Appearance
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]
"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? When did those guys stop being human?"[2]
"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? 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?"[3]
The CES Letter's three numbered claims work as a single argument. Restoration scripture (so the argument runs) commits the Church to a 7,000-year-old earth with no death of any organism before Adam, no hominid species before Adam, and Adam and Eve as the literal genetic ancestors of all modern humans. The fossil record, paleoanthropology, and the Neanderthal genome all falsify these commitments. Therefore (the argument continues) Restoration scripture is falsified — and continued faith on these questions amounts, in Runnells's introductory framing of his Science section, to "willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication."[4]
Each load-bearing premise of that argument is wrong. The Church does not require a 7,000-year-old earth — Brigham Young in 1871, James E. Talmage in 1931, Spencer W. Kimball in 1976, the 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, and the 2016 New Era Q&A explicitly accommodate geological deep time.[5][6][7][8][9] The Church does not require no animal death before the Fall — Talmage 1931 affirmed pre-Adamic animal death from the Tabernacle pulpit at the First Presidency's invitation, and the 1931 First Presidency memorandum to general authorities explicitly stated that "the conception that there was no death upon the earth prior to Adam's fall is likewise declared to be no doctrine of the Church."[6:1][10] The Church does not require Adam and Eve as the literal genetic ancestors of all humans — the 1909 First Presidency's "literal sons and daughters of Deity" language is about divine parentage in the premortal sense, not Y-chromosome inheritance.[11] And the Adam-as-first-prophet-and-covenant-bearer reading articulated by Trent Stephens and D. Jeffrey Meldrum (2001), Steven L. Peck (2010, 2015), Joseph M. Spencer (2020), and Ben Spackman (multiple essays, 2017–2024) handles hominid pre-history and Neanderthal admixture without theological collapse.[12][13][14][15][16]
This article addresses the evolution-and-Fall theological cluster in detail. The doctrine-vs-opinion framework, the 1909/1925/1931 First Presidency apparatus, the Talmage 1931 "Earth and Man" address, the apostolic-scientist tradition, the Bible Dictionary's 4000 BC chronology, and the basic hominid-DNA data are addressed in the sister article, Discredited Claims. The ethnic-DNA-and-Book-of-Mormon question is addressed in DNA. What this article develops directly is the theology: pre-Adamic death and the three faithful readings of 2 Nephi 2:22 and Alma 12:23–24; Adam's creation mechanism and the Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer framework; the Fall as theological category; image-of-God anthropology; theistic evolution among Latter-day Saint scientists from Eyring to BYU's biology faculty; the pre-Adamite tradition's twentieth-century history from Pack and Roberts through Joseph Fielding Smith and McConkie; and the Restoration's eight distinctive theological resources for evolution-faith integration.
Worth Acknowledging
The Restoration has a real internal tradition of young-earth creationism and no-pre-Adamic-death — most prominently Joseph Fielding Smith's Man: His Origin and Destiny (Bookcraft, 1954) and Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine (Bookcraft, 1958; 2nd ed. 1966).[17][18] 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 "the Church never canonized this position" defense is technically correct — the 1931 First Presidency memorandum had already negated it as Church doctrine 23 years before Man: His Origin and Destiny was published — but the framework's circulation among lay members was uneven for most of the twentieth century, and this article does not pretend that asymmetry away.[19]
What the science actually establishes
The CES Letter is correct on the science. The article concedes the science on its own terms before working through what the framework actually requires.
The fossil record establishes billions of years of biological death
The geological record establishes biological death long before any reasonable date for Adam. Radiometric dating of meteorites by Clair Patterson in 1956 placed the age of the earth at approximately 4.54 billion years.[20] Detrital zircons from Australia confirm continental crust and surface water on Earth at 4.4 billion years ago.[21] The fossil record contains microbial life from approximately 3.5 billion years ago, multicellular life from approximately 600 million years ago, the Cambrian radiation at approximately 540 million years ago, the dinosaurs from approximately 230 to 66 million years ago, and the mammalian radiation across the Cenozoic. Continuous tree-ring dendrochronology from bristlecone pine extends to approximately 10,000 BP without interruption; continuous varved (annually layered) lake sediment records — such as Lake Suigetsu, Japan — extend to approximately 50,000 BP without interruption; the Vostok and Greenland ice cores preserve continuous atmospheric records across hundreds of thousands of years.[22] Each of these methods independently confirms that biological organisms have lived and died on this planet for vastly longer than 7,000 years. The science is not contested.
The hominid fossil record is real and well-established
Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) at approximately 3.2 million years ago. Homo habilis at approximately 2.4 to 1.4 million years ago. Homo erectus at approximately 1.9 million to 110,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis at approximately 700,000 to 200,000 years ago. Homo neanderthalensis at approximately 430,000 to 40,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis at approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. The Denisovans, identified from a finger bone and tooth in Denisova Cave, Siberia, by David Reich and colleagues in 2010 and confirmed as a distinct archaic hominin lineage.[23] Anatomically modern Homo sapiens dating to approximately 315,000 years ago at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco — Jean-Jacques Hublin and colleagues' 2017 Nature paper that pushed the Homo sapiens origin date back roughly 100,000 years from prior consensus.[24] The Smithsonian Human Origins Program maintains accessible authoritative summaries of the entire hominid fossil record.[25]
The CES Letter's "dozen or so other Hominid species" framing is broadly accurate, with the precise number depending on taxonomic conventions. The hominid fossil record is not contested.
Neanderthal DNA in modern non-Africans is real, well-established science
Richard Green and colleagues' 2010 Science paper provided the first draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome and established 1–4% Neanderthal admixture in non-African modern humans.[26] Kay Prüfer and colleagues' 2014 Nature paper on the high-coverage Altai Neanderthal genome refined the estimates and characterized the admixture history.[27] Fabrizio Mafessoni and colleagues' 2020 PNAS paper on the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthal demonstrated that the admixture pattern is robust across multiple individuals from different regions.[28] Sriram Sankararaman and colleagues' 2014 Nature paper mapped Neanderthal ancestry across the modern human genome.[29] Current scientific consensus places Neanderthal admixture in non-Africans at approximately 1.5 to 2.1%, with Denisovan admixture additionally at 3 to 5% in Melanesians and certain Asian populations. The 1.6% figure the CES Letter author cites from his personal genetic test is well within this range.[29:1] Neanderthals went extinct approximately 40,000 years ago — meaning Neanderthal DNA in modern non-Africans entered the gene pool through interbreeding prior to extinction.
A literal 7,000-year-ago Adam who is the genetic ancestor of all modern humans does not work. Population genetics demands a much larger founding population for Homo sapiens, and a 7,000-year-old Adam cannot be the literal genetic source of the modern human genome. The CES Letter is correct on this point. The faithful response is not to deny the science. It is to work through what the framework actually requires the Restoration's scriptures and doctrines to commit to — and to demonstrate that the science the CES Letter cites is not in conflict with the Restoration's load-bearing theological claims.
Further Reading
Authoritative scientific overviews: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Human Origins Program (humanorigins.si.edu); Hublin et al., "New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens," Nature 546, no. 7657 (8 June 2017): 289–292; Green et al., "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome," Science 328, no. 5979 (7 May 2010): 710–722; Prüfer et al., "The Complete Genome Sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains," Nature 505, no. 7481 (2 January 2014): 43–49.
What canonized Latter-day Saint scripture actually says
The CES Letter's argument depends on a particular reading of 2 Nephi 2:22, Alma 12:23–24, and D&C 77:6–7 — a reading on which these verses commit the Church to a universal-no-pre-Adamic-death of any organism, an Adam dated to approximately 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, and a 7,000-year-old planet. Each verse, read in its own canonical context, supports a different reading.
2 Nephi 2:22 in context
The verse is part of Lehi's farewell discourse to his son Jacob (2 Nephi 2:11–25). Lehi's argument is theological: opposition is necessary in all things; without opposition, all things become "a compound in one" — undifferentiated, without meaning, without agency.[30] God created Adam, with both good and evil placed before him; the serpent ("an angel of God who had fallen from heaven") deceived Eve; and Adam's transgression introduced the conditions for human probation, agency, and joy.[31][32] The argument's culmination is the famous statement at verse 25: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy."[33]
The verse the CES Letter cites — verse 22 — sits in the middle of this argument as a counterfactual: if Adam had not transgressed, Lehi tells Jacob, then certain things would have remained as they were. The full text reads:
"And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end."[34]
The geographic locator "in the garden of Eden" is canonized text. It is the textual basis for reading the verse as describing what would have remained in the Garden — the paradisiacal pre-Fall Edenic state — rather than describing the absolute condition of the planet outside the Garden. This is the reading FAIR identifies as one of three primary faithful interpretations.[35] Lehi does not say, in verse 22, that no organism died anywhere on Earth before the Fall.
The verse is also contained within Lehi's theological argument structure, not a biological one. Verse 22's purpose, in context, is to set up verse 25: the Fall was theologically necessary for humanity to have joy. Reading verse 22 as a freestanding claim about pre-Adamic biospheric biology mistakes a theological premise for a scientific datum. Brant A. Gardner's verse-by-verse commentary on 2 Nephi 2:22 reads Lehi's argument as developing within Mesoamerican-setting cosmology — paradisiacal-Edenic state contrasted with mortal post-Fall conditions — and notes the geographic specificity of "the garden of Eden" within Lehi's discourse.[36] Joseph M. Spencer's 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction (Maxwell Institute, 2020), James E. Faulconer's The Book of Mormon Made Harder (Maxwell Institute, 2014), and Grant Hardy's Annotated Book of Mormon (Oxford, 2023) develop the theological-method reading: Lehi's "compound in one" discourse is structural-theological, not concordist-modern-history.[15:1][37][38] Ben Spackman argues that reading 2 Nephi 2:22 as a "scientific" report on planetary biology is methodologically incoherent — the verse is theological discourse, not data.[39]
Alma 12:23–24 in context
Alma 12 is Alma's response to Antionah's challenge about the cherubim guarding the way to the tree of life (Alma 12:21).[40] Alma's argument is structurally counterfactual:
"Behold, I say unto you, that 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, and the word would have been void, making God a liar, for he said: If thou eat thou shalt surely die."[41]
"And we see that death comes upon mankind, yea, the death which has been spoken of by Amulek, which is the temporal death; nevertheless there was a space granted unto man in which he might repent; therefore this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God."[42]
Verse 23's "no death" clause is contrafactual within the post-Fall scenario where Adam takes the tree of life — not a freestanding claim that no death existed pre-Fall on the planet. Alma's argument is that if Adam had eaten of the tree of life after his transgression, no death would have come; therefore the cherubim were placed to prevent that outcome, so that the prophesied "thou shalt surely die" would be fulfilled. Verse 24 then describes the actual state — death comes upon mankind as the "temporal death" that frames mortality as the probationary state allowing repentance.
