Evolution & the Fall
The claim:
"2 Nephi 2:22 and Alma 12:23-24 state there was no death of any kind (humans, all animals, 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?
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?"[1]
"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?"[2]
The argument here is about what scripture supposedly commits the Church to. Latter-day Saint scripture, it says, locks the Church into a planet only about 7,000 years old, with no creature of any kind dying before Adam, no human-like species before Adam, and Adam and Eve as the literal ancestors of everyone alive. Science has shown all of that to be false: the earth is billions of years old, a dozen hominid species lived and died long before any date for Adam, and many of us carry Neanderthal DNA from a species that vanished tens of thousands of years before he supposedly appeared. If the Church is committed to that timeline, the argument runs, the Church is simply wrong.
The science is right. The earth is ancient. Other human-like species really did live and die before Adam. The Neanderthal DNA is real. None of that is in dispute on this page. What is in dispute is the claim stacked on top of it, that the Church is committed to the opposite. That commitment was never real, and a single afternoon at the pulpit in 1931 shows why.
An apostle with a geology degree already said this
In 1931, at the First Presidency's invitation, James E. Talmage stood at the Salt Lake Tabernacle pulpit and told the Saints that the chalk beds and deep-sea limestones are packed with the bones of animals that "lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation."[3]
Sit with who said that and where. Talmage was an Apostle. He held a PhD in geology. He was speaking from the most authoritative pulpit in the Church, with the approval of its highest council, and he described exactly the planet the CES Letter describes: one where living things died, age after age, long before any human walked it. The most senior science-trained leader the Church had, speaking with permission from the top, taught pre-Adamic death as settled fact almost a century ago.
That one fact is enough to unravel the whole argument, because the argument depends on the Church being committed to the opposite. It never was.
The Church has no official position on this
The CES Letter quietly skips one piece that changes everything. The Church has never made the age of the earth or the theory of evolution into binding doctrine. It has done the opposite, on the record, for over a century.
The 2016 Church History essay on the subject states it in one sentence: "The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution. Organic evolution... is a matter for scientific study."[4] The 2016 New Era magazine, answering the same question for young members, is just as direct: "Nothing has been revealed concerning evolution... The details of what happened on earth before Adam and Eve, including how their bodies were created, have not been revealed."[5]
This is not a recent retreat in the face of awkward science. Back in 1871, decades before anyone could date a rock, Brigham Young told the Saints that whether God made the world "in six days or in as many millions of years" was a matter no one could settle without revelation, and that if geologists had shown the earth to be hundreds of millions of years old, "they have good reason for their faith."[6] A Church President said that. The latitude the Church gives on these questions is original equipment, not damage control.
The most important document here is a 1931 memorandum from the First Presidency to the Church's leaders, written to settle an internal dispute over exactly these questions. It states flatly that "the conception that there was no death upon the earth prior to Adam's fall is... declared to be no doctrine of the Church."[7] Read that again. The very claim the CES Letter says the Church is committed to, the First Presidency had already labeled "no doctrine of the Church" back in 1931. The whole argument is aimed at a position the Church officially rejected ninety years ago.
The verses don't say what the CES Letter says
The argument leans on three scriptures. Read with the words the CES Letter leaves out, none of them carries the weight placed on it.
2 Nephi 2:22. The "no death" verse comes from Lehi's farewell sermon to his son Jacob. Lehi is making a theological point, that opposition and choice are necessary, building to his famous line a few verses later: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy."[8] The "no death" verse is a what-if along the way, and it contains a location the CES Letter drops from its quotation. The full text: "if Adam had not transgressed... he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state."[9] In the garden. The verse describes what would have stayed frozen inside Eden, the paradise Adam and Eve lived in, not the condition of the entire planet outside it. Lehi never says no animal anywhere on earth ever died before the Fall. The conflict only appears once you trim away "in the garden of Eden."
Alma 12:23. Same move. The CES Letter reads this as a flat statement that nothing died before the Fall. It is actually an if-then about a road not taken: "if it had been possible for Adam to have partaken of the fruit of the tree of life at that time, there would have been no death."[10] Alma's point is that if Adam had eaten from the tree of life after his transgression, death would never have come, which is why he was kept from it. The verse spells out a hypothetical that never happened, and says nothing about whether the wider world held death before the Fall.
D&C 77:6-7. This is where the 7,000 years comes from. The verses describe "the seven thousand years of [the earth's] temporal existence."[11] That phrase, temporal existence, means the era of human probation since the Fall, the time God deals with people on this earth, not the geological age of the planet. Talmage spelled this out himself: the creation chapters "were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science."[3:1] The verse marks out the span of human history that matters to the plan of salvation; it was never meant to date the planet.
Three verses, three qualifiers the CES Letter's quotations leave on the cutting-room floor. Put them back and the airtight case for a 7,000-year-old deathless earth simply isn't in the text. (Faithful scholars actually read these verses in several compatible ways; the in-depth version lays them out side by side.)
