Science
The charge in this part of the CES Letter is the most intuitive one it makes. Religion, the argument runs, keeps making claims about the physical world (a young earth, a worldwide flood, no death before Adam, a tower that scattered the world's languages), science has tested those claims and found them false, and a person who keeps believing anyway is choosing, in Runnells's words, "willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication."[1] It is a clean syllogism, and the science half of it is largely correct. The earth is billions of years old. Organisms lived and died for eons before any human. There was no planet-covering flood around 2500 BC. Honest faith does not deny any of that.
The argument fails at a different joint. It assumes the Church requires those positions as binding doctrine. Pull that one assumption and the syllogism falls apart, because the Church declined to make the commitments the argument needs it to have made.
Watch whose words you are shown
Read the section's opening page slowly and notice the sources. 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.[1:1]
The absence is the section. The argument only works if the Church requires young-earth creationism (the view that the earth is roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years old and was created in six literal days), 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 is willful ignorance. Pull the premise and the whole structure comes down, because the Church never made those commitments in the first place.
The Eyring quotation is worth pausing on, because the CES Letter chose it as its own opening witness. This Berkeley-trained chemist, father of Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency, accepted an ancient earth and evolutionary biology without apology. The line the CES Letter quotes is his:
"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."[2]
The faithful position never had to explain that sentence away. The sentence is the faithful position, stated by the section's own epigraph.
A doctrine the Church declined to settle
In 1931 two senior leaders clashed in public over evolution and the age of the earth. The apostle Joseph Fielding Smith argued for a young earth and no death before Adam; B. H. Roberts, Senior President of the Seventy, 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 told the leaders to leave geology, biology, and anthropology "to scientific research," and stated flatly:
"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."[3]
The Church settled the conflict by declining to settle the science. That single document negates, in its own words, the premise the CES Letter needs: that "no death before the Fall" is Church doctrine.
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 the geologists who dated the earth to "thousands and millions of years" had "good reason for their faith."[4] 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. In 2016 the Church's own website restated the position flatly: "the Church has no official position on the theory of evolution," and added that "nothing has been revealed." BYU has taught evolution in its biology department since 1971.
The dates matter, because they answer the obvious suspicion that this distinction is a modern escape hatch. Brigham Young spoke in 1871, before plate tectonics, before the DNA double helix, before the radiometric date that fixed the earth at 4.54 billion years. The 1931 memorandum predates the 1956 measurement that dated the earth. The framework was articulated as the science was emerging, not bolted on after it became overwhelming.
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 is the CES Letter's argument. The whole case runs on folding three things into one: what canonized scripture says, what individual leaders have taught, and what the Church has formally committed to as binding doctrine. The Church has kept those three distinct.
Even so, that first sentence is sometimes true, and it deserves saying outright. This distinction is cleanest in hindsight. For much of the twentieth century, the practical, lived doctrine many members absorbed from manuals, from books like Joseph Fielding Smith's Man: His Origin and Destiny, and from Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine, was effectively young-earth creationism plus no pre-Adamic death. The institutional documents (1909, 1910, 1925, 1931) always kept the question open, but those documents circulated unevenly, and the louder voices reached more members.[4:1] That gap between the preserved framework and what people actually heard is real, and pretending it away would help no one. What the record does not show is the Church ever canonizing the young-earth position, and that is the only thing the CES Letter's argument requires it to have done.
Two articles, sorted by what each question turns on
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. 2 Nephi 2:22 says that if Adam had not transgressed "he would have remained in the garden of Eden," a locator about Eden, not the whole planet. Alma 12:23 opens with "if it had been possible," framing a hypothetical, not a stipulated past. D&C 77:6 speaks of the earth's "temporal existence," the era of human probation since the Fall, not the planet's geological age. Evolution and the Fall reads those verses in their own context and lays out several faithful interpretations of "no death before the Fall," none of which requires a young earth or a deathless prehistory.
