Science
Read the section's opening page slowly and watch whose words you are shown. The epigraph belongs to Henry Eyring, a National Medal of Science laureate and one of the twentieth century's foremost theoretical chemists, who happened also to be a devout Latter-day Saint. After him comes a Bible Dictionary entry, the kind of reference aid that prints a disclaimer about its own authority on its first page. Then a chronological table from that same dictionary. Then sermons from individual nineteenth-century leaders. What never appears, across the whole run of quotations, is the thing the argument needs most: a canonized scripture or a First Presidency declaration, sustained by the Church as doctrine, that binds the faith to a young earth, a deathless pre-Fall world, a planet-covering flood, or a literal Tower of Babel.[1]
The absence is not an oversight. It is the section. The argument only works if the Church requires young-earth creationism, no death of any organism before the Fall, a global flood, and a literal Babel as binding doctrine. Grant those as the faith's commitments and the conclusion follows on its own: science has falsified them, so faith here becomes "willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication."[1:1] Pull the premise and the whole structure comes down, because the Church never made those commitments in the first place.
A doctrine the Church declined to settle
In 1931 two apostles clashed in public over evolution and the age of the earth. Joseph Fielding Smith argued for a young earth and no death before Adam; B. H. Roberts argued for an ancient earth and pre-Adamic life. The First Presidency could have ruled for one side. It did the opposite. In a memorandum to the Quorum of the Twelve it wrote that "neither side of the controversy has been accepted as a doctrine of the Church," told the leaders to leave geology, biology, and anthropology "to scientific research," and stated flatly that the idea of no death before the Fall "is likewise declared to be no doctrine of the Church."[2] The Church settled the conflict by declining to settle the science.
That memorandum was not a one-time evasion, and the posture around it has held for a century and a half. Brigham Young granted in 1871 that geologists who dated the earth to "hundreds of millions of years" "have good reason for their faith."[3] The 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, approved by a board that includes the First Presidency and members of the Twelve, gathered the open-question statements together rather than retreating from them.[3:1] In 2016 the Church's own website restated the position in five words: "the Church has no official position on the theory of evolution," and added that "nothing has been revealed."[3:2] BYU has taught evolution in its biology department since 1971.
You can also read the Church's posture in who it has called. The same institution that supposedly stakes its truth claims on a young earth elevated James E. Talmage, an apostle with a PhD in geology who taught from the Salt Lake Tabernacle pulpit, at the First Presidency's invitation, that animals "lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation." It elevated two research chemists, John A. Widtsoe and Eyring himself. The current prophet, Russell M. Nelson, spent his earlier career as a cardiac surgeon and helped build the first heart-lung machine. A church that needed its members to believe in immortal dinosaurs would not keep handing its highest councils to the people best equipped to know better.
What members believed and what the Church taught
So the useful question is not whether some Latter-day Saint ever held a young-earth view. Many did, and some taught it forcefully. The question is whether the Church ever committed the faith to it as doctrine, and the documentary record says no. "A prophet was mistaken about geology" and "the Church staked its truth claims on geology" are two different sentences, and only the second one is the CES Letter's argument.
The first sentence, though, is sometimes true, and it deserves to be said straight. Three Church Presidents, Brigham Young, John Taylor, and Joseph F. Smith, described Noah's flood as a literal baptism of the planet, a global immersion.[3:3] On the geography they were simply wrong. There was no flood covering the earth around 2500 BC, and the geological record runs continuously through the date a global deluge would have left its mark. A faithful reader can grant that without losing anything the Church canonized, because those sermons were never doctrine to begin with, and the 1931 instruction to leave geology to scientific research had already drawn the line years before the strongest of them were preached. What erred was individual leaders' reading of geology, not anything revelation had committed the Church to.
The CES Letter compresses all of this into four "discredited" claims stacked fast, with no single one developed.[1:2] They split cleanly along the line the section blurs, which is why the rest of this material lives in two articles sorted by what each question actually turns on.
The first turns on doctrine. When the section presses 2 Nephi 2:22, Alma 12:23–24, and D&C 77:6–7 into service for a 7,000-year-old, animal-deathless past, it quotes around the qualifying words each verse carries, the "garden of Eden" locator, the conditional "if it had been possible," the "temporal existence" of the planet rather than its geological age. Evolution and the Fall reads those verses in their own context and lays out the several faithful interpretations of "no death before the Fall," none of which requires a young earth or a deathless prehistory, alongside the apostle Holland's 2015 formulation that the Fall introduced human death, not the death of every organism.
The second turns on events. Discredited Claims takes up the global flood, Noah's Ark with the bears, and the Tower of Babel with its Jaredite anchor in Ether 1, asking of each which were ever Church doctrine, which rest only on individual leaders, and where the genuinely hard question sits. That article is where the flood concession above is worked out in full, and where the one place a critic's pressure actually lands, the chronological specificity of Ether 1:33, gets a candid hearing rather than a dodge.
Sorted that way, the section loses its force, because you were never obligated to defend a position the Church declined to take. And the faith's actual commitments on knowledge run the other direction entirely. "The glory of God is intelligence" (D&C 93:36). The standing instruction is to "seek learning, even by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:118), words inscribed in the dedicatory prayer of the first Latter-day Saint temple. Those are not nervous accommodations bolted on once the science arrived. They were in the canon from the beginning. A theology chartered to go looking for truth wherever it leads is not the kind a fossil, a genome, or a sediment core can threaten. It is the kind that went looking for them.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," pp. 110–111. The section opens with a Henry Eyring epigraph and two Bible Dictionary excerpts, lists four "events/claims that science has discredited," and closes (p. 111) with the line that clinging to faith where "the overwhelming evidence is against it, is willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, Charles W. Nibley), memorandum to the Council of the Twelve, 5 April 1931, reproduced in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 53–66. ↩︎
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 14:116 (14 May 1871); on the flood as the earth's "baptism," Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 8:83 (1860), Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses 21:323 (1880), and John Taylor, Journal of Discourses 26:74–75 (1884); the 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, "Evolution and the Origin of Man," approved by the BYU Board of Trustees; "What does the Church believe about evolution?" New Era, October 2016, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution; and the 2016 Church History Topics page "Organic Evolution," https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution ("The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution"). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