Evolution
Evolution is change that unfolds by stages, as a scroll is opened one column at a time, and in biology it names the change in the inherited traits of populations over successive generations, as variations that favor survival and reproduction are preserved and others are lost. The Latin evolvere described the unrolling of a book, and the English word came to signify anything that unfolds from what lay folded within it. Many believers and skeptics alike treat evolution and creation as rivals, as though one must choose between the opening chapters of Genesis and the fossil record. Latter-day Saint leaders, however, have consistently affirmed that God is the Creator and that Adam was “the primal parent of our race,” while declining to rule on the mechanisms that biology studies.
Scripture itself binds the first man to the ground from which every other creature came. He is formed from the dust of the ’adamah, the tilled earth, and Hebrew hearers would scarcely have missed the echo of ’adam in ’adamah: the earthling bears the name of the soil. Restoration scripture builds on that kinship, describing a creation that takes time, proceeds by stages, and enlists the earth itself as a participant. In this light, Latter-day Saints may study the mechanisms of creation as part of their reverence for the Creator, and Mormon transhumanists may regard humanity’s growing power over those mechanisms as a stewardship inherited from the Gods who first organized the earth. The twentieth century showed how gravely that stewardship can be abused.
Let the Earth Bring Forth
Genesis has God command, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind” (Genesis 1:24), a formulation that grants the ground itself a share in producing life. Augustine and other early Christian interpreters read the command as God’s placing within matter seminal principles that would unfold across the ages, as a tree lies hidden within its seed. On this reading, the creative word establishes potentials that the created order then realizes over time, so that divine agency and natural process work together throughout. The Book of Abraham carries Augustine’s intuition considerably further. It recasts the creation as the work of a council of Gods who prepare the elements and then await their response, adding to the Genesis account a distinctive vocabulary of organization, patience, and obedience.
There the Gods resolve, “Let us prepare the earth to bring forth grass,” and then “organized the earth to bring forth grass from its own seed, and the herb to bring forth herb from its own seed” (Abraham 4:11-12). The same pattern governs the animals, for “the Gods prepared the earth to bring forth the living creature after his kind” and afterward “saw they would obey” (Abraham 4:24-25). The Book of Moses adds that every tree grew out of the ground “naturally” (Moses 3:9). Throughout the account the Gods prepare the earth to bring forth, organize it, and then wait upon it, a description of creative agency that comfortably accommodates long ages and the operation of natural law.
Deep Time and the Death Before the Fall
Steven L. Peck, a Latter-day Saint evolutionary biologist, has embraced deep time and common descent as compatible with the faith, and these chapters, in which the Gods give the earth time to bring forth its creatures and the trees grow naturally, leave ample room for both. Restoration doctrine removes most other grounds for conflict. Latter-day Saints hold that God organized the world from eternal matter and that intelligence itself progresses, so that a long development of living forms suits the theology as a whole. One question nevertheless remains open, and it concerns death. Enoch taught that “because that Adam fell, we are; and by his fall came death” (Moses 6:48), and faithful readers have long disagreed over how far that statement reaches.
Some interpreters take Enoch’s words to exclude any death on earth before the Fall, while others apply them to human death alone or to the posterity of Adam. In 1931, after B. H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith had disputed the matter before the Church’s leading councils, the First Presidency declined to settle it and advised that geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology be left to scientific research. Brigham Young University, guided by a collection of official statements its trustees approved in 1992, teaches evolutionary biology alongside them. The Apostle Paul supplies a sequence that harmonizes with an unfolding creation: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). Resurrection, on this reading, stands at the far end of a process that began when the earth first brought forth life.
Directed Evolution and Its Shadow
In 1957 the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley proposed that “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself,” and suggested transhumanism as the name for this new belief. Gene editing, synthetic biology, and laboratory evolution have since brought his proposal within technical reach, and in 2018 Frances Arnold shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for directing the evolution of enzymes toward functions she had chosen. Lincoln Cannon has urged that Latter-day Saints, whose prophet described a God who instituted laws by which others might progress, ought to be the foremost evolutionists in the world. On that view, those who hope to become like God must also learn to organize matter and life, as the Gods of Abraham organized the earth.
Huxley also presided over the British Eugenics Society, and the movement he endorsed discloses the shadow of directed evolution. In the United States, state sterilization laws, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927, were used against tens of thousands of citizens judged unfit to reproduce. In 2018 the researcher He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had edited as embryos, without adequate review or meaningful informed consent, and a Chinese court later sentenced him to prison. Both episodes treated human beings as material to be shaped by the designs of others. By way of contrast, the Gods of Abraham organize the earth to bring forth “from its own seed,” and the creatures they prepare retain a power to reproduce their own likeness that their makers respect.
Huxley coined transhumanism to name humanity’s deliberate participation in its own evolution, and Restoration scripture had already described a creation unrolled one column at a time, in which the Gods prepare the earth, organize it to bring forth from its own seed, and wait upon its response across the ages. Part of that organizing power now rests in human hands. The Book of Abraham sets the order in which it should be exercised: preparation, patience, and respect for the integrity of what is brought forth. Geneticists and synthetic biologists who adopt that order, with public review and the consent of those affected before any embryo is edited, and with long observation of engineered organisms before their release, will follow the pattern of preparation and patience that the Gods of Abraham observed in organizing the earth.