That article is also where the deepest version of the question gets worked out: if anatomically modern humans existed for some 300,000 years before any reasonable date for Adam, what is Adam's relationship to that prehistory? The answer faithful scientists have developed (Trent Stephens, Jeffrey Meldrum, Steven Peck, and others) reads Adam as the first covenant-bearer, the first to receive a premortal spirit and enter the plan of salvation, rather than the first biological organism in the human lineage. The 2016 Church statement points the same direction: "There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created."[5] The operative claim is about spirit and covenant, which paleoanthropology cannot touch, not about taxonomy, which it can.
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 is where the next section's flood concession is worked out in full, and where the one place a critic's pressure actually bites, the chronological specificity of Ether 1:33, gets a real hearing rather than a dodge.
Where the argument is sometimes right
Because steelmanning matters, take the flood at its strongest, the way a careful critic would press it. The argument is not only that geology rules out a global flood. It is that Latter-day Saint leaders actually taught one, repeatedly, from senior pulpits.
Brigham Young said the earth "has been baptized with water." Orson Pratt called the flood "a similitude of baptism for the remission of sins." John Taylor said "the earth was immersed." Joseph Fielding Smith called it "the baptism of the earth, and that had to be by immersion." That is two Church Presidents, an apostle, and a future Church President, close to a century of teaching, on the side of a literal global deluge.[6] A reader who learns that this was wrong is right to ask what else was wrong.
The response concedes the geography and holds the line on doctrine. 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.
But none of that "baptism of the earth" language was ever canonized, and the canonized flood texts read comfortably in a regional sense. The Hebrew word translated "earth" in the flood narrative, eretz, is the same word the Old Testament uses for "the land of Egypt" or "the land of Canaan"; it means a country or territory as readily as the globe, and ancient Israelite writers had no concept of "the planet" in the modern sense to begin with.[7] An apostle and trained chemist, John A. Widtsoe, wrote in 1943 that "the exact nature of the flood is not known," which is the doctrine-versus-opinion framework applied to the flood decades before the CES Letter.[8] The 1931 instruction to leave geology to scientific research had already drawn the same line years before the strongest of those sermons were preached. Discredited Claims works through where this concession is genuinely expensive (the early identification of Adam-ondi-Ahman in Missouri makes the post-flood geography harder to reconstruct) and does not pretend the regional reading reconciles every detail cleanly.
The Babel charge gets the same treatment there. The linguistic record does not show all human languages diverging from one event around 2200 BC, and Ether 1 anchors the Jaredite migration to "the time the Lord confounded the language of the people." This is the one place in the whole section where canonized scripture, not just a leader's sermon, makes a claim under pressure. The article engages it through three faithful readings rather than waving it off, and grants that the chronological anchor poses real interpretive pressure that does not simply vanish.
The affirmative case the section leaves out of frame
So far the work has been defensive, showing that the charges miss commitments the Church never made. The stronger point is that the relationship between the Restoration and science runs the opposite direction from the one the CES Letter draws.
Start with the faithful-scientist tradition, because it is not a handful of outliers. It is a continuous, century-and-a-quarter pattern of the Church promoting trained scientists into its highest councils.
James E. Talmage held a geology PhD and did pioneering work on the Great Salt Lake. John A. Widtsoe held a chemistry PhD from Göttingen. Joseph F. Merrill held a physics PhD from Johns Hopkins and worked on the very phenomenon of radioactive decay that underlies radiometric dating. Henry Eyring was among the most decorated chemists of his century. Richard G. Scott was a nuclear engineer under Admiral Rickover. Russell M. Nelson, the current prophet, was a pioneering heart surgeon.[9] These men did not check their disciplines at the chapel door. They were elevated, in part, because the tradition saw no quarrel to resolve.
The most authoritative single statement on deep time and animal death came from inside that tradition. In 1931, at the First Presidency's invitation and as a deliberate counterweight to Joseph Fielding Smith's teaching, Talmage stood in the Salt Lake Tabernacle and said:
"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."[10]
An apostle with a doctorate in geology, with the First Presidency's approval, described from the Tabernacle pulpit the exact deep-time, death-filled planet the CES Letter offers as a refutation, and the Church then published the address. The facts the CES Letter musters as a weapon were already in plain view of faithful apostles long before the genome or the sediment core, and they left those men's testimonies intact.