The CES Letter's framing — that Alma 12:23–24 "state there was no death of any kind on this earth until the Fall of Adam" — misreads the conditional structure of the verse. The "no death" of verse 23 is not a stipulated past condition; it is the counterfactual consequent of an unfulfilled hypothetical. Brant Gardner's verse-by-verse commentary on Alma 12 reads the discourse as Alma engaging Antionah's challenge through the Mesoamerican-temple-typology framework — tree of life as temple-symbol, mortality as probationary state, the Atonement as the sacrificial-temple completion. Gardner does not extract from Alma 12 a freestanding "no biological death pre-Fall" claim.[43]
D&C 77:6–7 in context
D&C 77:6–7 is part of the Doctrine and Covenants' set of clarifying questions about the Book of Revelation. Section 77 reports that the seven seals of Revelation correspond to "the seven thousand years of [the earth's] temporal existence."[44] The verses describe the era since the Fall — the period of human probation and the unfolding of the plan of salvation — not the geological age of the planet.
Talmage 1931 articulated this reading directly:
"The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science… The Genesis story of the creation has been the subject of much controversy. Some readers seek to apply the term 'day' to the periods of creative effort, and reckon by twenty-four-hour days. Such was not the intent of the inspired authors of the scriptures."[6:2]
The 2017 Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual — Church-published study material — interprets D&C 77's seven thousand years as the earth's "temporal existence" in the same sense.[45] Each seal corresponds to 1,000 years of temporal existence — the era of God's temporal dealings with humanity, distinct from the planet's geological age. The verse simply does not date the planet to 7,000 years.
Key Point
2 Nephi 2:22 says: "if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he 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 at that time, there would have been no death." D&C 77:6–7 says: "the seven thousand years of [the earth's] temporal existence." Each verse contains qualifying language the CES Letter omits from its quotations. None of the three verses, in its canonical context, makes the universal-no-pre-Adamic-death-of-any-organism claim the CES Letter assigns to "the Church."
Three faithful interpretations of "no death before the Fall"
The CES Letter's claim 1 collapses three distinct faithful readings of "no death before the Fall" into a single rigid universal-no-death reading, then falsifies that one reading. Each of these three readings is held by serious faithful Latter-day Saint scholars and (in some cases) apostles. None requires the universal-no-pre-Adamic-death-of-any-organism reading the CES Letter assumes is the only faithful option.
The Garden-only reading
The Garden-only reading takes 2 Nephi 2:22's geographical locator at face value: the verse describes what would have remained in the Garden, not what was outside it. The pre-Fall paradisiacal state of Eden — Adam and Eve in their pre-transgression condition, where there was no death and where they would have had no children — is what verse 22 describes.[35:1] Outside the Garden, the natural world operated under whatever conditions God's creative work had established. Animal death, plant death, predation, decay — none of these are negated by 2 Nephi 2:22 read on its own terms.
This reading is grammatically natural. The universal-no-death reading requires importing an absolute claim — "no death on this earth before the Fall" — that the text does not make on its own terms. The CES Letter's quotation of 2 Nephi 2:22 omits the "garden of Eden" qualifier from the rhetorical setup, then treats the modified passage as committing the Church to no-death-anywhere. The omission is the move that creates the apparent conflict.
The current Gospel Principles manual (2009/2011 edition) focuses narrowly on Adam and Eve's pre-Fall state in Eden ("they would have had no children"), consistent with this reading.[46] FAIR's "Death before the Fall of Adam and Eve" page surveys the Garden-only reading as one of three primary faithful frames.[35:2]
The human-only reading
The human-only reading takes the Fall's mortality-introduction as applying to humans — covenant-bearing beings — not to the universal mortality of all biological organisms. The Fall introduces human mortality, the spiritual-and-physical separation from God that the Atonement addresses, not the death of dinosaurs or trilobites.
This reading has explicit recent apostolic articulation. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's April 2015 General Conference address "Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet" describes the pre-Fall Edenic state as one "where there was neither human death nor future family."[47] Holland specified human death — not extending the no-death claim to all pre-Adamic biological life. The 2016 New Era Q&A on evolution uses identical language: Adam and Eve "lived alone in a paradisiacal setting where there was neither human death nor future family."[9:1] This is the most recent institutional articulation of the no-death-before-the-Fall question, and it is explicitly human-only.
The human-only reading also has earlier apostolic backing. President J. Reuben Clark — Counselor in the First Presidency 1933–1961 — wrote in correspondence with Joseph Fielding Smith: "I think when we use death in this connection, that is as of the time when death came into the world, that its application might normally be applied to humans." Ben Spackman's documentation of Clark's correspondence demonstrates that a sitting Counselor in the First Presidency directly disagreed with JFS's universal-no-death reading during the years JFS was writing Man: His Origin and Destiny.[48]
The most direct apostolic affirmation of pre-Adamic animal death is James E. Talmage's "The Earth and Man" address, delivered 9 August 1931 at the First Presidency's invitation, published in the Deseret News on 21 November 1931, and reprinted as a Church pamphlet:
"The whole series of chalk deposits and many of our deep-sea limestones contain the skeletal remains of animals. These lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation."[6:3]
An apostle who held a PhD in geology, addressing the Latter-day Saint people from the most authoritative pulpit in the Church at the First Presidency's invitation, taught that animals lived and died across the geological eons before humans inhabited the earth. Holland's 2015 "human death" formulation is the apostolic refinement: the Fall's mortality-introduction applies to humans — and even then, on the Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer reading developed below, in the covenantal sense. Talmage 1931 was not a tranquil consensus statement but a deliberate intervention in an active internal dispute, authorized without being consensus-closing.[49] The address is core sister-article material in Discredited Claims.
The temporal-existence reading
The temporal-existence reading takes D&C 77:6–7's "seven thousand years of [the earth's] temporal existence" as describing the era since the Fall — the period of human probation and the unfolding of the plan of salvation in operation — not the geological age of the planet.[44:1] This is the reading Talmage 1931 articulated directly: the seven days of creation "do not include the period of our planet's creation and preparation as a dwelling place for man. They are limited to Earth's 'temporal existence,' that is, to Time, considered as distinct from Eternity."[6:4] It is the reading the Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual (2017) preserves.[45:1]
Brigham Young in 1871 had already articulated the broader principle. On 14 May 1871, in Journal of Discourses 14:115–117, Young addressed the question of the earth's age:
"Whether the Lord found the earth empty and void, whether he made it out of nothing or out of the rude elements; or whether he made it in six days or in as many millions of years, is and will remain a matter of speculation in the minds of men unless he give revelation on the subject. … If geologists and philosophers have proved by demonstration to themselves and to others that this world has been in existence for hundreds of millions of years, they have good reason for their faith."[5:1]
A Church President in 1871 — eighty-five years before Patterson's 1956 isochron dating of meteorites established the 4.54-billion-year age of the earth — explicitly accommodated geological deep time and acknowledged that geologists "have good reason for their faith" in millions of years.
Why the three readings matter together
The three readings are not mutually exclusive; serious faithful Latter-day Saint scholars often hold combinations of them. Talmage held something close to all three: Garden-only paradisiacal Eden, human-only covenant mortality, and temporal-existence reading of D&C 77. Stephens and Meldrum hold a (human-only)+(temporal-existence) combination with theistic-evolutionary mechanism. The point for the article is that the CES Letter assumes the only possible faithful reading is the rigid universal-no-death-of-any-organism reading attributable to Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie — and that this assumption is empirically false. The Church's institutional position from 1909 through 2016 leaves all three readings open and rejects only the imposition of any one as binding doctrine.
The 1931 First Presidency memorandum's two key passages directly negate the CES Letter's premise:
"Upon the fundamental doctrines of the Church we are all agreed. … Leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church."[10:1]
"The doctrine of the existence of races of human beings prior to the fall of Adam was not a doctrine of the Church; and, further, that the conception that there was no death upon the earth prior to Adam's fall is likewise declared to be no doctrine of the Church."[10:2]
The 1931 memorandum explicitly negates the CES Letter's premise that "no death before the Fall" is Church doctrine. The framework's documentary continuity from 1871 through 1909, 1910, 1925, 1931, 1992, and 2016 is developed in detail in Discredited Claims.
Adam's creation and the covenantal-Adam framework
The deeper theological question is not whether animals died before the Fall — Talmage 1931 settled that one — but how to understand Adam himself in relation to the hominid biological lineage the CES Letter cites. If Homo sapiens existed for approximately 315,000 years before any reasonable date for Adam, what is Adam's relationship to that pre-history? The Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer framework — articulated by Stephens and Meldrum (2001), Peck (2010, 2015), Spencer (2020), and Spackman (multiple essays, 2017–2024) — provides the load-bearing theological response.
What the 1909 First Presidency statement actually claims
The 1909 First Presidency under Joseph F. Smith — together with John R. Winder and Anthon H. Lund — published "The Origin of Man" in the Improvement Era.[11:1] The statement makes claims about (a) divine parentage of humans ("All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity"), (b) Adam's headship over the human family, (c) "Adam was 'the first man of all men,'" and (d) animal-to-human evolution as "the theories of men." On biological mechanism, the 1909 statement is hostile-leaning ambiguous rather than strictly silent: it characterizes Adam as "the immediate offspring of the Heavenly Father" and dismisses descent from "lower forms of life" as "the theories of men," but it does not commit to a specific mechanism. The 1910 Improvement Era editorial five months later explicitly opened what 1909 hostile-leaningly framed by listing natural development from earlier organisms as one of three possible explanations for Adam's body. The 1909 statement's doctrinal core — what the framework holds across the documentary trajectory — is divine parentage and Adam's covenant headship, not a particular biological mechanism.
