Darwin's Birthday

A new Gallup Poll dated February 11, 2009, on the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, shows that only 39% of Americans say they "believe in the theory of evolution", while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity. Even to this day, highly religious individuals claim that the theory of evolution contradicts the story of creation as outlined in the book of Genesis in the Bible.

What is the official position of the LDS Church on evolution? I would hazard a guess that most of the members don't really know and just assume that the church's position would be one of opposition. However, that is not the case.

If you want to look at the official Church position, read the statement in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Part of that position reads as follows:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, declares man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity.... Man is the child of God, formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes.

I'm not someone who necessarily believes that one of my ancestors is a chimpanzee but the Church could have said evolution was not true, and it did not. The position statement leaves a lot of room for evolution to take place.

For those of you who are interested enough to read further, there is a very interesting article in on a website entitled Fairlds.org. The website is operated by the Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research (FAIR) which is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of LDS doctrine, belief and practice.

The article is entitled "Evolution and Latter-day Saint Theology: The Tree of Life and DNA".
The conclusion of the article is this:

"the data support the scientific interpretation of an evolutionary process for human origins. The scriptures state that God created humans in His image, we believe these two apparently contradictory paradigms can be reconciled if God created the natural laws by which humans were created. We refer to those natural laws as evolution in a package. Conflicts between the scientific data and the scriptural accounts result from our interpretation of the scriptures and our interpretation of the scientific data. They're not in the data or in the scriptures inherently."

For more information on how eminent LDS scientists reconcile their religious beliefs with their scientific knowledge, read my previous blog, Science vs. Religion.