The current prophet says it in modern form. At the dedication of the BYU Life Sciences Building in 2015, Russell M. Nelson, the heart surgeon, taught:
"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."[11]
That building is itself part of the argument. BYU is the Church's flagship university, funded by the Church, governed by a board that includes the First Presidency and members of the Twelve. Its biology faculty publish in Science and Nature; its Earth Science Museum holds tens of thousands of dinosaur specimens dated by methods that depend on millions of years.[12] A church that needed its members to believe in immortal dinosaurs would not fund the museum that dates them, staff a Life Sciences Building with evolutionary biologists, and send its prophet to dedicate it.
The Restoration even brings theological tools to this question that strict biblical literalism lacks. The eighth Article of Faith accepts the Bible "as far as it is translated correctly," which is an explicit rejection of the inerrancy that locks young-earth creationism into many Protestant traditions. Continuing revelation treats religious knowledge as something that grows over time rather than a closed deposit threatened by every new fact. Premortal existence relocates the question "what is a human?" from biology to spirit, so that "the first man" can be a covenantal status rather than a fossil. And D&C 93:36 identifies God himself by an intellectual virtue: "The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth." A faith that defines deity by intelligence is the last thing a fossil could overturn.[13]
This is also why a revised teaching is not a crack in the foundation. Every tradition that touches the physical world eventually hits a point where an older interpretation collides with new evidence, and the real test is whether it can correct course without losing its core. Catholicism took 359 years to move from Galileo's trial to a formal acknowledgment that it had misjudged him; several Protestant denominations remain officially committed to a literal six-day creation.[14] The Church carries none of those commitments, and the proof is that it could produce Talmage and Joseph Fielding Smith at the same time, let both men speak, and decline to bind the faith to either. The things the framework protects (divine parentage, the historicity of Adam and Eve as covenant-bearers, the Fall as a real event, the Atonement of Jesus Christ) have not moved across a century and a half. The things it leaves open (the flood's geography, the mechanism of Adam's body, the age of the earth) are exactly the things a continuing-revelation faith should be free to revise.
Why the section loses its force
Sorted that way, the section loses its force, because you were never obligated to defend a position the Church declined to take. The deepest version of the charge, the one that asks whether a leader being wrong about the flood means leaders could be wrong about anything, gets its full hearing in Discredited Claims. The short of it is that the core has held steady through every documented reversal, and the core is the part the Church's claim to revealed truth actually rests on.
The faith's actual commitments on knowledge run the opposite direction from the one the CES Letter assumes. Alongside "the glory of God is intelligence" sits the standing instruction 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.
Where this section gets genuinely hard, and on some of it the most accurate answer is that the Church has left the question open, it is worth remembering what stands on firmer ground than any reading of Genesis. The Book of Mormon arrived in one unbroken stretch of dictation in 1829, spoken faster than a man could have invented it and never reworked once it was down, and its account of the Fall is the one this whole dispute keeps circling back to: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:25). That is a covenantal Adam, purposeful and planned, and a covenantal Adam is precisely the one the fossils, the hominids, and the genome leave standing. The wider case for the book is made across the Book of Mormon section. Here it is enough that the Eyring sentence the CES Letter opened with was right all along. The gospel embraces all truth, and the evidence this section musters never reached the doctrine it was aimed at.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," pp. 110–111. The section opens with a Henry Eyring epigraph and two Bible Dictionary excerpts, lists four "events/claims that science has discredited," and closes (p. 111) with the line that clinging to faith where "the overwhelming evidence is against it, is willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Henry Eyring, The Faith of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1967), 12, 31. Internet Archive scan: https://archive.org/details/faithofscientist0000eyri. ↩︎
First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, Charles W. Nibley), memorandum to the Quorum of the Twelve, the First Council of Seventy, and the Presiding Bishopric, 5 April 1931. Quoted in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 75. The companion passage instructs leaders to "Leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research." ↩︎
