Can evolution be reconciled with the Bible? Ben Spackman is a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University, and he says “Yes, but not the way people think.” He introduces us to the idea of “Concordism.” What is that?
Ben: This is not a question that is answered easily within 30 seconds, because it requires dealing with assumptions that people don’t even know they have. The main one is something called “concordism.” It’s an assumption that science, especially evolution or the age of the earth or various aspects of that, and scripture are speaking the same language. They’re talking about the same thing and therefore they have to match up or one of them is false. They have to be in concord with each other.
The assumption that Genesis is providing a natural history of the earth, a physical history of the earth, is simply not an accurate assumption, but most people have it. So you end up going in a couple of different ways. You have people who say, well, this is what my reading of the Bible says, so I’m going to make the science match that. You get young-earth creationists who say that the earth is only a couple of thousand years old. Everything was created more or less in its current form as we know it within the last couple of thousand years. Then you have the people who go the other way and they say, well, here’s what science tells us. So obviously that’s what scripture must be saying in some kind of veiled or poetic or metaphoric way.
You may wonder why I decided to talk to Ben. He has a very interesting background.
Ben: If you really want to understand evolution and how different religious people have thought about it, you need three different areas of expertise. You need to understand the science of evolution, at least basically. That’s what my two major rounds of science as an undergrad and then as a post-bacc premed have given me. I have more science than a lot of people. But you also need history, especially intellectual history of about the last 500 years. That is history of ideas. That’s where two of my three Ph.D. exams come in, American Religious History and Reformation History. My third exam will be History of Science. So I’m really getting at the history of the worldview that people have today that leads them to read Genesis in certain ways. What are the roots of that worldview, of those unspoken assumptions back 500 years ago?
The third leg you need– so you need history, you need science, then you have to control the biblical interpretation. You have to be able to look at the Bible in its ancient setting, in its Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. The problem is that many people who write about evolution are scientists. They don’t have the history and they don’t control scripture. Most of the people who write about this, well, let me limit myself to a Latter-day Saint context. Most Latter-day Saints who have written about reconciling science and religion or evolution have either been scientists, so they get the science down well, but they don’t do the history or the scripture.
Most of the people who have written about it from a scriptural perspective, they don’t know the history. They don’t know the science. Because of our 19th century populist inheritance in Mormonism, that is, we were very skeptical of experts, very skeptical of clergy, very skeptical of authority telling us what this had to mean. If you look at all the books that have been written by a Latter-day Saints on this topic, the vast majority of them have no relevant expertise at all. They’re lawyers. They’re accountants. They’re doctors. They’re people who don’t really do the science. They don’t really do the history and they don’t really do the scripture either. So to my knowledge, I’m the only one who really has a foot kind of in all those different worlds, which is kind of a historical accident. I certainly didn’t choose to spend six years in graduate school and then be given the boot because of Babylonian or to not get into medical school. But in retrospect it’s worked out very well and my wife and I have been very lucky in certain ways. So that’s my story and my educational background. I consider myself an eclectic historian with different skills depending on the time period we’re looking at.
In part 2, we talk about how early Christian fathers and modern LDS think about science and the Bible. Early Mormon Seventies/Apostles BH Roberts, John A. Widtsoe, and James E. Talmage seemed to be very amenable to evolution. It seems like Joseph Fielding Smith on the other hand, had an outsize influence on LDS thought, and tended more towards a creationist stance. In our next conversation with Ben Spackman, we’ll talk about that dynamic, and how early leaders diverged, and how it seems like Smith temporarily won the evolutionary debate.
GT: So let me throw that out there. We talked about who won between Tertullian and Augustine and it sounds like Augustine won? Is that a fair assumption? Before you answer that, I also want to do this. Let’s talk about Talmage, Roberts and Widtsoe and Joseph Fielding Smith. It sounds like Joseph Fielding Smith won in a lot of minds.