In April 1910, the Improvement Era — under Joseph F. Smith's editorship — published an editorial in the "Priesthood Quorums' Table" feature titled "Origin of Man" listing three possible explanations for the physical origin of Adam and Eve's bodies: natural development from earlier organisms, transplantation from another world, and mortal birth in this one — without endorsing any one of them.[50] The 1910 editorial appeared anonymously rather than over First Presidency signatures and should be read as an editorial under Joseph F. Smith's editorship rather than as a signed First Presidency declaration; even at that lighter institutional weight, it is significant evidence that the 1909 statement was not understood at the time as a closed-door rejection of evolutionary mechanism. It is reproduced in full in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery's Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Greg Kofford Books, 2005).[51] The 1925 First Presidency statement reissued the doctrinal core of 1909 (divine parentage, Adam as primal parent) but softened the 1909 anti-science language and used "evolve" positively in regard to human progression toward godhood.[52] The institutional position has consistently distinguished what the Church teaches positively (Adam as real historical covenant-bearer, divine parentage of humans) from what the Church leaves open (the biological mechanism of Adam's body).
President Spencer W. Kimball articulated the institutional agnosticism on mechanism directly in 1976: "We don't know exactly how their coming into this world happened."[7:1] The 2016 New Era Q&A states the position even more explicitly: "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."[9:2] The 2016 Church History Topics page on "Organic Evolution" says simply: "The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution. Organic evolution… is a matter for scientific study."[53]
The Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer reading
The cleanest framing of the Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer reading is the distinction between (a) Adam as the first biological Homo sapiens — a literal taxonomic-historical claim — and (b) Adam as the first covenant-bearing prophet, the first spirit child of God placed in mortality, the first to enter into the covenant-Eden-and-Fall narrative arc that founds the plan of salvation — a theological-typological claim.
Reading (a) requires Adam at approximately 6,000 years ago, taxonomically distinct from prior hominids. This reading is falsified by paleoanthropology — Hublin et al. 2017's Jebel Irhoud finding places anatomically modern Homo sapiens at approximately 315,000 BP, which is roughly 309,000 years before any reasonable date for Adam.[24:1]
Reading (b) is consistent with hominid biological pre-history, Homo sapiens at approximately 315,000 BP, Neanderthal admixture in modern non-Africans, and all the empirical claims of the CES Letter — because Adam's role is theological-covenantal, not taxonomic. Adam is the first to receive the spirit-image-of-God in the covenant sense, the first to enter into the plan of salvation as a covenant-bearer, the first prophet on Earth. Other hominid species, including Homo sapiens populations preceding Adam, may have existed biologically; but the covenant-bearing role — the role 1909 is articulating — begins with Adam.
The 2016 New Era Q&A makes this explicit at the institutional level: "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."[9:3] Adam-as-first-spirit-bearer is the operative theological claim — not Adam-as-first-biological-organism. Pre-Adamic hominids could have existed biologically without being "human" in the spirit-bearing covenant sense.
This reading is articulated in detail by Trent D. Stephens (Idaho State University biology emeritus) and D. Jeffrey Meldrum (Idaho State University anatomy and anthropology), with Forrest B. Peterson, in Evolution and Mormonism: A Quest for Understanding (Signature Books, 2001) — the most thorough faithful Latter-day Saint integration of evolutionary biology with Restoration theology of Adam, the Fall, and the Atonement.[12:1] Their framework: God created life through evolutionary processes; Adam and Eve are real historical persons — the first beings to receive a fully divine spirit and become covenant-bearers; pre-Adamic hominids are biologically continuous with Adam but theologically distinct; the Fall is a covenantal event introducing covenant-mortality, not biological mortality of all organisms; the Atonement applies to covenant-bearers (Adam and his descendants) and, on the universal-scope reading of 2 Nephi 9:21, to all of God's children.
Steven L. Peck — BYU biology professor — develops a complementary theological proposal in "Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution," Dialogue 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 1–36.[13:1] Peck identifies Adam and Eve as "the first of Heavenly Father's spirit children to be linked to one of these biological machines." The Fall is the participatory union of premortal spirit with evolved biological body — the moment "conscious experience enters the world." Adam is a historical figure — "real living persons" — without requiring the universe to lack pre-Adamic biological evolution. Peck's Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist (Maxwell Institute, 2015) develops the proposal across twelve essays.[14:1] The Maxwell Institute publication is Church-affiliated scholarly publishing, not an institutional doctrinal endorsement on the level of a First Presidency declaration or the BYU Board of Trustees–approved Evolution Packet, but it establishes that BYU's scholarly publishing arm has actively published scholarship framing Adam as historical-and-evolutionarily-emergent without retraction.
Joseph M. Spencer (BYU religion; Journal of Book of Mormon Studies editor) develops a complementary theological reading method in his Maxwell Institute Brief Theological Introductions series, treating Adam as both a literal historical figure AND a being who emerges from biological lineage with a spirit from God.[15:2] Matthew Roper's "Premortal Existence of a 'First Man' Suggested in the Book of Job" reads Job 15:7–9's "Are you the firstborn of the human race? Were you brought forth before the hills?" as preserving an ancient Near Eastern conceptualization of a premortal first man, supporting the Adam-as-first-spirit-child-on-Earth framework.[54] Ben Spackman's "Genesis and Evolution: A BYU Guest Lecture" (September 2018) engages the image-of-God anthropology question directly within this same framework.[55]
The covenantal-Adam reading preserves the 1909 statement's theological force without requiring biological-taxonomic primacy. It is consistent with the 1910 First Presidency editorial's explicit listing of natural development as one of three possible explanations for Adam's body, the 1925 statement's softened anti-evolution language, the 1931 memorandum's negation of pre-Adamites and no-pre-Adamic-death as binding doctrines, the Holland 2015 "no human death" formulation, and the 2016 New Era Q&A's "no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."
Worth Acknowledging
The 1909 statement's "Adam was 'the first man of all men'" language deserves honest engagement. The statement commits the Church to two things: Adam-as-historical (a real person who entered the Eden narrative) and Adam-as-first-of-something (a primacy claim). The covenantal reading honors both by reading "first man of all men" as a primacy claim about covenantal-anthropological status rather than biological-taxonomic status. That reading is theologically defensible and is the reading the framework's documentary trajectory supports across 1909, 1910, 1925, 1931, Kimball 1976, Holland 2015, and the 2016 New Era — but it is not the natural reading of "first man of all men" if the reader is unfamiliar with Restoration covenantal theology, and the article does not pretend the covenantal reading falls out of the phrase in a way the average 1909-reader would have heard at the time.[56]
The Hublin 2017 / Holland 2015 stress point
A careful reader will notice a real interpretive tension between Holland's April 2015 "neither human death nor future family" formulation and Hublin et al. 2017's Jebel Irhoud finding of Homo sapiens at approximately 315,000 BP.[47:1][24:2] If "human" in Holland's formulation means "biological Homo sapiens," then a population of Homo sapiens not dying for approximately 309,000 years before Adam is biologically impossible.
The faithful reading takes "human" in Holland's formulation as the covenantal-spiritual category rather than the biological-Homo sapiens category. Holland's "no human death" applies to covenant-bearing humans — Adam and Eve in their pre-transgression Edenic state. Pre-Adamic Homo sapiens, on this reading, are biologically human but not in the covenant-bearing category Holland's formulation describes. This is the Stephens-Meldrum-Peck-Spencer-Spackman reading; it is consistent with Talmage 1931's affirmation of pre-Adamic animal death and with the broader framework's documentary trajectory. The article does not pretend Holland's address alone, abstracted from that framework, compels the covenantal reading — Holland's "Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet" is structurally an Atonement sermon, and a reader unfamiliar with the covenantal-vs-biological distinction would naturally hear "human" biologically.[57]
The pre-Adamic moral-status question
A deeper question follows: what was the moral status of pre-Adamic Homo sapiens (and of Neanderthals, given admixture)? Were they moral agents? Did they have the spirit-image-of-God? If yes, were they subject to the Fall in some pre-Adamic mode? If no, in what sense were they image-bearing?
The framework's response is that these questions are open. The 2016 New Era Q&A states it directly: "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."[9:4] The 1931 First Presidency memorandum directs general authorities 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."[10:3] These are precisely the empirical-biological questions the Church has explicitly declined to close.
The Stephens-Meldrum-Peck-Spencer framework offers possible answers within that open space. Pre-Adamic Homo sapiens were biologically human but theologically pre-covenant — not sin-capable in the covenantal sense, analogous to little children, who in LDS theology are "not capable of committing sin" and stand outside the law of accountability (Moroni 8:8).[58] Christ's atonement applies universally to all of God's children — 2 Nephi 9:21 extends the Atonement to "all men" and "every living creature," with the "family of Adam" framing readable as the covenant family or the broader divine family.[59] The framework distinguishes between cognitive-moral capacity (which pre-Adamic Homo sapiens may have possessed, evidenced by cave art, intentional burial, tool culture) and covenantal-moral capacity (which the framework holds began with Adam as first covenant-bearer); the Moroni 8:8 analogy is a theological extension, defensible within the framework, but the framework does conceptual work the reader should be aware of, and the underlying question is genuinely underdeveloped in the scholarly tradition.[60]
The framework's negative claim (pre-Adamic-life is not a binding doctrinal position either way) is institutional and explicit. The framework's positive claim (pre-Adamic Homo sapiens were sin-naive biological-humans-not-covenant-bearers) is scholarly-individual — articulated by Stephens, Meldrum, Peck, Spencer, and Spackman, but not canonized in formal-institutional documents. The article acknowledges this honestly: there is no definitive faithful answer to "what was the moral status of pre-Adamic Homo sapiens?"; there is the framework's commitment to leaving the question open, and the scholarly tradition's exploration of possible answers within that open space. The Neanderthal question follows the same pattern: faithful answers remain open and consistent with the 2016 New Era's "Nothing has been revealed."
The Fall as theology, not biology
The single most important theological move for the article is the recognition that the Fall is a theological category — the introduction of human mortality, separation from God's presence, the necessary backdrop for the Atonement — and not a biological category (the introduction of organism-level death into the biosphere at a specific date). If the Fall is theological, then the CES Letter's apparent collapse of the framework dissolves. Evolution does not disrupt theology; it just does not speak to it.
What the Fall actually does in the plan of salvation
The Fall teaches three things in Latter-day Saint doctrine, none of which depend on biological mechanism:
- Humanity exists in a mortal, fallen state — separated from God's presence, subject to physical death, and subject to spiritual death until reconciled through Christ.
- This was not God's accidental result but part of God's plan — 2 Nephi 2:25's "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" frames the Fall as purposeful, planned, and necessary for the plan of salvation.[33:1]
- The Atonement of Jesus Christ overcomes the Fall — restoring humanity to God's presence (overcoming spiritual death) and granting resurrection (overcoming physical death).