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 14:116 (14 May 1871); on the flood as the earth's "baptism," Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 8:83 (1860), Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses 21:323 (1880), and John Taylor, Journal of Discourses 26:74–75 (1884); the 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, "Evolution and the Origin of Man," approved by the BYU Board of Trustees; "What does the Church believe about evolution?" New Era, October 2016, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution; and the 2016 Church History Topics page "Organic Evolution," https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution ("The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution"). The mid-century lay-level circulation of young-earth creationism through Joseph Fielding Smith's Man: His Origin and Destiny (Bookcraft, 1954) and Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine (Bookcraft, 1958; 2nd ed. 1966), neither of which was canonized, is documented in Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution (Greg Kofford Books, 2005). ↩︎ ↩︎
"What does the Church believe about evolution?" New Era, October 2016. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution. ↩︎
Brigham Young, discourse, 12 June 1860, Journal of Discourses 8:83 ("This earth … has been baptized with water, will be baptized by fire and the Holy Ghost"); Orson Pratt, discourse, 1880, Journal of Discourses 21:323 ("a great flow of water came … sweeping away all wickedness and transgression—a similitude of baptism for the remission of sins"); John Taylor, discourse, 30 November 1884, Journal of Discourses 26:74–75 ("The earth was immersed … a period of baptism"); Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, 3 vols., compiled by Bruce R. McConkie (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954–1956), 2:320 ("It was the baptism of the earth, and that had to be by immersion"). ↩︎
Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907; reprinted Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), s.v. eretz (אֶרֶץ), with a semantic range covering "earth" (the world), "land" (a country or territory), "ground," and "the underworld." On ancient Israelite cosmology lacking a modern planetary concept, see John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), and David E. Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis–Deuteronomy (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014). ↩︎
John A. Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1943), 127: "The fact remains that the exact nature of the flood is not known. We set up assumptions, based upon our best knowledge, but can go no further." ↩︎
Erich Robert Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), the definitive scholarly history of the scientist-apostle tradition; see also FAIR's profiles at https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_science. Talmage held a PhD in geology (Illinois Wesleyan, 1896); Widtsoe a PhD in chemistry (Göttingen, 1899); Merrill a PhD in physics (Johns Hopkins, 1899); Eyring a PhD in chemistry (Berkeley, 1927). Richard G. Scott was a nuclear engineer under Admiral Hyman Rickover; Russell M. Nelson was a pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon who performed the first open-heart surgery in Utah (1955). ↩︎
James E. Talmage, "The Earth and Man," address delivered in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, 9 August 1931, at the invitation of the First Presidency as a counterweight to Joseph Fielding Smith's contemporaneous teaching. Published in the Deseret News, 21 November 1931, with the imprimatur of the First Presidency, and reprinted as a Church pamphlet. Online: https://interpreterfoundation.org/reprint-sm1-12-the-earth-and-man/. ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, remarks at the dedication of the BYU Life Sciences Building, 9 April 2015. Reported in Church News, 14 April 2015. ↩︎
"50 Years of Teaching Evolution at BYU," BYU Life Sciences Magazine. The first comparative-evolutionary-theory course (Zoology 404) launched fall 1971 under Dr. Clayton White and Dr. Duane Jeffery. The 1992 BYU Evolution Packet, "Evolution and the Origin of Man," was approved by the BYU Board of Trustees (the First Presidency, members of the Quorum of the Twelve, and others) and compiled the 1909, 1910, 1925, and 1931 First Presidency statements with the Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry on "Evolution." https://biology.byu.edu/00000172-29e6-d079-ab7e-69efe5890000/byu-evolution-packet. ↩︎
On the Restoration's distinctive theological resources for integrating science and faith (continuing revelation in the 9th Article of Faith, premortal existence in Abraham 3 and D&C 138, qualified biblical authority in the 8th Article of Faith, and the inquiry-commending revelations of D&C 93:36 and 88:118), see William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 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). ↩︎
The 1633 Galileo trial was formally addressed by Pope John Paul II in a 1992 statement acknowledging the Roman Catholic Church's misjudgment of Galileo, a 359-year span that is the standard reference point for institutional course-correction on a scientific question. ↩︎