This scripture opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for me about the nature of God, humanity and existence, as well as doubt, faith, belief, fact and truth. This allowed me to accept many things that I couldn’t accept before. Granted, I have friends and even a few family members who insist that this scripture allows me to fit square pegs into round holes.

As far as evolution is concerned, I don’t pretend to know the reason why God does the things that God does, but I firmly believe that evolution was the vehicle in which life was accomplished on this planet. As to Adam and Eve, couldn’t they have been simply the first people that God chose to talk to? Is it so far outside the realm of possibility that God let thousands of years go by without communicating with this version of humanity? If we believe in Mormonism, God certainly let an awful long time go by between the time his gospel was destroyed after the death of Christ, and the time it was restored. It doesn’t mean though that those people who lived between the time of the Great Apostasy and The Restoration are damned. In the same way, I don’t believe that those human beings who lived before Adam and Eve are damned, or less important or less significant than us. Also, the temple, when talking about Creation, doesn’t refer to days, but to (can’t remember the exact terminology it uses) something like periods of time.

Again, friends would say that I’m fitting square pegs into round holes, but I also believe that to force God into terms, explanations, definitions that are defined by us is the height of unmitigated hubris. It suggests that we have all the answers and we can’t possibly be wrong. Maybe when we all die and know the answers, then the questions are not going to be important anymore. Maybe, creating viable worlds are like making spaghetti noodles. If you don’t cook it long enough, the noodles are too hard. If you cook it for too long, they get mushy. I don’t know.

Maybe when we die and truly understand the nature of god, these things will all make sense. One other thing, the bible is a great book, but there are some concepts that are difficult to explain and so it talks in generalities, in stories, in parables. I believe that the same can be said for our other scriptures. They are more specific, but in the same way that we don’t talk about things outside the temple, maybe the same is true about the nature of God. Maybe the technical aspects of life are closely tied to things like spirituality, agency, choice, etc and so the details are not fully explained to us, or at least, not to our satisfaction.

However, I’m still somewhat skeptical about the “how” vs. “why” distinction re science and religion. I would certainly agree that religion addresses the “why” question in a way that is outside the scope of science. But the scriptural accounts still largely focus on how. It’s true, as you say, that the details are vague–but Genesis doesn’t really touch on the question of why God created the earth; rather, it lays out an account of how it happened (however non-literally one might decide to read it.) Abraham has a bit more on the why, as in the verse you cited, but it still includes a description of the process of creation. I personally incline toward reading Genesis non-literally, and I don’t have a problem with evolution. But I also think that those who point to conflict between the two are raising legitimate questions. If our scripture only consisted of philosophical kinds of statements regarding the purpose of life, I think a neat categorization of science and religion as dealing with different spheres might be more tenable. But given that it also includes a lot of “how,” of God’s actions in the world, the situation seems messier to me.

I think this is what you are saying, and I like the approach because it is at least intellecutally honest and doesnt leave me lost in a fog of obfuscation. It certainly raises any number of other very significant questions, but at least it doesn’t try to convince me that black is really white, and my problem is that I am just not looking at it the right way.

Well, now, that’s just being snide, Geoff. Maintaining a context is not the same as having no imagination. And since we are Mormons, the both of us, having some reference to Mormon context would seem like the thing to do.

Do you or do not agree that spirits once lived in heaven, and then came to live on earth, and that therefore there mus have been a first time that occurred? No matter what the type of being that spirit entered. ~