None of these three commitments depends on a specific date for the Fall, a specific biological mechanism for Adam's body, or the absence of animal death before approximately 4000 BC. The theology works whether Adam's body was formed from dust in an instant or whether God guided billions of years of biological development toward two beings prepared to bear the divine image, receive premortal spirits, enter Eden, and make a choice. Tad R. Callister's The Infinite Atonement (Deseret Book, 2000) frames the Fall as introducing (a) physical mortality for God's children and (b) spiritual separation from God's presence, both addressable through Christ's atonement.[61] The Fall makes the Atonement necessary; the Atonement makes the Fall purposeful.
2 Nephi 2:25 — the Fall is purposeful, not accidental
2 Nephi 2:25 is the load-bearing Restoration teaching about the Fall:
"Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy."[33:2]
The Fall, in Latter-day Saint doctrine, is part of the divine architecture for human becoming — not a tragedy God reluctantly accommodates. This framing is theologically more sophisticated than typical Protestant young-earth-creationism's "Adam screwed up" framing. And it is wholly consistent with God using long evolutionary processes to prepare bodies capable of bearing premortal spirits — the purposefulness of the Fall does not depend on its biological mechanism. The current Gospel Principles manual (2009/2011 edition), chapter 6, focuses narrowly on Adam and Eve's pre-Fall state in Eden ("they would have had no children") rather than asserting universal pre-Adamic biospheric immortality.[46:1] The current institutional articulation is narrower than fundamentalist universal-no-pre-Adamic-death readings.
The plan of salvation framework
The plan of salvation framework — premortal existence → mortal probation (entered through the Fall) → death → resurrection (made possible through the Atonement) → judgment → eternal kingdoms — is the spine of Restoration theology. None of its load-bearing components depend on the biological mechanism by which Adam's body came into being. Truman G. Madsen's Eternal Man (Deseret Book, 1966; reprinted 2011) establishes the premortal-existence theological framework that distinguishes Latter-day Saint anthropology from creedal Christianity: humans exist as spirit children of God before mortality; mortality is a probationary state; the Fall introduces the conditions for the probationary state; the Atonement enables passage through it.[62]
Adam S. Miller's Letters to a Young Mormon 2nd ed. (Maxwell Institute, 2018) articulates a faith-and-science integration appropriate for young-adult faithful readers, with the science chapter explicitly treating evolution and old-earth as compatible with the Restoration's theology.[63] The Fall is a theological event introducing the conditions for mortal probation; the science of how Adam's body came into being is a question the Restoration explicitly leaves open.
Image-of-God anthropology
The CES Letter's claim 2 challenges the "first humans" framing for Adam by asking how Adam can be "the first man" if a dozen hominid species lived and died 35,000 to 2.4 million years before him. The challenge presupposes that "human" must mean "biological Homo sapiens" or "biological member of Homo." The Restoration's image-of-God anthropology supports a different reading.
Divine parentage, not morphology
The 1909 First Presidency statement's load-bearing anthropological commitment is divine parentage: humans are "literally the sons and daughters of Deity," "in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother."[11:2] This is a claim about spiritual genealogy — humans bear the divine image because they are spirit children of God — not a claim about biological taxonomy. The 1909 statement does not assert that Adam's body must have a particular morphology, that Adam must be the first organism with Homo sapiens anatomy, or that prior hominid species cannot have existed biologically. It asserts that humans are literally the spirit-children of God, that Adam is the first to bear that role on Earth in the covenant-Eden-and-Fall narrative, and that the Fall introduces the conditions for human probation.
Premortal existence (Abraham 3:21–28; D&C 138) reframes "what is a human?" as a question about spirit-bearing identity rather than biological form.[64][65] The eternal identity of the human is not the biology — it is the premortal spirit. The 2016 New Era Q&A makes this explicit: "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."[9:5] Adam-as-first-spirit-bearer is the operative theological claim — not Adam-as-first-biological-organism.
"First human" as covenantal claim
The Adam-as-first-prophet-and-covenant-bearer reading handles claim 2 directly. "When did those guys stop being human?" trades on the biological-Homo sapiens reading of "human." The Church's actual teaching, articulated through the 2016 New Era Q&A, is the covenantal reading: pre-Adamic hominids may have existed biologically; "human" in the doctrinal-spirit-bearing sense begins with Adam.
FAIR's "Adam and Eve as Historical Figures" hub identifies four faithful readings, all preserving historical Adam: (1) the first humans, (2) the first priesthood-holding patriarch among existing humans, (3) the first of God's spirit children among other human-like beings, (4) Adam and Eve with bodies "that are the product of organic evolutionary processes."[66] The fourth reading is explicitly organic-evolutionary. FAIR is the most-trafficked Latter-day Saint apologetics platform; this is institutional evidence of the framework's flexibility.
Christian cross-tradition perspective
The Restoration's covenantal-Adam reading has analogs in the broader Christian theistic-evolution conversation. John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve (IVP Academic, 2015) is the most-cited evangelical analog: Walton accepts evolutionary biology and reads Adam as a real historical priestly figure whose theological role is the doctrinal load-bearing claim.[67] Peter Enns's The Evolution of Adam (Brazos, 2012) argues for an archetypal-Adam reading — incompatible with the Restoration's literal-historical Adam commitment, cited here as evidence of the breadth of the Christian theistic-evolution conversation rather than as an ally.[68] Denis O. Lamoureux's Evolutionary Creation (Wipf & Stock, 2008) provides a comprehensive Christian evolutionary-creation treatment.[69] William Lane Craig's In Quest of the Historical Adam (Eerdmans, 2021) develops an Adam-as-Homo heidelbergensis thesis.[70] BioLogos, founded by Francis Collins, is the leading Christian science-faith integration site.[71]
The Catholic Church accepts evolution: Pope Pius XII's 1950 Humani Generis permitted research on evolution "in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter — for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God."[72] The structure is parallel to the Latter-day Saint framework: bodies through evolutionary processes; souls created by God. Pope John Paul II's 1996 Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences accepted evolution as "more than a hypothesis." Mainline Protestant denominations (Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, ELCA Lutheran) accept evolution. Evangelical Protestant fundamentalism opposes evolution at significant cost.
The strongest evangelical theistic-evolution positions — Walton, Lamoureux, Craig, BioLogos — each have to do significant interpretive work to reconcile evolutionary biology with Genesis 1–3, because the evangelical hermeneutical tradition has historically committed to forms of biblical inerrancy that strict-modern-historical readings of Genesis pressure.[73] The Restoration's framework does not require this renegotiation: the 8th Article of Faith already qualifies biblical authority ("as far as it is translated correctly"), continuing revelation already establishes that knowledge develops over time, the doctrine-vs-opinion framework already separates binding doctrine from individual leader interpretation, and premortal-existence anthropology already locates "what is a human?" in the spirit-bearing rather than biological category. The Catholic framework sits closest to the Restoration in structural parallel; the Restoration is not the only Christian framework that integrates theistic evolution, but it is one that does so without requiring substantial hermeneutical renegotiation.
The pre-Adamite tradition's twentieth-century history
The pre-Adamite question — were there hominids or human-like beings before Adam? — has been actively engaged within faithful Latter-day Saint scholarship and leadership for over a century. The CES Letter's argument depends on the reader believing the Church has consistently taught no-pre-Adamites plus no-pre-Adamic-death. The actual record is messier and more interesting.
Frederick J. Pack and the early-twentieth-century engagement
Frederick J. Pack — University of Utah geology professor — published a series in the Improvement Era in the early 1920s arguing for the geological evidence for an ancient earth and engaging the pre-Adamite question from a faithful-scientist perspective.[74] The Sterling B. Talmage corpus (gathered as Can Science Be Faith-Promoting?, edited by Stan Larson, Blue Ribbon Books, 2001) preserves the geologist son of Apostle James E. Talmage's 1934–36 essays plus 27 letters to and from his father, John A. Widtsoe, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Heber J. Grant — documenting that the substantive faithful-Latter-day-Saint-scientist case for an ancient earth and pre-Adamic life was already articulated in the 1930s.[75]
B.H. Roberts and The Truth, the Way, the Life
B.H. Roberts — Senior President of the Seventy, one of the most accomplished Latter-day Saint theologians of the early twentieth century — completed The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology between 1928 and 1933 as a systematic theology to be used as a Church manual.[76] The First Presidency's Correlation Committee declined to publish it because of Roberts's chapters on pre-Adamites and old-earth geology. Roberts argued that the geological evidence required an ancient earth and that pre-Adamic intelligent beings ("pre-Adamites") were consistent with the framework of the Restoration — they simply weren't covenant-bearing in the Adamic sense.
The fact that an apostolic-level (Senior President of Seventy) systematic theology pushing for pre-Adamites was completed in 1928–1933 is direct evidence that the pre-Adamite position was a serious faithful option for Church leaders in the same period that Joseph Fielding Smith was hardlining the no-pre-Adamites line. The 1931 First Presidency memorandum's negation of both sides — neither pre-Adamites nor no-pre-Adamic-death is binding doctrine — was a deliberate intervention to depressurize a real internal Church dispute, not a one-sided pronouncement leaning either way. Richard Sherlock's "'We Can See No Advantage to a Continuation of the Discussion': The Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair" reconstructs the 1928–1931 internal Church dispute using Sterling Talmage's papers and the Heber J. Grant diary.[77]
Joseph Fielding Smith, Man: His Origin and Destiny (1954)
Joseph Fielding Smith was an apostle from 1910, Counselor in the First Presidency 1965–1970, and Church President 1970–1972 — a tenure of sixty-two years in senior Church leadership. Man: His Origin and Destiny (Bookcraft, 1954) is JFS's fullest book-length statement of the no-pre-Adamic-death plus no-pre-Adamites plus young-earth-creationism position.[17:1] In it, JFS presents these positions as revealed truth — not as personal opinion, not as one apostle's reading among others, but as the doctrine of the Church.