Key Point
The CES Letter quotes each verse with its qualifier removed. 2 Nephi 2:22 says Adam "would have remained in the garden of Eden." Alma 12:23 says "if it had been possible for Adam to have partaken of the fruit of the tree of life, there would have been no death." D&C 77:6-7 says "the seven thousand years of [the earth's] temporal existence." None of the three, read whole, makes the no-death-anywhere-for-7,000-years claim the CES Letter pins on "the Church."
Adam as the first covenant-bearer, not the first body
Now the harder question, the one the hominids and the Neanderthal DNA actually raise. If anatomically modern humans existed for roughly 300,000 years before any reasonable date for Adam, what was Adam? When did "those guys," as the CES Letter puts it, stop being human?
The answer turns on a distinction the Restoration is unusually well equipped to make. There are two different things "first man" could mean. One is biological: the first creature with a human body. The other is covenantal: the first person to receive a spirit from God in the full sense, the first to stand accountable before God, the first prophet, the first to step into the story of Eden, the Fall, and the plan of salvation. The science only speaks to the first meaning. The scriptures are making the second.
The 2016 New Era says exactly this when it teaches that "there were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."[5:1] Notice what that claims and what it doesn't. Human-shaped bodies could well have existed before Adam; what begins with Adam is the covenant role. Other human-like populations could have lived and died as biology, while the spiritual-covenant role the scriptures care about starts with him.
This is not an idea invented to dodge the CES Letter. Faithful Latter-day Saint biologists have been building it out for decades. Trent Stephens and Jeffrey Meldrum, two scientists at Idaho State University, laid out the fullest version in their 2001 book Evolution and Mormonism: God created life through evolution; Adam and Eve are real, historical people, the first to become covenant-bearers; the human-like species before them were biologically continuous with Adam but not yet covenant-bearers; and the Fall introduced covenant mortality, the spiritual separation from God the Atonement heals, not the biological death of every organism.[12] Steven Peck, a BYU biology professor, developed a similar reading in a peer-reviewed journal and a later book, describing Adam and Eve as the first of God's spirit children joined to one of these evolved bodies.[13][14]
Read this way, every fact the CES Letter raises fits without strain. A dozen hominid species before Adam: fine, they were biology, not covenant-bearers. Modern humans at 315,000 years ago: fine, the covenant role still begins with Adam. Neanderthal DNA in your genome: fine, interbreeding among biological populations says nothing about who first carried the covenant. Adam's importance was never about being the first body off the assembly line.
The Restoration already had plenty of room for this. BYU, the Church's own university, with the First Presidency on its board, has taught mainstream evolutionary biology as standard science since 1971 and runs an active, well-funded research program in it today.[15] Some of the most prominent Latter-day Saints of the last century were working scientists who saw no conflict: Henry Eyring, a Berkeley-trained chemist who won the National Medal of Science and whose son now sits in the First Presidency, wrote that "since the Gospel embraces all truth, there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion."[16] Russell M. Nelson, a heart surgeon before he was Church President, said the same at a BYU building dedication in 2015: "There is no conflict between science and religion."[17] The CES Letter actually opens its science section by quoting Eyring, then argues against a view he plainly did not hold. He was describing the faithful position, not a problem for it. The in-depth version traces this whole tradition of faithful scientists.
What members were actually taught
The cleanest part of this story is the scripture and the official position. The messy part is what ordinary members were actually taught for much of the twentieth century.
While the framework above sat in the institutional record, two influential leaders spent decades teaching the opposite to the broad membership. Joseph Fielding Smith, an Apostle and later Church President, argued for a young earth, no pre-Adamic death, and no pre-Adamic life in his 1954 book Man: His Origin and Destiny, and he presented it not as opinion but as revealed truth.[18] Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine hardlined the same positions and was, for forty years, the most widely owned Latter-day Saint reference book outside scripture.[19] For a great many members across those generations, the working assumption absorbed from manuals, books, and parents really was young-earth, no-death-before-Adam.
The fair defense is that the Church never canonized either man's view, and that the 1931 First Presidency memorandum had already ruled it out as doctrine more than twenty years before Man: His Origin and Destiny was printed. That is true, and it matters. But it does not erase the gap. The official, open position sat in old magazines and an internal memo; the books in members' homes said something stricter. Those two things were both real at the same time, and pretending the average member of that era heard the open version would paper over the gap.[20]
There is one more genuinely open question. In 2015, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland described pre-Fall Eden as a place of "neither human death nor future family."[21] That fits the covenantal reading well, human death meaning the covenant-bearers, Adam and his line. But if you read "human" to mean any biological Homo sapiens, it collides with the 315,000-year fossil record, and a listener not already thinking in covenant terms would naturally read it that way. The covenantal reading resolves the tension, but only for someone who already holds the distinction. And the deeper question underneath, what the moral standing of those pre-Adamic humans actually was, the Church has genuinely never answered. The most accurate thing to say is the New Era's "Nothing has been revealed." The framework was never built to depend on that answer, which is why it holds steady with the question left open.
