Ben Spackman Interview

sunshine i realize i am in sunshine would you like to go to the top of sunshine all right welcome to um an interview in this channel accept truth with joy it's a real pleasure to have benjamin spacman with me today and um we're gonna have a conversation we don't know how long this is gonna go but i'm really excited to have him here he's really one of the up-and-coming uh scholars in in both thinking about how we should interpret scripture in relation to science and specifically evolution and i think he's well positioned to really help us out try to come to a better place where we can reconcile our faith and our religion so ben uh thank you for being with me today hey glad to be here i am always happy to opine [Laughter] great um and let's see you're coming you're in california is that where you're at right now i'm in i'm in phoenix my wife is a professor at arizona state so i'm just i'm here in my cave writing my dissertation that's awesome i did my post-doc at arizona state so i love it all right there for a while i love that area well great um well what i want to do maybe is start off with you kind of giving me um like the and the listeners just kind of a background of who you are and how you arrived at this point where you're now writing a dissertation on the subject of of evolution and mormonism um so maybe you could give us a kind of a short background of who you are and and how you arrived where you're at well uh like most people i thought i was normal for most of my life and have realized that that wasn't the case so i grew up i grew up in rochester minnesota in the shadow of the mayo clinic was a science nerd was surrounded by doctors and engineers um and so are your parents science bent as well or my dad's a retired doctor from the clinic yeah and his dad was also a doctor at the clinic before going to canada so i intended to go to medical school and uh was just very interested in science and mechanics and engineering growing up and um got well i don't need to tell you my whole life story but i went on a mission to france and got very interested in biblical languages there and started trying to teach myself a little bit of hebrew and a little bit of greek and a little bit of spanish and a little bit of mandarin which aren't biblical languages but but i was interested and i went home and i transferred to byu and i went to the jerusalem center and i was in the midst of taking organic chemistry for majors and i think second semester hebrew and first semester greek i said i don't know about this medical stuff but these languages are fascinating and at that point i kind of made a conscience a very conscious decision to take a different path which really felt like a leap into the unknown because you know you you go to medical school you get a job as a doctor very predictable very safe very difficult but you know so i went off to the university of chicago and did a master's degree and phd work in um what's called comparative semitics uh which was basically kind of old testament languages and literature plus arabic so i was taking three language classes three quarters a year for four years and got hebrew and aramaic and assyrian and babylonian and ugaritic and old south arabian and arabic a little bit of history and a little bit of linguistics and then i took my doctoral exams which were in hebrew arabic aramaic acadian syria palestinian history and comparative semitic linguistics and passed them all except acadian which is assyrian and babylonian and they they decided my acadian was not up to snuff and that ended my time at the university of chicago so i went back to school while my wife was getting her phd and went back and did all the pre-med stuff again took the mcat volunteered at a hospital kind of said i can do this as a hobby i've got the languages down and i was also teaching institute volunteer institute and i had some students who were grad students who wanted me to do a class on genesis and that kind of got me looking further down that road what what year is this about what year are we talking where this starts um i think chicago ended about 2007 2008 okay um and i was doing i was working part-time and going to school part-time while my wife was doing her phd we were in new york and you know 2008 is right when the economy is collapsing and there were not really jobs for someone with my training so i was working at a u-haul and doing these pre-med classes and teaching institute sometimes twice a week so i started getting very interested i'd always been interested in genesis but i started getting very interested as well in why have we understood genesis in particular ways because the way a lot of people read it today is not really what it meant to the israelites or the early christians so why have we started reading it this way and that started getting me onto the evolutionary side of things a little bit in some history of science and about the time my wife was applying for jobs i applied for medical schools and didn't get in anywhere but my wife got a postdoc at harvey mudd which is one of the clermont colleges at that point i was very interested in kind of the modern side of genesis and creationism and evolution especially within the church and i said well okay i can wait another year and apply in california schools but they're already super competitive and i'm old relatively speaking for medical school so we're gonna go back the other direction and i knew claremont had an american religious history program i knew patrick mason was there and there were mormon studies people there so i said okay we're going to go back we're going to do a phd in american religious history and we're