JFS cited Seventh-day Adventist creationist George McCready Price as a "scientific" authority supporting his position. Ben Spackman's 2023 documentation of JFS's borrowing from SDA sources demonstrates that JFS's anti-evolution science was substantially imported from the same Protestant-fundamentalist creationist sources that grounded the Scopes-era and post-Scopes anti-evolution movement.[78] Spackman's 2024 doctoral dissertation at Claremont Graduate University is the definitive scholarly treatment of how JFS imported Protestant fundamentalist creationism into Latter-day Saint popular doctrine across the mid-twentieth century, establishing that the hardlining was not the consistent traditional Latter-day Saint position; it was a mid-century shift influenced by Protestant fundamentalist hermeneutics.[79]
The "the Church never canonized this" defense is technically true. The 1931 First Presidency memorandum (which JFS himself was on the receiving end of) had already negated his position as Church doctrine 23 years before Man: His Origin and Destiny was published. JFS continued to teach his personal interpretation, and the institutional framework continued to reject it as binding doctrine. The 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, compiled and Board-of-Trustees-approved 22 years after JFS's death, reissues the 1909/1910/1925/1931 framework, not JFS's reading.[8:1] But the article should not pretend the asymmetry is comfortable. JFS taught his position from senior leadership for sixty-two years; his writings remain in print at Deseret Book. The honest framing: the reliability of "prophetic teaching" must distinguish (a) sustained doctrinal commitments expressed through canon, First Presidency declarations, and the framework apparatus from (b) individual leader interpretations on questions the Church has not closed — a distinction the Church itself develops at length in the contexts of Anti-Intellectualism and earlier doctrinal-reversal episodes such as Adam-God. JFS's Man: His Origin and Destiny is squarely in category (b); the CES Letter's argument requires it to be category (a).
Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (1958, 1966)
Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine (Bookcraft, 1958; 2nd ed. 1966) was — for forty years (1958–1990s) — the most-distributed Latter-day Saint reference work outside canonized scripture.[18:1] McConkie's entries hardlined no-pre-Adamic-death, no pre-Adamites, and the universal application of 2 Nephi 2:22 to all biological organisms. The functional doctrine for most lay Latter-day Saints in the 1958–1980s era was YEC plus no-pre-Adamic-death — even though the institutional documents (1909/1910/1925/1931/1992) had always preserved the open question.
The faithful response is not to deny that Mormon Doctrine shaped lay theology for forty years but to note that Mormon Doctrine was never officially endorsed by the First Presidency. President J. Reuben Clark, McKay's Counselor, wrote a critical internal review of it; conditions were imposed for the 1966 second edition; and the First Presidency's discomfort with the book was preserved internally. The 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, compiled by the Board of Trustees that includes the First Presidency, reissues the 1909/1910/1925/1931 framework rather than the McConkie reading. The institutional framework has progressively corrected the McConkie functional doctrine. By 2016, the Church's official position is unambiguous and contradicts the McConkie reading directly.
Worth Acknowledging
The framework existed institutionally throughout the twentieth century — the 1909, 1910, 1925, and 1931 First Presidency documents, Talmage 1931, the BYU Evolution Packet's pre-1992 documentary trail. But its lay-level circulation was uneven. The 1931 memorandum was internal — distributed to general authorities, not to members. The 1909/1910/1925 statements were filed in Improvement Era back issues. What members read was Mormon Doctrine and Man: His Origin and Destiny. The framework's institutional preservation and its experiential availability to most twentieth-century members were two different things — and the article does not pretend that gap away.
Theistic evolution among Latter-day Saint scientists
The Restoration has a continuous tradition of faithful scientists who have integrated mainstream science — including evolutionary biology and an ancient earth — with their faith. The CES Letter quotes Henry Eyring as its section-opening epigraph, then proceeds as if the framework Eyring articulated does not exist. The framework does exist, and the apostolic-scientist tradition is developed in detail in the sister article, Discredited Claims. What this article develops is what is distinctive to evolution-and-the-Fall: Eyring's substantive theological framework, the cross-generational pattern, BYU's biology program, and David O. McKay's contemporaneous editorial actions during the years JFS was publishing Man: His Origin and Destiny.
Henry Eyring's framework, not just credentials
Henry Eyring (1901–1981) was the Latter-day Saint Church's most visible twentieth-century scientific figure: PhD chemistry Berkeley 1927; Princeton faculty 1931–1946; University of Utah graduate dean 1946–1966; National Medal of Science 1966; Wolf Prize in Chemistry 1980; Priestley Medal 1975; National Academy of Sciences (1945); president of the American Chemical Society (1963); president of the AAAS (1965); over 600 scientific publications; namesake of the Eyring equation in chemical kinetics.[80] Eyring was a devoted Latter-day Saint and the father of President Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency. Eyring himself accepted an ancient earth, evolutionary biology, and theistic evolution.
Eyring's The Faith of a Scientist (Bookcraft, 1967) and Reflections of a Scientist (Bookcraft, 1983) explicitly addressed organic evolution, age of the earth, and the truth-from-any-source posture that the CES Letter quotes.[81][82] The articulation:
"For me there has been no serious difficulty in reconciling the principles of true science with the principles of true religion, for both are concerned with the eternal verities of the Universe."[81:1]
"There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men."[81:2]
"In this Church, you only have to believe the truth. Find out what the truth is!"[81:3]
"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."[81:4]
Eyring's framework is not "tolerate evolution because the Church doesn't take a position" — it is "the Restoration's epistemological architecture actively requires the integration of all truth from any source." The CES Letter's section-opening epigraph is faithful articulation of the framework Joseph Smith's revelations established. The cross-generational pattern is also significant: Henry Eyring Sr.'s son Henry B. Eyring is currently Second Counselor in the First Presidency. A National Medal of Science recipient produced a son who serves as a Counselor in the First Presidency. The Eyring tradition of theistic evolution is institutional and continues into current senior Church leadership.
David O. McKay, contemporaneous with JFS
David O. McKay was Church President 1951–1970 — during the years Joseph Fielding Smith published Man: His Origin and Destiny (1954). McKay's contemporaneous editorial actions are a key data point for what was actually the institutional position vs. JFS's personal view. Ben Spackman documents that as editor of The Instructor, McKay approved Bertrand Harrison's 1965 article "The Relatedness of Living Things," which presented evolution as compatible with faith and used the spirit-vs-body distinction the Stephens-Meldrum framework develops.[83] McKay's 1957 letter to William Lee Stokes (preserved in Evenson and Jeffery's Mormonism and Evolution) explicitly stated that the Church "has issued no official statement on the subject of the theory of evolution" and encouraged BYU faculty to discuss geological timescales freely.[51:1] The institutional position, articulated by the sitting Church President during JFS's Man: His Origin and Destiny era, was more accommodating than the loudest individual leader voices.
Spackman's annotation of the 2022 Church History Topics page also documents that the Encyclopedia of Mormonism "Evolution" entry's famous formulation — "the scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how" — was authored by then-Counselor Gordon B. Hinckley, who became Church President in 1995.[84] The formulation locating evolution as outside the Church's doctrinal jurisdiction was authored by a future Church President.
Russell M. Nelson — a current Church President is a scientist
Russell M. Nelson — pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon, performer of the first open-heart surgeries in Utah in the mid-1950s, apostle since 1984, Church President since January 2018 — depended throughout his career on the same biology and chemistry that establish evolution and an ancient earth. Cardiac biology, surgical anatomy, pharmacology — all rest on the modern evolutionary synthesis. Nelson's dedication of the BYU Life Sciences Building (April 9, 2015):
"There is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion, or both. All truth is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether truth comes from a scientific laboratory or by revelation from the Lord, it is compatible."[85]
A current Church President — at the dedication of a Life Sciences Building, in 2015 — articulated the Restoration's epistemology in modern form. Dieter F. Uchtdorf's October 2014 General Conference address opened with reflection on changing scientific understanding (the Milky Way once thought to be the only galaxy → modern cosmology) as illustration of how revelation works alongside science.[86]
BYU's evolutionary biology program
BYU is the Church's flagship university, fully Church-funded, with the First Presidency and members of the Quorum of the Twelve serving on its Board of Trustees. BYU teaches mainstream evolutionary biology as standard science.
Drs. Clayton White and Duane Jeffery launched BYU's first undergraduate evolution course (Zoology 404: Comparative Evolutionary Theory) in fall 1971.[87] The launch was triggered by an institutional embarrassment: dental schools were rejecting all BYU applicants because BYU's curriculum lacked evolution coverage. Administrators told BYU: "we're not even sure that your students are well grounded in the life sciences and biology." The course filled completely its first semester. The Church-funded university had to teach evolution to meet the standard of mainstream science education. The Church-funded university did teach evolution. There has been no retreat across fifty-five years.
The 1992 BYU Evolution Packet was approved by the BYU Board of Trustees — composed of the First Presidency, members of the Quorum of the Twelve, and others.[8:2] The packet compiles the 1909, 1910, 1925, and 1931 First Presidency statements together with the Encyclopedia of Mormonism "Evolution" entry. The Board of Trustees — including the First Presidency itself — formally institutionalized the doctrine-vs-opinion framework. BYU's own Life Sciences Magazine reports that BYU's evolutionary biology faculty between 1997–2021 secured 112 NSF grants ($20.5M), 40 additional grants ($3.5M from USDA, NIH, Bureau of Land Management), and 934 peer-reviewed papers across 8 faculty members.[87:1] The Church-funded flagship university operates one of the country's most active evolutionary biology research programs, has done so for fifty-five years, and shows no contraction.
The broader faithful-scientist tradition
The unbroken faithful-scientist tradition includes James E. Talmage (geology PhD, Illinois Wesleyan 1896), John A. Widtsoe (chemistry PhD, Göttingen 1899), Henry Eyring Sr. (chemistry PhD, Berkeley 1927), Sterling Talmage (geology), Frederick J. Pack (geology PhD), Trent Stephens (biology), D. Jeffrey Meldrum (anatomy/anthropology), Steven Peck (biology), Kent Condie (geophysics), David Bailey (physics), William Evenson (physics).[88] These are not isolated outliers — they are the institutional tradition. The apostolic-scientist roster (Talmage, Widtsoe, Merrill, Eyring, Nelson, Scott) and the broader faithful-scientist tradition are developed in detail in Discredited Claims.
Further Reading
Major faithful-scholar treatments of evolution and the Fall: Trent D. Stephens and D. Jeffrey Meldrum with Forrest B. Peterson, Evolution and Mormonism: A Quest for Understanding (Signature Books, 2001); Steven L. Peck, "Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup," Dialogue 43/1 (2010), and Evolving Faith (Maxwell Institute, 2015); Ben Spackman's evolution essays at benspackman.com/category/evolution/ including "Evolution and the Fall" (2017), "Mormon Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It?" (2017), "President J. Reuben Clark: Some Death Before the Fall" (2022), and "Joseph Fielding Smith and Creationist Claims to Scientific Authority" (2023); William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Greg Kofford Books, 2005); the BYU Evolution Packet at biology.byu.edu; the 2016 New Era Q&A "What does the Church believe about evolution?" at churchofjesuschrist.org; and David H. Bailey, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Lewis, and Michael R. Stark eds., Science and Mormonism: Cosmos, Earth, and Man (Interpreter Foundation, 2016).