The Fall was never about biology
Everything hinges on what kind of event the Fall is. If it is a biological event, a calendar date when organism-level death first switched on, then deep time and the fossil record really would be a problem. In Restoration theology, though, the Fall is a theological event: the entry of human mortality, the separation from God's presence, the necessary setup for the Atonement. It teaches that we live in a fallen state, that this was God's plan rather than an accident, and that Christ overcomes it. Not one of those three depends on a date for the earth or a mechanism for Adam's body. The theology works whether God formed Adam from dust in an instant or guided long ages of life toward a body prepared to receive a spirit and make a choice.
Once you see that, the apparent collision just dissolves. The deep-time earth, the dozen hominid species, the Neanderthal DNA, these are the same facts Talmage already had in front of him in 1931, and they leave the Restoration's real commitments untouched: that we are the children of God, that Adam and Eve were real people who bore the covenant, that the Fall was purposeful, and that the Atonement reaches everyone.
When the technical questions get genuinely hard, it helps to remember what stands on much firmer ground. The Book of Mormon was dictated aloud in roughly sixty working days, about 270,000 words, with no notes and no rewriting of earlier pages as later ones came, and no one has produced a credible natural explanation for it. On the one point in this whole debate it actually settles, it is clean: not the age of the earth, on which it is silent, but the meaning of the Fall itself, "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy." That is a covenantal Adam. And a covenantal Adam is exactly the one the fossils, the hominids, and the genome leave standing.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," no. 1, p. 111. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," no. 3, p. 111. ↩︎
James E. Talmage, "The Earth and Man," address delivered in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, 9 August 1931. Published in the Deseret News, 21 November 1931, with the imprimatur of the First Presidency. Reprinted as a Church pamphlet in 1931. Reprinted in The Instructor 100 (December 1965): 474–477. Online: https://interpreterfoundation.org/reprint-sm1-12-the-earth-and-man/. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Organic Evolution," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution. ↩︎
"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. ↩︎ ↩︎
Brigham Young, discourse, 14 May 1871, Journal of Discourses 14:114–118 (relevant geological/age-of-earth statement at 14:115–117). ↩︎
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. Documentary history in Sherlock 1980 and Keller 1982. ↩︎
2 Nephi 2:25. ↩︎
2 Nephi 2:22. ↩︎
Alma 12:23. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 77:6–7. ↩︎
Trent D. Stephens and D. Jeffrey Meldrum, with Forrest B. Peterson, Evolution and Mormonism: A Quest for Understanding (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001). ↩︎
Steven L. Peck, "Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 1–36. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/crawling-out-of-the-primordial-soup-a-step-toward-the-emergence-of-an-lds-theology-compatible-with-organic-evolution-2/. ↩︎
Steven L. Peck, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute Publications, 2015). https://publications.mi.byu.edu/book/evolving-faith/. ↩︎
"50 Years of Teaching Evolution at BYU," BYU Life Sciences Magazine. https://lifesciences.byu.edu/magazine/50-years-of-teaching-evolution-at-byu. Course Zoology 404 / Comparative Evolutionary Theory launched fall 1971 by Dr. Clayton White and Dr. Duane Jeffery; 1997–2021 grant and publication statistics for the BYU evolutionary biology faculty. ↩︎
Henry Eyring, The Faith of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1967), 12, 31. Internet Archive scan: https://archive.org/details/faithofscientist0000eyri. ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, remarks at the dedication of the BYU Life Sciences Building, 9 April 2015. Reported in Church News, 14 April 2015. https://www.thechurchnews.com/2015/4/14/23212914/elder-nelson-dedicates-life-sciences-building-there-is-no-conflict-between-science-and-religion/. ↩︎
Joseph Fielding Smith, Man: His Origin and Destiny (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954). Explicit defense of young-earth creationism, no pre-Adamic death, global flood, and approximately 6,000-year earth as Church doctrine. ↩︎
Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1958; 2nd ed., 1966). Treated belief in young-earth creationism, no pre-Adamic death, and a global flood as required by the gospel. Mormon Doctrine was widely treated by lay members as quasi-canonical despite repeated First Presidency discomfort with it. ↩︎
Joseph Fielding Smith treated young-earth creationism and no-pre-Adamic-death as revealed doctrine across sixty years of senior leadership and was Church President 1970–1972. His writings remain in print at Deseret Book. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine hardlined the same positions and was for forty years (1958–1990s) the most-distributed Latter-day Saint reference work outside canonized scripture. For most lay members in the McKay-through-Benson era, what they were taught from manuals and parents was effectively young-earth creationism plus no-pre-Adamic-death. The framework's institutional preservation and its lay-level circulation are two different things, and the article works through both honestly in the "Pre-Adamite tradition" section below. ↩︎
Jeffrey R. Holland, "Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet," April 2015 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2015/04/where-justice-love-and-mercy-meet. Holland describes pre-Fall Eden as "a paradisiacal setting where there was neither human death nor future family." ↩︎