going to focus on the history science interface and i'm bringing my science to it i'm bringing my bible ancient near east hebrew to it most people don't have those yeah so i started that program and uh did my exams two years ago in american religious history and then uh protestant reformation so i've got a good idea of things that happened in the last 500 years that led people interpreting in certain ways and thinking of authority in certain ways my tertiary exam was history of science so with all of those things i i knew going in that i wanted to write my dissertation loosely around latter-day saints evolution creationism genesis interpretation of scripture and so i've actually been doing research for my dissertation since you know i kind of got started in my program yeah um and so that brings me to where i am today i am writing my dissertation uh i i write and talk a lot about these issues and related issues i actually think that evolution touches directly on uh central issues of faith for latter-day saints because of if evolution is true as seems to be the case along multiple fields of science and mounds of data then why haven't god's proxies namely prophets in scripture known that truth or even fought against it in some cases so i i spend time kind of on that theological side trying to provide people with intellectual mechanisms for making sense of this for for having these gears meshed together that's fascinating um and uh so you're married you have children we don't have any kids we've never been able to have kids okay and um so i i thought it was fascinating you said both your dad and your grandfather were doctors but you went kind of a theology route kind of like darwin darwin's grandfather and father were both doctors and then he graduated in in theology as well so maybe you kind of have a darwinian history to you uh yeah well to some extent i hope those aren't perfect parallels have you traveled the galapagos before i've i've spent a lot of time in europe and the middle east but not really elsewhere in the world too much well great you know i'm not interested in observing finch beaks or doing the scientific side i mean i i a lot of people want to argue science with me and i say i'm not a scientist i don't read those papers i don't do lab work i'm a historian yeah and tell you how we got to this point and what drives it and why but that's not my area of specialty well great well great well thanks for kind of giving us that up up to date where you're at um what i'd like to do maybe because you you've been kind to kind of share a little bit of your dissertation with me and i've looked over it and i've listened to the things that you've said in multiple settings as well i want to just maybe ask you then some questions now the first thing is you use two words all the time that i was not familiar with and i'd like you to because you're probably going to use them and you probably know what two words i'm going to bring up the exegesis and hermenetics right determining could you talk about those two words um and why they're going to be important for a discussion of understanding evolution and and science and religion so hermeneutics and exegesis both come out of greek and they're related in the very simple sense that hermeneutics is a theory and exegesis is the practice hermeneutics refers to the assumptions you make about the nature of scripture and revelation and prophets and assumptions about your methods and then you apply those assumptions and methods in exegesis and so exegesis is kind of the machine you you build the machine with hermeneutics and then you feed your text through it and out comes this is what the text means and so there are different um we'll throw in the third term interpretation there are different kinds of interpretation and exegesis gives you kind of the historical contextual what did this mean to people at the time when paul said it or isaiah said it it's what you get taught in uh in graduate school um but your you know if you've ever made homemade pasta the kind of the shape of the pasta you get out of the machine depends on how you build the machine and how you build the machine and this analogy is hermeneutics right so if your hermeneutic shift this metaphor is getting away from me the shape of your pasta changes right right so what's what's key here is that everyone has a set of assumptions most of us aren't aware of the assumptions and those assumptions to a large degree determine what we think scripture says so if you can if you can take apart that machine you can say oh okay i see this gear is what's making those designs on the pasta well i don't like that can i swap out a different gear for this does this gear make sense in other words once you become aware that you have assumptions and this was this took me a couple years in graduate school you start going what are my assumptions is that a reasonable assumption to hold right and sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is no and sometimes the answer is i'm not really sure right now you you claim that the history of religious opposition to evolution is in reality a history of hermeneutics epistemology and authority structures within the religious culture why why why do you claim that so um in history of science and religion you know uh starting in about the 15th and 1600s what we think of as science really starts snowballing and happening quickly and one of the things that was clear is that around that time people had partly because of the protestant reformation had started to read scripture primarily as a global history of the earth natural history science creation history um it explained where the different races came