Eight Restoration theological resources for evolution-faith integration
The Restoration possesses eight distinct theological resources for evolution-faith integration that fundamentalist Protestantism lacks. These are not retrofit; they are intrinsic to the Restoration's foundational scriptures and doctrines. The integration that costs Protestant fundamentalism so much (defending YEC against geology, biology, and paleoanthropology) costs the Restoration nothing — because the Restoration's distinctive doctrines are already theistic-evolution-compatible.
First, continuing revelation. The 9th Article of Faith — "We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God" — assumes the trajectory of religious knowledge is additive over time, not a static deposit threatened by new findings.[89] The Restoration is structurally open to ongoing revelation — including potentially contrary-seeming new information — because revelation is understood as progressive, not fixed. This is what makes the Latter-day Saint framework able to absorb evolution and pre-Adamic death without theological collapse. Russell M. Nelson framed the Restoration as ongoing in the October 2021 General Conference: "The Restoration is a process, not an event."[90]
Second, premortal existence. Abraham 3:21–28 and D&C 138 establish that the human spirit existed before the body.[64:1][65:1] Biology cannot address this. "First human" becomes a theological question (the first to receive a premortal spirit and enter covenant), not a biological question. The 2016 New Era Q&A operationalizes this: "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."[9:6] Adam-as-first-spirit-bearer is the operative theological claim — and the timing of Adam's spirit-reception is invisible to paleoanthropology because the spirit-bearing transition is theological, not biological, and need not leave a fossil record.
Third, material spirit. D&C 131:7–8: "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes."[91] Spirit is finer matter, not immaterial substance. This grounds the unity of physical and spiritual without forcing biology to do all the explanatory work.
Fourth, image of God as parental kinship. The 1909 First Presidency: humans are "literally the sons and daughters of Deity"[11:3] — a load-bearing claim about divine parentage, not a particular biological form. The image-of-God anthropology in the Restoration is about kinship to Heavenly Father (Romans 8:16–17; Acts 17:28–29) — a theological-genealogical claim, not a morphological one.
Fifth, covenantal-not-biological Adam. The Stephens-Meldrum-Peck-Spencer framework: Adam is the first to receive a premortal spirit and enter covenant accountability.[12:2][13:2][15:3] The Fall is a covenantal event introducing covenant-mortality, not a biological event introducing organism-level death. Pre-Adamic hominids existed biologically but were not covenant-bearers in the spirit-receiving sense.
Sixth, the doctrine-vs-opinion framework. The 1909, 1910, 1925, and 1931 First Presidency statements; the 1992 BYU Evolution Packet; the 2016 Church History Topics page; the 2016 New Era Q&A — all preserve the institutional distinction between binding doctrine and individual leader opinion on the physical world. The framework is documentarily continuous across 145 years and is developed in detail in Discredited Claims.
Seventh, the 8th Article of Faith's qualified biblical authority. "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly."[92] The qualifier explicitly rejects the inerrancy commitment that locks Protestant fundamentalism into young-earth creationism. This creates conceptual room for reading Genesis 1–11 as ancient Near Eastern theological literature rather than a modern-history textbook — the textual hermeneutic resource that allows the Restoration's evolution-Fall integration to proceed without the substantial hermeneutical renegotiation evangelical theistic-evolutionists have to undertake.
Eighth, the Fall as purposeful covenantal event. 2 Nephi 2:25's "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" makes the Fall purposeful, planned, and necessary — theologically more sophisticated than typical Protestant young-earth-creationism's "Adam screwed up" framing.[33:3] A Fall this purposeful is fully consistent with God using long evolutionary processes — the purposefulness does not depend on the biological mechanism.
These eight resources together establish that theistic evolution is consistent with — not merely tolerated by — the Restoration's intrinsic theological architecture. The CES Letter's framing requires the Restoration to be defensively conceding ground to evolution. The actual record is the inverse: the Restoration's foundational scriptures, premortal-existence anthropology, image-of-God ontology, materialist metaphysics, doctrine-vs-opinion framework, faithful-scientist apostolic tradition, and BYU's mainstream-science biology program together establish that the Restoration handles theistic evolution without the substantial hermeneutical renegotiation evangelical theistic-evolutionists have to undertake — not because the Restoration has retreated from a creationist stance, but because Joseph Smith's revelations contained theological resources that anticipated this kind of integration from the beginning.
Key Point
The Restoration's epistemological framework actively commends scientific inquiry. D&C 93:36 identifies the deity by the attribute of intelligence: "The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth."[93] D&C 88:118 commends learning by "study and faith": "seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith."[94] D&C 130:18–19 declares that "whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection."[95] D&C 101:32–34 anticipates eschatological convergence: at Christ's coming, "he shall reveal all things… things of the earth, by which it was made, and the purpose and the end thereof."[96] The deity Latter-day Saints worship is identified by cognitive virtue. Knowledge gained in mortality persists eschatologically. The Restoration's revelations anticipate the convergence of revealed and discovered truth — they do not treat them as separate magisteria.
Engaging the steelman
A careful critic will not be satisfied with the framework's elegance. Several genuinely hard objections deserve direct engagement before the article concludes.
The retrospective doctrine-vs-opinion concern
Critics argue: the Church only says it has no official position on evolution because the science became overwhelming, and the framework's "always open" language is a retrospective rescue. For most of the twentieth century, the functional doctrine for many lay Latter-day Saints was YEC plus no-pre-Adamic-death.
The honest framing: the framework did exist institutionally throughout the twentieth century, and Brigham Young's 1871 JD statement predates even 1909 — but the framework's circulation among lay members was limited until the 1990s and 2010s. The article does not claim "the Church has always taught this"; it claims the framework existed institutionally, was occasionally articulated by senior leaders (Talmage 1931, Kimball 1976, McKay's editorial actions, Hinckley's Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry, Eyring's books), and progressively won over time. By 2016 the framework is the explicit institutional position. The Discredited Claims sister article develops this asymmetry steelman in further detail.
The asymmetric institutional response
The 1931 First Presidency memorandum's "neither side" framing was real, but it did not generate equal-weight teaching. JFS continued to teach his position publicly; B.H. Roberts's The Truth, the Way, the Life was suppressed for 66 years. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine circulated widely; the 1909/1910/1925/1931 framework documents were archived. The framework's institutional position was preserved, but the framework's circulation was asymmetric — and the framework has progressively won over time. The 1928–1933 B.H. Roberts manuscript that was suppressed in 1933 was published in 1994. The trajectory of the framework's articulation is consistently toward the open-on-mechanism, theistic-evolution-compatible reading.
The Atonement-Fall-Adam logical chain
The deepest theological challenge: the Atonement requires the Fall; the Fall requires Adam's transgression; Adam's transgression introduces sin into the human family (the canonical reading from Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, reinforced by 2 Nephi 2 and Alma 12); if Adam's transgression introduces sin, then before Adam's transgression either (a) there was no human family before Adam, or (b) the pre-Adamic human family was sin-naive.[97][98]
If (a) — the entire pre-Adamic biological-human history is excluded from the theological framework, and the Church must commit to Adam at approximately 6,000 years ago as the first Homo sapiens. This contradicts paleoanthropology.
If (b) — there was a population of Homo sapiens for approximately 300,000 years prior to Adam who were biologically human but morally sin-naive. The framework's preferred reading (Stephens-Meldrum, Spackman, Spencer, Peck) is (b). Pre-Adamic Homo sapiens were biological humans but not covenant-bearing humans — not sin-capable in the covenantal sense, on the Moroni 8:8 analogy.[58:1] Adam is the first covenant-bearer. The Atonement applies to covenant-bearers (Adam and his descendants) and, on the universal-scope reading of 2 Nephi 9:21, to all of God's children.
The framework's response to the moral-status question is genuinely underdeveloped. The Stephens-Meldrum and Spackman positions sketch out possible answers, but these answers are not canonized or articulated in formal-institutional documents. The framework's negative claim (pre-Adamic-life is not a binding doctrinal position either way) is institutional; the positive claim is scholarly-individual. The framework leaves the question open — consistent with the 2016 New Era's "Nothing has been revealed concerning evolution" — without pretending this open question is resolved in faith's favor. It is held open, with possible answers within that open space, and the framework is robust enough to function while the question remains open.
Worth Acknowledging
The Holland 2015 / Hublin 2017 stress point is real. The covenantal reading of "human" in Holland's General Conference statement is not the most natural reading. The pre-Adamic moral-status question is genuinely open and underdeveloped. The framework absorbs these tensions through the doctrine-vs-opinion distinction, the human-only and covenantal-Adam readings, and the "Nothing has been revealed" institutional position — but absorbing tensions is not the same as resolving them. Honest faith engages hard questions; it does not pretend they are easy.
Assessment
The CES Letter's argument depends on three premises: (1) Restoration scripture and doctrine commit the Church to no death of any organism before Adam, approximately 7,000 years ago; (2) the fossil record, paleoanthropology, and Neanderthal genetics falsify this commitment; (3) therefore Restoration scripture is falsified. The article concedes (2) on its own terms — the science is real and uncontested. It rejects (1).
Premise (1) collapses three distinct categories the Church has consistently maintained as distinct: (a) what canonized scripture actually claims (read in canonical context); (b) what individual leaders have taught (Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie); (c) what the Church has formally committed to as binding doctrine. The CES Letter treats these as one. The Church itself, since at least Brigham Young's 1871 articulation and most explicitly in the 1931 First Presidency memorandum, has treated them as three. The 1931 memorandum explicitly negates the CES Letter's framing claim that "no death before the Fall" is Church doctrine. The 2016 New Era Q&A states the institutional position in three words: "Nothing has been revealed."[9:7]
Within the framework, three faithful readings of "no death before the Fall" — Garden-only, human-only, temporal-existence — are each grounded in canonical text and each consistent with the science. The Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer reading articulated by Stephens, Meldrum, Peck, Spencer, and Spackman handles hominid pre-history and Neanderthal admixture without theological collapse. The Restoration's eight distinctive theological resources allow theistic evolution to be integrated without the hermeneutical renegotiation that evangelical fundamentalism's inerrancy commitments force.
The article does not pretend the framework eliminates every difficulty. The 1909 statement's "first man of all men" language requires a covenantal rather than biological-taxonomic reading — a reading the framework supports but that is not unforced. Holland's 2015 "no human death" creates real interpretive tension with Hublin 2017's Homo sapiens dating; the covenantal reading of "human" handles the tension, but requires prior commitment to the framework's covenantal-vs-biological distinction. The pre-Adamic moral-status question is genuinely open and underdeveloped. JFS's Man: His Origin and Destiny (1954) and McConkie's Mormon Doctrine (1958, 1966) circulated widely as functional doctrine for many twentieth-century Latter-day Saints, even though they were never canonized; the framework's institutional preservation and its experiential availability to lay members were two different things across most of the twentieth century. Each of these is a real concession.
