the ark. Those that take the ark literally would say that the several bear species would have been on the ark.
Anyway, like the flood, you also don't have to believe in a literal ark if you don't want to.
I should add here that with the 2017 edition of the CES Letter, Jeremy removed the "Scriptures" section, providing this explanation on his website:
The Scriptures section is where a lot of the tonal problems were in the previous CES Letter. After much thought and evaluation, Jeremy decided that the Scriptures section was redundant and unnecessary as it was a distraction from the core problems that are uniquely Mormon. Many of the issues with the bible and Christianity that were discussed in this section aren’t uniquely Mormon issues and problems.
It seems that Jeremy removed things from the Science section for the same reason. Since they were removed, I won't respond to them here, but I hope my fellow Christians who share the CES Letter will realize that the CES Letter is also anti-Christian.
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