from it explained uh geology and the problem was as as they were sending out explorers you know they discover the new world well there's nothing about the new world in the bible how do we account for the things existing that the bible doesn't know about how do we account for civilizations like in china and egypt that appear to have records and monuments that go back before the flood and so as soon as uh science loosely speaking starts discovering new data it starts calling into question does the bible know this if so where does it hint at this and if not why doesn't the bible know this and so there's there's kind of not clash but there's data that makes them reflect on what's going on and so for a lot of a lot i need to be careful let me let me give a more general example geology and theology settle in the the 1700s and scientists and theologians and christians this isn't this isn't a science versus religion this is a both and because most people who were scientists as we think of them were also deeply religious people often priests monks and they were doing science as part of their uh their theology their study of god because god created everything in the world you studied god by studying his creations exactly and so theology with paley exactly exactly they had this idea that goes way way back at least 1600 years of god's two books he gave us the book of scripture he gave us the book of nature to study god you have to read both books and so with geology and scripture it was decided fairly quickly that scripture did not control geology scripture was not giving us a natural history of the earth geology was teaching us things about what scripture said and so on and i'm kind of i'm kind of giving you the very short version there right now i i also like you you compare you kind of make you say genesis proves mainstream science faults for the but the mainstream science proves genesis faults now not that this happens but you say this is a problem is that many people think that genesis is proving mainstream science faults and many people think that mainstream science is proving genesis faults why why is this a false dichotomy in your opinion and what assumptions are being made here that amplify this conflict the primary assumption here is that the truth of genesis is dependent upon genesis speaking in scientific terms that are accurate on the far one extreme you have ken ham and the young earth creationists who say genesis teaches us about the history of the earth about its age about how it was created and that proves that all this stuff about billions of years and evolution is false and on the flip side of that you have the new atheists like um mr dawkins oh dawkins thank you who shares the exact same assumption that for genesis to be true it has to be speaking in scientific terms and revealing scientific truths which it doesn't and that proves genesis is false now most people don't hold to either of these extremes but most people do have this assumption that if genesis is talking about creation it has to be speaking in kind of material terms because what else would it be talking about then otherwise and that kind of comes from our inheritance of the enlightenment that says truth is facts and facts mean science and history and if you stop and think about that there are kinds of truth that are not um they are not quantitative that way they are not reducible to historical facts i would consider it a truth that my spouse loves me but i can't prove that with a geometric theorem or a two plus two equals four or even in her behavior because people can lie or or whatnot but it you know so the problem here is this assumption that we have made kind of as a society generally that for genesis to be true it needs to be scientific and most people would think about well scientific but not literal you know they're they're metaphors or you have to understand day is billions of years or something like that i mean it's still talking about science and creation it's just it's a poem or something and uh the only reason we can think that way is because most people don't get exposed to um the ancient near eastern parallels and genres that genesis is speaking in that god was speaking to you know the book of mormon and dnc tells us that god speaks to people in their language he meets their needs and our assumption is that god's revealing things about the physical origins of the earth well i i can tell you that's not their spiritual need that they needed yeah 3000 years ago 2500 years ago that's not what god was doing yeah it reminds me of that quote from galileo where it says the bible teaches us how to go to heaven but not how the heavens go yeah which which was not his he got that from the from the vatican librarian who was a priest oh yeah which which undermines the um our typical science religion warfare dichotomy and we tell the galileo story and it doesn't fit there's there's a lot of misconceptions there as well as as you know so let's bring this kind of more into the mormon realm um if we could what um because you mentioned you know kind of the young earth creationist movement especially that happened here in the united states how how what effect did that have on mormonism and why i mean why if if we're the restored church and we're supposedly re receiving you know revelations from god and new scripture and and all of this why did that young earth creationism um affect mormonism or how did it do it and why oh okay there are about three different questions there's a lot there but let's let's so let's start with like um where did this start to happen and how did it happen let's start with the prophetic side because that helps the other parts