Science
The CES Letter's science section makes a blunt accusation. The Church's own scriptures and prophets, it says, lock the faith into a set of claims science has long since disproven: an earth only a few thousand years old, no death of any kind before Adam, a flood that drowned the whole planet, and a Tower of Babel that split the world's languages in a day. Cling to a faith committed to all that, the section concludes, and you are guilty of "willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication."[1]
The whole charge rests on one word: requires. It works only if the Church actually requires those positions as binding doctrine. So look at who gets quoted. The opening pages lean on a devout Latter-day Saint scientist, a Bible Dictionary (a study help that warns on its own first page not to treat it as the Church's official word), an old timeline chart, and a few sermons by individual leaders from the 1800s. The one source the argument truly needs is missing: a verse of scripture, or an official First Presidency statement the whole Church has voted to accept as doctrine, that ties the faith to any of these four claims.
That missing source is the heart of the matter. The clearest test came in 1931, when two senior leaders fell into a public quarrel over the age of the earth and whether anything died before Adam. The First Presidency, the three men at the head of the Church, could have backed one side and ended it. They refused to. They told the leadership that neither side of the dispute had ever been accepted as doctrine, and they handed the underlying science back to the scientists:
"Leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research."[2]
This was no isolated sidestep. The same neutral footing has held for the better part of a century and a half. Brigham Young told the Saints in 1871 that geologists who dated the earth to "hundreds of millions of years" "have good reason for their faith." Brigham Young University, the Church's own school, has taught evolution in its biology classes since 1971. And in 2016 the Church's website put the question to rest in a single sentence:
"The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution."[3]
The same answer shows up in who the Church chooses to lead it. James Talmage, ordained an apostle, held a doctorate in geology and taught from the Tabernacle pulpit that animals lived and died for ages before any people existed. A research chemist and a research physicist were called to the apostleship in the decades that followed. Russell M. Nelson, the prophet who leads the Church today, spent his working life as a heart surgeon. If believing in a 6,000-year-old earth were really the price of membership, the Church would hardly keep promoting the very people most equipped to know the earth is older than that.
The CES Letter stacks four "discredited" claims in quick succession. They fall into two kinds, which is why the full answers live in two separate articles.
The first kind is about scripture. The section takes a few verses, about the garden of Eden and about "no death before the Fall," and reads them as proof of a young, deathless world, while quietly skipping the qualifying words each one carries. Evolution and the Fall walks through those verses in context and lays out the several faithful ways to read "death before the Fall," none of which needs a young earth, including Elder Holland's point that the Fall brought human death, not the death of every living thing.
The second kind is about events: the global flood, Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel. One concession belongs on the table right away. Two Church Presidents and an apostle really did describe Noah's flood as drowning the whole planet, and on the geology they were simply wrong. There was no worldwide flood around 2500 BC.[3:1] But a leader getting the geology wrong is a far cry from the Church writing that error into its doctrine, and the 1931 ruling had already drawn that exact line. Discredited Claims sorts each event into what was ever doctrine and what traces back only to individual leaders, and it gives the one place where the pressure is real, the Book of Mormon's tie to the Tower of Babel, a full hearing instead of a dodge.
Once the claims are sorted this way, the section runs out of force, because the Church never asked you to defend the positions the CES Letter pins on it. And its actual teaching about knowledge points the other way entirely. One Latter-day Saint revelation defines deity itself by a love of knowledge: "The glory of God is intelligence" (D&C 93:36). Another commands members to "seek learning, even by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:118), a line built into the prayer that dedicated the very first Latter-day Saint temple. These were written into scripture at the start, not slipped in later when the fossils got awkward. A faith that sends its members chasing truth wherever it turns up has nothing to fear from a bone or a strand of DNA.
A few of these questions stay genuinely hard, and on some of them the truest thing to say is that the Church has chosen to leave the door open. When you hit one of those, it helps to recall where the faith is actually moored. Not to any single reading of Genesis, but to the Book of Mormon, some 270,000 words Joseph produced by dictation across the spring and summer of 1829, working without a manuscript to read from or revise. The Adam it gives us is the figure this whole argument keeps circling: a man who fell on purpose, as part of a plan, "that men might be" (2 Nephi 2:25). An Adam like that belongs to covenant rather than to biology, and no fossil bed or genome touches him. Henry Eyring, the chemist the CES Letter chose for its own opening quotation, had it right: the gospel takes in all truth, and the evidence raised in this section never reached the doctrine it was firing at.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," pp. 110–111. The section opens with a Henry Eyring epigraph and two Bible Dictionary excerpts, lists four "events/claims that science has discredited," and closes (p. 111) with the line that clinging to faith where "the overwhelming evidence is against it, is willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication." ↩︎
First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, Charles W. Nibley), memorandum to the Quorum of the Twelve, the First Council of Seventy, and the Presiding Bishopric, 5 April 1931. Quoted in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 75. The companion passage instructs leaders to "Leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research." ↩︎
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 14:116 (14 May 1871); on the flood as the earth's "baptism," Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 8:83 (1860), Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses 21:323 (1880), and John Taylor, Journal of Discourses 26:74–75 (1884); the 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, "Evolution and the Origin of Man," approved by the BYU Board of Trustees; "What does the Church believe about evolution?" New Era, October 2016, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution; and the 2016 Church History Topics page "Organic Evolution," https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution ("The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution"). The mid-century lay-level circulation of young-earth creationism through Joseph Fielding Smith's Man: His Origin and Destiny (Bookcraft, 1954) and Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine (Bookcraft, 1958; 2nd ed. 1966), neither of which was canonized, is documented in Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution (Greg Kofford Books, 2005). ↩︎ ↩︎