What the framework does establish, against the CES Letter's claim, is that the Restoration's load-bearing theological commitments — divine parentage, the historicity of Adam and Eve as covenant-bearers, the Fall as theological event introducing the conditions for human probation, the Atonement as universal in scope — are compatible with mainstream evolutionary biology, mainstream paleoanthropology, and mainstream genetics. The Church has consistently distinguished these commitments from speculative leader opinion on the physical world. The faithful-scientist tradition (Talmage, Widtsoe, Eyring, Stephens, Meldrum, Peck, BYU's biology faculty since 1971) demonstrates that the integration is not merely possible but has been actively practiced for over a century.
The Eyring quotation the CES Letter opens with — "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"[81:5] — is not a problem for the faithful position; it is the faithful position. Russell M. Nelson articulated the same framework in 2015: "There is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion, or both."[85:1] The CES Letter cites the Restoration's actual position — and then proceeds to argue against a position the Restoration does not actually hold.
When the science questions get genuinely difficult — and the pre-Adamic moral-status and Neanderthal-admixture questions are genuinely difficult — what stands firm is the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon does not take a position on biological evolution. It contains no statement about geological timescales, the age of the earth, or the biological mechanism of Adam's body. The verses the CES Letter cites — 2 Nephi 2:22 and Alma 12:23–24 — read in canonical context, do not assert universal pre-Fall biospheric immortality. The Book of Mormon does take a covenantal position on Adam: 2 Nephi 2:25's "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy." That position is fully compatible with theistic evolution. The book was produced rapidly in 1829 by an unschooled translator under conditions documented by multiple witnesses; the substantive content of its narrative, doctrines, and structures has remained stable across nearly two centuries of textual transmission and ongoing scholarly examination. The detailed positive case for the Book of Mormon — chiasmus, Hebraisms, Nahom, ancient Near Eastern parallels, witnesses — is developed in the Book of Mormon section of this site, including DNA, and is not relitigated here. The reader who finds the evolution-Fall question difficult can rest the framework on what stands firmest — the Book of Mormon's covenantal-narrative testimony of Christ — without forcing a particular biological reading of Adam.
Bottom line: The CES Letter's "willful ignorance" charge requires the Church to be committed to no death of any organism before Adam, approximately 7,000 years ago, and to Adam and Eve as the literal genetic ancestors of all modern humans. The 1931 First Presidency memorandum explicitly negates the no-pre-Adamic-death position as Church doctrine. The 1909 statement's "literal sons and daughters of Deity" language is about divine parentage, not Y-chromosome inheritance. The 2016 New Era Q&A states the institutional position in three words: "Nothing has been revealed." Within the framework, three faithful readings of "no death before the Fall" (Garden-only, human-only, temporal-existence) handle the pre-Adamic biology question; the Adam-as-first-covenant-bearer reading handles the hominid pre-history and Neanderthal admixture questions; the Restoration's eight distinctive theological resources allow theistic evolution to be integrated without the hermeneutical renegotiation evangelical fundamentalism's inerrancy commitments force, sitting closer in structural parallel to the Catholic framework than to evangelical Protestantism. The framework does not eliminate every difficulty — the JFS and McConkie tradition was real lay-level doctrine for forty years; the 1909 "first man of all men" language requires a covenantal reading; the pre-Adamic moral-status question is genuinely open. But the framework absorbs these difficulties without theological collapse, and the load-bearing Restoration commitments — divine parentage, historical Adam-and-Eve as covenant-bearers, the Fall as theological event, the Atonement as universal in scope — remain firm. The Eyring quotation the CES Letter opens with is the framework Joseph Smith's revelations established, articulated by a National Medal of Science chemist who saw no conflict between his science and his faith. The Restoration's load-bearing case stands.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," no. 1, p. 111. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," no. 2, p. 111. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," no. 3, p. 111. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," p. 111. ↩︎
Brigham Young, discourse, 14 May 1871, Journal of Discourses 14:114–118 (relevant geological/age-of-earth statement at 14:115–117). ↩︎ ↩︎
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/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Spencer W. Kimball, "The Blessings and Responsibilities of Womanhood," Ensign, March 1976. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1976/03/the-blessings-and-responsibilities-of-womanhood. "We don't know exactly how their coming into this world happened." ↩︎ ↩︎
"Evolution and the Origin of Man," BYU Board of Trustees–approved packet, compiled by William E. Evenson, 1992. Distributed to BYU faculty. Includes the 1909, 1910, 1925, and 1931 First Presidency statements plus the Encyclopedia of Mormonism "Evolution" entry. https://biology.byu.edu/00000172-29e6-d079-ab7e-69efe5890000/byu-evolution-packet. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"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. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
First Presidency (Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, Anthon H. Lund), "The Origin of Man," Improvement Era 13, no. 1 (November 1909): 75–81. Reprinted in Ensign, February 2002, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/02/the-origin-of-man. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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/. ↩︎ ↩︎
Joseph M. Spencer, 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute, 2020). https://mi.byu.edu/1st-nephi. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "Evolution and the Fall" (2017). https://benspackman.com/2017/04/evolution-and-the-fall-conference-handout/. Full corpus of Spackman evolution essays: https://benspackman.com/category/evolution/. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Clair Patterson, "Age of meteorites and the Earth," Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 10 (1956): 230–237. The lead-lead isochron dating of meteorites established the 4.54-billion-year age of the Earth. ↩︎
Simon A. Wilde, John W. Valley, William H. Peck, and Colin M. Graham, "Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago," Nature 409 (11 January 2001): 175–178. ↩︎
Vostok ice core: J. R. Petit et al., "Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica," Nature 399 (1999): 429–436. Greenland ice cores (GISP2, NGRIP) extend further. Continuous tree-ring dendrochronology from bristlecone pine extends to approximately 10,000 BP; varved (annually layered) lake sediment records — Lake Suigetsu, Japan — extend to approximately 50,000 BP without interruption. ↩︎
David Reich et al., "Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia," Nature 468, no. 7327 (23 December 2010): 1053–1060. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09710. ↩︎
Jean-Jacques Hublin et al., "New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens," Nature 546, no. 7657 (8 June 2017): 289–292. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22336. The 2017 Jebel Irhoud finding pushed anatomically modern Homo sapiens origins back to approximately 315,000 years ago. See also Chris Stringer and Julia Galway-Witham, "On the origin of our species," Nature 546 (2017): 212–214. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Human Origins Program, "Our species arose at least 300,000 years ago," https://humanorigins.si.edu/research/whats-hot-human-origins/our-species-arose-least-300000-years-ago; "Ancient DNA and Neanderthals," https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals. ↩︎
Richard E. Green et al., "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome," Science 328, no. 5979 (7 May 2010): 710–722. DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021. ↩︎
Kay Prüfer et al., "The Complete Genome Sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains," Nature 505, no. 7481 (2 January 2014): 43–49. DOI: 10.1038/nature12886. ↩︎
Fabrizio Mafessoni et al., "A High-Coverage Neandertal Genome from Chagyrskaya Cave," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 26 (2020): 15132–15136. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2004944117. ↩︎
Sriram Sankararaman et al., "The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans," Nature 507, no. 7492 (2014): 354–357. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12961. Consumer-grade ancestry tests sometimes report figures slightly higher than peer-reviewed academic averages because of differences in reference panels and methodology, but the CES Letter author's reported 1.6% is well within academically credible range. ↩︎ ↩︎
2 Nephi 2:11–13. Lehi: "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. … righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one." ↩︎
2 Nephi 2:14–19. Lehi recounts the creation, the Fall, and the role of the serpent. ↩︎
2 Nephi 2:20–21. The state of mankind after the Fall and the days of probation. ↩︎
2 Nephi 2:22. ↩︎
"Death before the Fall of Adam and Eve," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Death_before_the_Fall_of_Adam_and_Eve. The page surveys the Garden-only, human-only, and temporal-existence readings as the primary faithful frames. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Volume 2 — 2 Nephi through Jacob (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007). Verse-by-verse commentary on 2 Nephi 2:22. ↩︎
James E. Faulconer, The Book of Mormon Made Harder: Scripture Study Questions (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute, 2014). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/16/. ↩︎
Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). The first academic-edition Book of Mormon. Annotations on 2 Nephi 2 contextualize the Lehi-Adam-Eden material within Lehi's broader theological discourse. ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "Mormon Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It?" (January 2017). https://benspackman.com/2017/01/mormon-said-believe-settles/. ↩︎
Alma 12:21. Antionah: "What does the scripture mean, which saith that God placed cherubim and a flaming sword on the east of the garden of Eden, lest our first parents should enter and partake of the fruit of the tree of life and live forever?" ↩︎
Alma 12:23. ↩︎
Alma 12:24. ↩︎
Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Volume 4 — Alma (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007). Verse-by-verse commentary on Alma 12. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2017), chapter 29 ("Doctrine and Covenants 77–80"). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual-2017/chapter-29-doctrine-and-covenants-77-80. ↩︎ ↩︎
Gospel Principles (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2009; revised 2011), chapter 6, "The Fall of Adam and Eve." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-principles/chapter-6-the-fall-of-adam-and-eve. ↩︎ ↩︎
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." ↩︎ ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "President J. Reuben Clark: Some Death Before the Fall" (August 2022). https://benspackman.com/2022/08/president-j-reuben-clark-some-death-before-the-fall/. Documents Clark's correspondence with Joseph Fielding Smith. ↩︎
Talmage 1931 was an intervention in an active internal dispute — Joseph Fielding Smith hardlining no-pre-Adamites and no-pre-Adamic-death, B.H. Roberts's The Truth, the Way, the Life manuscript pushing the opposite direction, the 1931 First Presidency memorandum (5 April 1931) directing both sides to stand down, and the Talmage address (9 August 1931) as the public-facing complement to the internal memorandum. JFS objected to Talmage's address privately and continued teaching the no-pre-Adamic-death position until his death in 1972; the First Presidency authorized Talmage's delivery but did not publicly side with him against JFS. So Talmage 1931 was authorized (it would not have been delivered from the Tabernacle pulpit and published in the Deseret News otherwise) without being consensus-closing. The article treats it as documentary evidence that the institutional Church in 1931 did not require the JFS reading and permitted an apostolic geologist to publicly affirm pre-Adamic animal death — not as a closed-the-question declaration. ↩︎