Ben: In a lot of ways, I think he did. If you want to be cynical, he kind of waited until his opponents died. Then he published Man, His Origin and Destiny, which was kind of his young-Earth creationist book. Parts of that were written word for word 20 or 30 years earlier. None of his discussions with apostles, who were in some cases his senior and had Ph.D.’s in relevant fields shifted him one bit.
Ben: On the one hand, you can look at that as very admirable. His strength was, he thought, and rightly so, at least in this narrow way, what is important is that we’re faithful to scripture. Where that goes wrong, and I would disagree with it, is how he read scripture. There are other examples of this in LDS history. I have made a very loose argument somewhere that, in a way, Joseph Fielding Smith was kind of the epitome of 19th century assumptions that Mormons had inherited. These other three guys were outsiders in several ways. First of all, they were all foreign, technically. Roberts was British, Talmage was British, Widtsoe was Norwegian. So they were not raised in a set of 19th century American assumptions. They were getting 19th century European assumptions which differed in some ways. They were all converts and so they were not raised with, what you might think of as religious Mormon assumptions that they would just start imbibing by osmosis, from age three onwards in church or something. So, it’s interesting that these three guys who are outsiders in significant ways are the ones who opposed Joseph Fielding Smith’s insider perspective. By insider I mean, you couldn’t be much more of an insider than Joseph Fielding Smith. I mean by his position, by his family, by his history. He was just at the center, at the core.
Many people like to say that man evolved from Apes. We talked about that assumption, and I asked Ben Spackman his opinions on the evolution of man.
GT: So, let’s talk a little bit about your views then. We’ll use the classic trope or whatever. Do you believe that we evolved from one-celled bacterium to evolve into monkeys and apes and to mankind and that sort of a thing?
Ben: As you phrased it, I would say no, but that’s because it’s an inaccurate description of evolution.
GT: Okay.
Ben: Evolution is itself a fairly vague term. A lot of people who have issues with evolution are actually having issues with abiogenesis. That is, how do you go from something that’s lifeless to something that has life? That’s not technically what evolution is about. Evolution is about the relatedness of living things. They are very similar. Why are they similar? How do we explain the similarities in things which no longer exist, which we have proof of.
Ben: We didn’t descend from apes, we share a common ancestor. That is where the scientific evidence points. Again, I’m not a scientist. I can’t go in and evaluate their p-values or redo these experiments or get my hands on the fossils. As with most aspects of life, we kind of accept the scientific consensus such as it is….
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GT: So, in Genesis it says that Adam was formed out of the dust of the earth. Is that what happened?
Ben: I actually like to bring that up with people who are opposed to evolution. They say, “You think we came from apes.” I say, “Well, you think we came from dirt. Is that really so much better?”
What do you think?
What are your thoughts concerning evolution and the Bible? Can they be reconciled via this idea of concordism? Should they be separated as teaching completely different things? Has creationism won in the Church, or do you think the Church is making headway towards a greater acceptance of evolution? Did man evolve from apes?
Wheat & Tares 
Ben S. always has great material. He brings a lot of insight and perspective to the evolution discussion. The evolution battle within Mormonism is over at this point — although there are quite a few older Mormons who don’t quite recognize this. So a discussion about evolution and Mormonism is more an exercise in LDS history, trying to understand the personalities and LDS governance issues that put the Church in a position of being science-deniers for most of a century about evolution.
And that’s the issue that is still live and relevant for Mormons. The Church is not doing any better with current science issues (the basis of homosexuality; Word of Wisdom claims versus actual facts; the origins and genetic makeup of Native Americans) than it did on evolution in the 20th century. In other words, LDS leaders have learned exactly nothing from the LDS experience with evolution. LDS leaders don’t understand that even in the eyes of most active Mormons science has more credibility than they do. To retain what credibility they still have, they need to be more willing to integrate science into the LDS worldview and LDS doctrinal positions.
There was a similar discussion over on BCC and I’ll post my same comment from there.
