Mormon Doctrine

Evolution in Mormon Doctrine

The longest entry in the book, and the one furthest from where the church now stands.

Evolution runs to about 38,500 characters — the fourth-longest of the book's 1,451 entries, and longer than Atonement of Christ, Faith or Revelation. It is not a survey of the question. It is a nine-point refutation, and its ninth point is what the earth will look like afterwards.

What it argues

The case rests on the fall. If nothing died before Adam, there was no time in which anything could have evolved, and the entry says so directly.

Adam and Eve and all forms of life, both animal and plant, were created in immortality, that is, when first placed on this earth, all forms of life were in a state of immortality. There was no death in the world; death entered after the fall.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Evolution”, 1966 second edition, p. 180

If the revelations are true which say that all life was created in immortality, then evolutionary theories which necessarily assume there was always death in the world are false.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Evolution”, 1966 second edition, p. 180

From there the entry reads the seven thousand years of Doctrine and Covenants 77 as literal periods, all of them after the fall, and arrives at a figure.

Thus the period during which birth, and life, and death have been occurring on this earth is less than 6,000 years.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Evolution”, 1966 second edition, p. 180

Most of the entry's length is quotation rather than argument: President John Taylor on species keeping their kind, the First Presidency's 1909 statement The Origin of Man, and several pages of Joseph Fielding Smith. The 1958 and 1966 texts of the entry are substantially the same. What changed around it is that Cro-Magnon Man, a one-line cross-reference pointing here, was deleted in 1966 — while Cave Man, pointing at the same entry, survived.

Where it stands

The church's current position is published under Church History Topics, and it is a position of not having one.

The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution.

“Organic Evolution”, Church History Topics

The same page reproduces the formulation used in Latter-day Saint teaching since 1992: that “the scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how.” Organic evolution is taught in the biology department at Brigham Young University, and has been since long before that. The 1909 statement the entry leans on is one of the documents in the packet BYU issues to students on the subject — where it sits beside the 1931 instruction from the First Presidency that geology, biology, archaeology and anthropology be left “to scientific research”.

So the entry preserves a position the church has since declined to hold, argued at greater length than any other subject in the book. That is what makes it worth reading: it is the fullest statement of a view that was once ordinary and is now nobody's official anything.