Creation and Evolution

"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day" (Exodus 20:11).  Most people, even in the Church, get to a verse like this one and think "Well obviously he didn't REALLY make everything in six days ..."  Since I was young, I was under the impression that we weren't expected to believe that, because the Church believes in "science."

In my youth, and up through college, I was taught evolutionism in my biology classes.  The teacher always made sure to emphasize that what we were being taught was fact, not theory.  No one at home or church ever countered it, so I never had any reason to question it.  At times the logic in the evidences didn't seem to match up, but I just trusted that some scientist somewhere, who was much smarter than me, had it all figured out.

But all that changed one day while I was talking to an apologist friend of mine.  He mentioned Lenski's E. coli experiment, where bacteria were isolated in different environments.  After 60 million generations, they were able to adapt but they never produced anything other than more E. coli.  Keep in mind that this is about a hundred times the proposed number of generations between humans and apes, and that bacteria are much more susceptible to mutation than humans and apes.  You would expect them to at least have jumped species, maybe even genera or families.  When he told me this, I thought, "Oh my gosh, is there no such thing as evolution?"

Indeed, I was fascinated.  I subsequently learned everything I could about the subject, both from the scriptures, the Church, and Creation scientists.  I ultimately came to the conclusion that harmonizing evolutionism with the Gospel is absolute heresy, inconsistent with both the Scriptures and empirical science.  Below are some answers to questions and arguments that might be made on this subject:

The Scriptures don't say how He did it.  They only say that He did it.

If this were true, all that would be written in the first 11 chapters of the Bible would be "In the beginning something happened, and whatever it was, God was behind it.  Chapter 12: Abraham!"  Although we might not know everything about the Creation, the scriptural accounts that we do have are more detailed than you might remember.

But what about errors in Bible translation?  Surely the word "day" was a mistranslation.

If you can't take the Bible's word for it, we have two more creation accounts in Moses and Abraham, and all three are perfectly consistent.  The word "day" is also present in Moses, so there's no mistranslation there.  If the Bible were unreliable on vital doctrines like the creation, we wouldn't use it in the Church.

The scriptures state pretty clearly that God created the world in 6 days (Genesis 1:1, Exodus 20:11) and that there was no death before the Fall (1 Corinthians 15:21, Romans 5:12).

Hasn't the Church's stance on Evolution changed through the years?

No.  Every prophet who made any revealing statements on this topic was clearly against evolutionism.  Joseph Smith was given the Creation accounts in the Pearl of Great Price.  Brigham Young taught that Adam had no parents other than just God, and he was clearly opposed to the theories of Darwin and Huxley, and he established Brigham Young Academy in Provo to counter these heresies.  Joseph F. Smith issued the declaration on the Origin of Man, which states that evolutionism is only the theory of men, and that we are descendants of Deity in every sense.  Joseph Fielding Smith was specially outspoken about this subject, having written entire books and given devotionals at BYU about it.  Bruce R. McConkie did the same thing, calling the act of harmonizing the two teachings "false and devilish."  Gordon B. Hinckley publicly supported Joseph Fielding Smith's teachings and literature about evolutionism.  Russell M. Nelson, a surgeon, openly said in an interview that there was no such thing as organic evolution, saying, "Man has always been man.  Dogs have always been dogs.  Monkeys have always been monkeys.  It's just the way genetics works."

More details about the Church's stance on evolution can be found at these links:
Has the Church changed its position?
Have different presidents contradicted each other?

There are two main premises you can use to explain the origin of earth and life.  On the left, there's the premise that the world is completely natural, supernatural miracles don't happen, and everything came about through the random course of cause and effect.  If this were the case, then evolution simply must be how it happened.  There would be no alternative.  On the right, however, we have the premise that God created everything.  If this is true, then he must have created it the way he said he did, because he cannot lie.  So when it comes down to it, it's just a matter of which premise you choose to believe in (although I find the creation paradigm to be more in line with empirical science.)  Every piece of evidence is an object or phenomenon that has two ways of looking at it.

But doesn't carbon dating prove that the Earth is billions of years old?

No.  Carbon-14 only lasts thousands of years, so it can't be used to measure things billions of years old.  As for the other types of radiometric dating, you have to assume certain atmospheric conditions were present in order to make it work.  In other words, the theory is based on assumption upon assumption.  They've dated rocks that came from a volcano which had only erupted and cooled a few years before, and they still got arbitrary dates millions of years ago.  Not to mention the fact that you get dramatically different ages when you use different dating methods.  In short, it just doesn't really work the way they make it sound.

Where did dinosaurs come from, and what happened to them?

There's nothing magical about dinosaurs.  They were created at the same time as all the other animals, and then went extinct probably a few hundred years ago.