As an amateur science nerd, it’s fascinating to me that this is even a topic up for debate today. The evidence in support of evolution by natural selection as the best explanation for ALL life on earth is simply overwhelming. When the data is understood at even the most basic level, having a debate about evolution seems to me as silly as debating a round earth or a heliocentric model of the universe.
The only reason someone would not accept evolution as fact is because of religious based emotional reasoning where some aspect of religous belief is seen as conflicting with evolution. But in the 21st century we can no longer shrug off evolution as “just a theory” anymore than we can shrug off gravity as such. If evolution seems to conflict with religious dogma, then it’s the dogma that must change to accomodate what should be seen as absolutely proven and confirmed science.
I appreciate the comments Dave and Tom. But there is a problem when the current prophet in about 2007 stated the following, “Man has always been man. Dogs have always been dogs. Monkeys have always been monkeys. It’s just the way genetics works.” One of the commenters on my YouTube channel said this came from: https://bycommonconsent.com/2007/05/20/elder-nelson-doesnt-believe-in-evolution/
I’ll also mention that the creationists came out in full force on Part 1 of my interview. I even got a flat-earther!!! (I agree these are emotional arguments, but they all claim a scientific conspiracy against their arguments.)
I don’t have a problem with Pres Nelson having an opinion different than what science has. Until we take his opinion in front of the Church and vote on it as scripture, it’s just his opinion.
We need to stop promoting the idea that just because a leader of the church says something, it’s authoritative and God’s opinion. If that was the case, then we’d be stuck with every conference talk, all the way back to Journal of Discourses, as scripture.
For Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-Day-Saintism the biggest problem is not the Bible. D&C 77, the Pearl of Great Price, and modern prophets and apostles are the bigger barrier believing evolution.
The debate should be over, but it isn’t. There are plenty of young people that deride evolution as an unproven theory, and those that disagree are usually silent outside of the blogs.
I disagree with Ben. I think that teachings about evolution and the Old Testament are mutually exclusive and that science has proved wrong what has long been believed to a description of a historical reality by billions of people across millenia up to the present day. Of course, you can always derive some metaphorical value from the Old Testament, and I’m not discounting that, but I have every reason to believe that the people who originated the ideas and stories as well as their editors who eventually compiled them to create the Book of Genesis were attempting to describe reality, and that their followers for millenia mostly believed this to be a description of reality. Of course, they knowingly engaged in metaphor, hyperbole, and embellishment to tell these stories, and their early followers may have acknowledged as much as well. However, I simply can’t imagine that these early story-tellers and their followers believed themselves to simply promoting some entertaining fiction. When they spoke of a great flood covering the earth, I think that they really believed in a massive flood that forced Noah to relocate and take every last animal with him.
Many, particularly on this blog, scoff at the idea that humans actually take so many of these fantastic ideas such as are described in the OT at face value and are very much prone to accept scientific consensuses. According to a recent study by Chapman University which polled 2,500 American adults, just as many adults believe in Bigfoot (20%) as they do the Big Bang Theory. 60% believe that civilizations like Atlantis once existed. To believe myths as real is just a human phenomenon that even in this age of science is extremely widespread, even in the developed world.
“The only reason someone would not accept evolution as fact is because of …”
I will pick my own reasons thank you very much!
Anyway, I tend to ignore it. I fix computers. How exactly I came to be, beyond ordinary parentage, does not seem to influence my daily life much. It is possible that the Earth and everything on it was created yesterday and who can prove otherwise?
So I go with what seems to be true and let others argue the gnats. Unless of course it is a sufficiently interesting gnat
Thanks Ben for all the great work you do. I am a huge fan.
“Anyway, I tend to ignore it.”
Your comment suggests otherwise, that you are annoyed by people bringing up evolution and take the stance that such an idea is too extraordinary and can’t be proved or even established a plausible (not true). If you really tended to ignore it, then why bother commenting?