An Update to My Faith Crisis
Russel M. Nelson said this in one of his recent talks when I was listening to him live during conference:
“Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes of the human body happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, “Could an explosions in a printing shop produce a dictionary?” The likelihood is most remote. But if so, it could never heal its own torn pages or reproduce its own new editions!” Thanks Be to God, page 2
also this:
“[T]o think that man evolved from one species to another is, to me, incomprehensible. Man has always been man. Dogs have always been dogs. Monkeys have always been monkeys. It’s just the way genetics works.” In Focus Mormonism in Modern America - Pew Research, page 5
It has always stuck with me. Not because it’s true, but because it’s just a terrible way to talk about the Big Bang or evolution.
I’ve had this analogy about dice and the big bang in my head but could never put it into words. So I asked Claude to put it into words for me. Here’s what it wrote:
Imagine someone rolls a handful of dice and they all come up sixes. A reasonable person looks at that and thinks, “Okay, either someone rolled these, or maybe they were placed deliberately—but something caused this arrangement.” Now imagine someone argues: “No, nothing caused this. The dice have just always been sitting there showing sixes. There was no roll, no placement, no prior state. This is simply how dice exist.”
That’s roughly the position of denying the Big Bang. We’re looking at a universe that has a very specific arrangement—matter distributed in particular patterns, background radiation with a precise temperature, galaxies moving apart from each other in measurable ways. All of this evidence points backward to a moment when everything was compressed together and then expanded.
Denying the Big Bang is like insisting the dice were never rolled, despite the fact that we can see they’re still wobbling slightly, we can hear the echo of them hitting the table, and we have footage of them mid-tumble. The evidence for a beginning isn’t just philosophical preference—it’s written into the current state of the universe itself.
You can certainly ask what caused the roll or who rolled them or what existed before the roll—those are open questions. But denying that any roll occurred requires ignoring the dice still settling on the table.