Humans and dinosaurs at the same time?!  That's preposterous!!!

There's nothing preposterous about it.  Dinosaurs are just another type of animal.  In the middle ages, there was a certain kind of animal that people called a dragon.  In historical records, dragons are never described as fictional animals.  They were just everyday animals to them, and historians will believe an entire account except for the little bit about the dragon.  This also explains how people all over the world know what a dragon is and have their own name for it, from Europe to China to America to Africa.  There are cave drawings, paintings, and engravings all over the world that resemble what we know as dinosaurs.  In fact we're lucky that they had that much contact with them, seeing as so many kinds of dinosaurs lived in different environments from humans, such as swamps.

But if dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans, how did their bones get buried so deep?

The layers that we see in the earth were all formed at the same time in mud flows during the Noachian Flood.  In fact such a flood would be the perfect way to have their bones fossilized.  Otherwise it's kind of hard to explain how enormous sauropods suddenly get dragged into giant bodies of water and buried in the mud before the body can decay.  Fossils are much more likely to be an evidence that God has the power and authority to destroy the Earth.

Another challenge for the idea of dinosaurs having died out millions of years ago is the presence of soft tissue in their bones.  Part of the definition of a fossil is that there is no more organic matter, only rock, because tissues break down quickly, and under the best of circumstances can last only thousands, not millions, of years.  In addition, animals are discovered all the time which, according to the atheistic time scale, are supposed to have gone extinct a long time ago.  The coelecanth fish, for example, was thought to be the first fish to walk on land, giving rise to amphibians, and then to have died out 100 million years ago.  And then they found them, swimming around in the Indian Ocean.  Looks like it's just a regular fish.  But keep in mind, this is supposed to be twice as old as the dinosaurs.  This is twice as impressive as finding pterodactyls flying around in a jungle somewhere.  In short, just because it stops showing up in the atheistic timeline, doesn't mean that it went extinct then, or even at all, for that matter.

Haven't scientists found the link between humans and apes?

No.  They've just found remains of humans, and remains of apes, nothing in between.  The australopithecine, which is considered to be the prime candidate of a human-ape link, can be argued to be more apelike than a chimpanzee.  They just take the human skeletons and slouch them over, and take the ape skeletons and stand them up, to make them look more ape-like or human-like.

Can't scientists observe evolution in action?

Well, that depends on your definition of evolution.  There's what some call micro-evolution, which they define as the changes in living things that we can see e.g. diversification of dog breeds, and then macro-evolution, which they define as the changes which we can't see, e.g. monkeys turning into humans.  These two are completely different processes.  The former is the shuffling and selecting of genes and the latter is mutagenesis of completely new information.  Using examples of the former to prove the latter is logical the fallacy of equivocation.  Bacteria mutate and adapt, but can never become something other than bacteria.  Dog genes are selected, but they only produce more dogs.  That's just how genetics works.

How did Noah fit all those animals on the ark?

This question is often asked by people who change the story to be that the ark was a small boat and Noah had every animal species in the world on it.  That's a straw man fallacy.  The ark was hundreds of feet long, at least a hundred feet tall, and another hundred feet wide.  There were multiple floors and plenty of room for, what would have been, only a few thousand young land animals which had the right genes to produce all the animals that we have to this day.

Unfortunately, in the face of criticism, believers feel a need to harmonize these two points of view.  They might say they're harmonizing it, but in every case it's the atheistic version they're actually accepting.  Before I became a creationist, this was my reasoning:  God blew the Big Bang just right so that everything would fall into place naturally.  Through the course of cause and effect, there would end up being a planet the perfect distance from a star, with the perfect conditions for life to spontaneously generate, and ultimately give rise to a life from which looked and thought like God.  But there's one big problem with this kind of thinking: that's not what He said he did.  If you want to know where everything comes from, just open the book of Moses and God will personally narrate to you, in the first person, what he did to bring this world and everything on it into existence.  And we have no reason, scientific or otherwise, to doubt that that's exactly what he did.

In summary, speculating about the origin of the earth and life is outside the scope of natural science.  It's a matter of history.  There's no proof for evolution or an astronomically old earth, so there's no reason to venture out into these preposterous hypotheses, which are biologically and mathematically impossible.

When I came to accept the fact that God just did it the way he said he did, my eyes were opened to the beauty of nature to an even greater extent.  The colors of the flowers, the interactions between animals, and the bone structure of our own anatomy are not by-products of evolution.  God specially made it that way when he created our first parents from the dust, and every other ancestral plant and animal.  God's word is consistent with itself and with empirical science, so there is no reason to complicate things.  There's much freedom and knowledge in just believing what what He says.