make sense okay so the the main thing about profits here and i've written essays on this and one will be in byu studies later this year is that we tend to think of prophets uh functionally as basically being kind of typewriters for god you know you get called into that position god tells you what to say and you get it there's actually um a friend used this at a conference and i've used it someone lds painted a picture of the proclamation on the family and in this painting which is not it's not for sale it's not professional it's just it was this person's visualization of what revelation looks like jesus is pushing the text of the proclamation on the family across the desk to president monson now set aside the fact that it wasn't president monson at the time we tend to lose our history in these things the idea here is that once you're the president you just kind of you pick up your daily briefing from god and uh your personality your own ideas your own understandings they don't really enter into it and that's that's a form of fundamentalism which is also something i study so if we understand that prophets retain all of their own cultural assumptions and ideas and biases and knowledge and language patterns and relationships it just means that god will speak to them and direct the church through them it doesn't mean um that they are basically an avatar of god right it's interesting because when i was a missionary you know i used to try to argue with evangelists that you know it wasn't like the bible fell from heaven it kind of sounds like you're making a similar comparison here with mormons where we have this idea that god is literally pushing the revelation in front of the prophet is that kind of what you're saying yeah exactly i think i think we have borrowed a lot of evangelical inerrancy but instead of applying it to the bible or scripture we've applied it to modern prophets but i mean think about think about church structure if that were really how it worked would the prophet need counselors would he need an entire council to counsel with that's what you do with the council you get different ideas you hash things out that that is incompatible with the idea that all talks all revelations all policies are just you know pushed across the desk to the president of the church by jesus right so with that understanding of prophets in mind and i don't think that's inconsistent with anything in church history i argue that from church history yeah and other things then we say okay well where do these ideas come from in latter-day saint history um and here you've got to go back to the 19th century because you know joseph smith was in effect a convert he grew up in a certain place and time and uh he has spiritual experiences that lead him to found the church and get new scripture that is not familiar to him he didn't grow up with it literally everyone who joins the church is a convert they bring in their pre-existing beliefs assumptions doctrinal ideas and it's really rough and tumble for for a number of decades that way there are a number of ideas that we know we inherited one of them was the curse of cain on african americans that long predates latter-day saints but it came in with the converts with everybody and then with that idea we read certain scriptures and saw it confirmed in revelation so there's this there's this problem of people importing stuff and not being aware that they're importing it ideas and unrecognized assumptions they kind of get smuggled in and then baptized as mormon one of these major ideas as it relates to creationism and evolution which was just absolutely dominant in the church at the beginning and still i think is 19th century populist ideas about scripture it's sometimes called anti-clericalism that is people in america in josephus time and place they did not like the idea that scripture is not accessible to me god should be able to speak to me directly through scripture i don't need a priest or a professor to tell me what scripture means i'm just going to read it get get the pastors out of the way get the priests out of the way get the academics out of the way i want god directly well that sounds kind of like the joseph smith story yeah exactly he reads the book the bible and then says i'm gonna go do this which seemed to be new right yeah and the problem with that comes with the nature of scripture which is a scripture particularly ancient scripture was not written for us um to borrow a line from john walton scripture is for us but it was not to us genesis 1 was not written for people in the year 2020. uh if god speaks to people in their time and place then the message is going to bear the marks of that time and place do you see the book of mormon being different where they you know the prophets claim that they're writing for future generations or i do but we have to attenuate that it's commonly said that the bible was written for our day and i would say well it's edited for our day by mormon but nephi in the small plates repeatedly says who he's writing for and it's contemporaries he says i am writing for my people here and we know that the small plates are key in the conversion of the lamanites later on in mosiah and alma okay so even for the book of mormon it's a good idea to be cautious and realize that you need to be understanding that scripture in light of all of the context and how it was written and who it was written for yeah and you know when uh i can't remember if it's mormon or moroni when he says i have seen your day the question is is that day 1830 is that 1930 is that 20 30 is that 25 30 and the idea that the book of mormon is written for our day has led to questions like well why