An Update to My Faith Crisis
I came across this Wikipedia article on the acceptance of evolution by religious groups and at the time of writing, the article has a chart showing the percentage of different religious groups who agreed that evolution is the best explanation for the origin of human life on Earth as of 2007.
What was a bit surprising to me was how low Mormonism was on this chart. As I’ve pointed out earlier in my Looking to the Church section of my faith crisis write up, some early church leaders were extremely against the idea of natural selection. But I also found this excerpt from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism somewhat interesting as it states that the church has published its views on evolution as early as 1909.
What confuses me about this is that many church leaders from 1950 to today as seen in this video that I also previously mentioned in My Spiritual Deconstruction have come out fully against the ideas of evolution and in support of the theory of creation. Why would they? From the excerpt above, it sounded like the issue was settled. Apparently, it was not. And I’m not going to go into the flawed men argument. These are supposed leaders of God’s church speaking on behalf of the church and its leadership. Their statements, whether true or not, should hold equal weight.
Going back to the chart above, the second striking thing to me is how willing the Jewish community is to agree with evolution. This is a religious community who solely relies on books of the Old Testament in their faith, yet they are more accepting of evolution than Christians. From what I can find, most Jews view the story of creation allegorically or philosophically rather than as a scientific fact. I’m not sure why modern Christianity and LDS views skew towards upholding the Book of Genesis account of life’s origin as scientific, but to me it’s clearly a problem and will continue to be a problem Christianity as a whole is going to have to reconcile with as science encroaches on explanations that used to be left up to Bible interpretation. Adam and Eve are portrayed as real beings in the LDS mythos with Michael the Archangel being a pre-embodied Adam and him being essential in the creation of Earth. Again, we get into the issue of how much of the story is “real” and how much of it is “allegorical”.