"Priesthood Quorums' Table: Origin of Man," Improvement Era 13, no. 6 (April 1910): 570. Published anonymously in the Priesthood Quorums' Table feature under the editorship of Joseph F. Smith. Reprinted in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 39–41. Evenson and Jeffery treat the editorial as authoritative; recent scholarship has questioned whether it carries formal First Presidency declaratory weight and treats it instead as an Improvement Era editorial published under First Presidency editorship. ↩︎
William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005). The definitive primary-source compilation of First Presidency and Twelve statements 1909–1992 with scholarly commentary. The 1931 memorandum's full text and documentary context are at pp. 53–80; the 1909 statement at 13–37; the 1910 editorial at 39–41; the 1925 statement at 47–49. ↩︎ ↩︎
First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, Charles W. Nibley), "'Mormon' View of Evolution," Improvement Era 28, no. 11 (September 1925): 1090–91. Reprinted in Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution, 47–49. ↩︎
"Organic Evolution," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution. ↩︎
Matthew Roper, "Premortal existence of a 'First Man' suggested in the book of Job," Maxwell Institute (Willes Center). https://mi.byu.edu/premortal-existence-book-of-job/. Roper draws on Dexter Callender's reading of Job 15:7–9 as preserving an ancient Near Eastern conceptualization of a premortal first man whose primacy is wisdom-bearing rather than strictly chronological. ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "Genesis and Evolution: A BYU Guest Lecture" (September 2018). https://benspackman.com/2018/09/genesis-and-evolution-a-guest-lecture/. ↩︎
A reader of the 1909 Improvement Era without the covenantal-theology framework — and most LDS readers from 1909 to roughly the 2000s — would naturally hear "first man of all men" as a biological-taxonomic claim about Adam being the first organism with human anatomy. The covenantal reading is therefore a retrospective interpretive shift — defensible, internally coherent, supported by the documentary trajectory from 1909 through the 2016 New Era, but a shift. The article holds the covenantal reading is the better reading and the one the institutional framework requires. ↩︎
Holland's project in "Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet" is to articulate why the Atonement was needed — what state of human existence created the requirement for Christ's redemptive work. The "neither human death nor future family" phrase appears within Holland's articulation of what kind of probationary state required the Atonement: Adam and Eve in their pre-transgression Edenic state were not yet in the conditions of mortality the Atonement addresses; the Fall introduced those conditions; the Atonement responds to them. Holland's "human" in that sentence-level context is plausibly doing salvation-history work — engaging the Eden-Atonement narrative arc rather than making a biological-categorical claim about what species can die. A reader committed to the covenantal-Adam framework will read Holland's "human death" as covenant-mortality in the salvation-history sense; a reader unfamiliar with the framework would naturally read "human" biologically. Two faithful readings can handle the tension: the first dates Adam much earlier (coincident with the appearance of anatomically modern humans at approximately 315,000 BP) — preserving a biological reading of "human" but contradicting canonical genealogies; the second takes "human" in Holland's formulation as the covenantal-spiritual category. The article holds the second reading is the better one, while acknowledging the framework's reading requires prior commitment to the covenantal-vs-biological distinction. ↩︎
Moroni 8:8. "Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God. Behold, I came into the world not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin." ↩︎ ↩︎
2 Nephi 9:21. "And he cometh into the world that he may save all men if they will hearken unto his voice; for behold, he suffereth the pains of all men, yea, the pains of every living creature, both men, women, and children, who belong to the family of Adam." ↩︎
Moroni 8:8 is, exegetically, about infants — beings under the age of accountability who have not yet developed moral capacity. Pre-Adamic Homo sapiens, by every indication of the archaeological record (cave art at 40,000+ BP, intentional burial, tool culture, pigment use, symbolic cognition), had moral capacity in the cognitive-behavioral sense. Calling them "like little children" is a theological move, not a clean exegetical handoff. The framework distinguishes between cognitive-moral capacity and covenantal-moral capacity; what pre-Adamic Homo sapiens lacked, on the framework's reading, is not cognitive moral capacity but the covenantal accountability that comes with spirit-bearing-covenant-mediator status. The framework owes the reader the harder question — what exactly is the difference between cognitive-moral capacity and covenantal-moral capacity? — and that answer is genuinely underdeveloped in the scholarly tradition. The article does not pretend Moroni 8:8 is a clean exegetical fit; it is a theological extension, defensible within the framework, but the framework does conceptual work here the reader should be aware of. ↩︎
Tad R. Callister, The Infinite Atonement (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000). ↩︎
Truman G. Madsen, Eternal Man (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1966; reprinted 2011). ↩︎
Adam S. Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute, 2018). https://mi.byu.edu/letters-to-a-young-mormon-2nd-edition. ↩︎
"Adam and Eve as Historical Figures," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Adam_and_Eve_as_historical_figures. ↩︎
John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2–3 and the Human Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015). Note: distinct from Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP Academic, 2009), which addresses Genesis 1 cosmology. ↩︎
Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012). ↩︎
Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008). ↩︎
William Lane Craig, In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021). ↩︎
BioLogos Foundation, "What is Evolutionary Creation?" https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-evolutionary-creation. Founded by Francis Collins. ↩︎
Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, 12 August 1950. Vatican: https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html. Pope John Paul II, "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences," 22 October 1996. ↩︎
Walton reads Genesis 1 as ancient Near Eastern functional cosmology rather than material cosmology — the locus classicus is The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP Academic, 2009), with The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015) extending the functional-cosmology reading to Genesis 2–3. Lamoureux accepts ancient-science-in-the-text and treats Genesis's cosmological details as accommodation. Craig dates Adam to Homo heidelbergensis approximately 750,000 years ago. Each is a defensible reading; each requires the evangelical reader to renegotiate what biblical inerrancy commits them to. The Restoration's framework does not require this renegotiation because the 8th Article of Faith already qualifies biblical authority and continuing revelation already establishes that knowledge develops over time. ↩︎
Frederick J. Pack — University of Utah geology professor — published a series of articles in the Improvement Era in the early 1920s engaging the pre-Adamite question and the geological evidence for an ancient earth from a faithful-scientist perspective. Pack's role in the early-twentieth-century Latter-day Saint scientist conversation is documented in Erich Robert Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992). The specific Improvement Era essay citations require manual archive research; this article cites Pack's broader role rather than committing to a specific issue without verification. ↩︎
Sterling B. Talmage, Can Science Be Faith-Promoting?, ed. Stan Larson (Salt Lake City: Blue Ribbon Books, 2001). Includes Sterling Talmage's 1934–1936 essays plus 27 letters to and from James E. Talmage, John A. Widtsoe, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Heber J. Grant. ↩︎
B. H. Roberts, The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. Stan Larson (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1994). Roberts completed the manuscript between 1928 and 1933; the First Presidency's Correlation Committee declined to publish it. ↩︎
Richard Sherlock, "'We Can See No Advantage to a Continuation of the Discussion': The Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 63–78. https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/dial/article/13/3/63/244088/. Sherlock's earlier companion piece, "A Turbulent Spectrum: Mormon Reactions to the Darwinist Legacy," Journal of Mormon History 5 (1978): 33–59. The 1982 Dialogue sequel by Jeffrey E. Keller, "Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair," Dialogue 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 79–98, draws on Sterling Talmage's papers and Heber J. Grant's diary. ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "But I Have Better Grounds: Joseph Fielding Smith and Creationist Claims to Scientific Authority" (April 2023). https://benspackman.com/2023/04/but-i-have-better-grounds-joseph-fielding-smith-and-creationist-claims-to-scientific-authority-video-and-notes/. Documents JFS's borrowing from Seventh-day Adventist creationist George McCready Price. ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "'The Scientist is Wrong': Joseph Fielding Smith, George McCready Price, and the Ascent of Creationist Thought among Latter-day Saints in the Twentieth Century" (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2024). 300 pp., approximately 900 footnotes. ProQuest. Announcement: https://benspackman.com/2024/12/dissertation/. ↩︎
Henry Eyring (1901–1981) — PhD chemistry Berkeley 1927; faculty Wisconsin (1930), Princeton (1931–1946), University of Utah graduate dean (1946–1966); National Medal of Science 1966; Wolf Prize in Chemistry 1980; Priestley Medal 1975; National Academy of Sciences (1945); president, American Chemical Society (1963); president, AAAS (1965); over 600 scientific publications by FAIR's biographical reckoning; namesake of the Eyring equation in chemical kinetics; father of President Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency. See FAIR scholar profile, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/testimonies/scholars/henry-eyring; Henry J. Eyring, Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2007). ↩︎
Henry Eyring, The Faith of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1967), 12, 31. Internet Archive scan: https://archive.org/details/faithofscientist0000eyri. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Henry Eyring, Reflections of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1983). ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "David O. McKay on Evolution and Reading Genesis" (June 2016). https://benspackman.com/2016/06/david-o-mckay-on-evolution-and-reading-genesis/. Documents McKay's editorial approval of Bertrand Harrison's 1965 article in The Instructor and McKay's 1957 letter to William Lee Stokes (in Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution, 71–73). ↩︎
Ben Spackman, "The new Church History evolution topic essay, with commentary" (June 2022). https://benspackman.com/2022/06/an-annotated-version-of-the-new-church-history-evolution-topic/. Spackman's annotation specifies that the Encyclopedia of Mormonism "Evolution" entry's formulation "the scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how" was authored by Gordon B. Hinckley. ↩︎
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/. ↩︎ ↩︎
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, "Receiving a Testimony of Light and Truth," October 2014 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2014/10/receiving-a-testimony-of-light-and-truth. ↩︎
"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. ↩︎ ↩︎
Erich Robert Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Definitive scholarly history of LDS cosmological thinking and the rise of LDS scientism (Roberts/Talmage/Widtsoe/Merrill). For apostolic-scientist biographical detail, see also FAIR's scholar profiles, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_science. ↩︎
9th Article of Faith. Pearl of Great Price, The Articles of Faith, no. 9. ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, "The Temple and Your Spiritual Foundation," October 2021 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2021/10/47nelson. "The Restoration is a process, not an event." ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 131:7–8. ↩︎
8th Article of Faith. Pearl of Great Price, The Articles of Faith, no. 8. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 93:36. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 88:118. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 130:18–19. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 101:32–34. ↩︎
Romans 5:12–21. Paul's Adam-Christ typology. ↩︎
1 Corinthians 15:21–22. "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." ↩︎