doesn't it talk about say uh homosexuality why doesn't it talk about and it's like well what is our day what what did he actually see we don't know but our day is a moving target so um so it's clear that there is editing for not contemporaries but later people okay and that's different than the bible but we also just don't have the same kind of historical linguistic context for the book of mormon so can we is there is there kind of a few people or instances in time when when mormonism really kind of buys into the old earth creationism argument then an interpretation of scripture or was it or did it gradually come along starting in with joseph smith or one of the things that's interesting that is unknown to most people is that in the 19th century the vast majority of christians in the united states thought the earth was old and that the flood was local in during what's called the fundamentalist modernist controversy from about 1910 through the 1930s when they are founding things called the worldwide fundamentalist society they still think the earth is old and the flood is local and no one's down with this idea of a young earth really except for a very few people one of them is a seventh-day adventist named george mccready price and he holds those views based on a vision of the seventh-day adventist founder and starts saying well i know this is true from revelation and he starts writing geology books to undermine the age of the earth and other things and if he can undermine the age of the earth with geology he also takes out evolution because evolution requires very long periods of time well very few people buy into price's stuff one of the people who does is joseph fielding smith as early as uh 1926 he is reading price's books he is pushing them on other apostles he's saying this supports scripture and other apostles like john witso and james e talmadge are saying no no no scripture doesn't necessarily mean that and this guy doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to geology did smith meet price like did they in person or was he just reading his not as far as i can tell okay i price's books got a bump in the scopes trial of 1925 the famous so-called monkey trial yeah because um william jennings bryan who was the prosecuting attorney cited two scientists to support the bible and one of them was price now brian himself who's been kind of held up as the fundamentalist for all fundamentalists actually believed in an old earth and was fine with evolution of plants and animals just not humans but i i suspect smith may have heard about price from the scopes trial uh maybe he heard of him earlier i haven't found evidence of that yet well even even i mean the reporters were coming to the church and asking their opinion about the scopes trial which resulted in the 1925 first presidency statement right so there was definitely some interaction going on there yeah yeah well smith smith really embodied that 19th century populism that mormonism inherited he thought that people got educated beyond their intelligence he did not trust scientists he did not trust bible scholars he thought that scripture was divine facts and if the bible was a little messed up it's because it hadn't been translated correctly it had been passed on but because the book of mormon and the pearl of great price and dnc just came straight through a prophet those were facts direct from god's mouth and he didn't think he was interpreting he was not aware of his own hermeneutical assumptions and people who disagreed with him like whitso like talmage like uh later on like bh roberts he flatly said in private and sometimes in public you reject scripture and they said clark was great with this he said i am not rejecting scripture i'm rejecting your interpretation of scripture and smith said in response basically i'm not interpreting scripture's meaning is plain and obvious and they're facts people only interpret to get away from the obvious meaning so fast forward a couple decades price's ideas do not really catch on at all although there are some evangelicals who start moving in that direction and uh in the late 1950s early 1960s two evangelicals one of them who is a a hydrological engineer and the other one who was a theologian get together and find price's stuff and they write a book called the genesis flood this morrison whitcomb this is morrison whitcomb in 1961 yeah and um they basically go back 300 years and it's back to the bible should control geology and so little are these ideas held by evangelicals that they shop it around to a couple of presses and they get turned down even by moody press which is super conservative and so it gets published by this podunk press and what happens is it just sells like hotcakes hundreds of thousands of copies um multiple languages and all of a sudden people start saying the only way to be true to the bible is to hold to a seven day creation or a seven thousand year creation and a worldwide flood and all of that rules out evolution and so what we think of today as fundamentalist ideas really only take off in the 1960s and do you think that some of that popularity also came about because you know in response to kind of the anti-darwinian you know um materialistic views that were becoming more and more uh at least touted by people or at least being scared of those ideas do you think that had something to do with it yeah i mean a lot of the a lot of the opposition evolution has been less about the science and more about uh evolution as philosophy because atheists seized on evolution to wield as a club against religion against the bible against superstition and um that picks up with world war ii that picks up in the 1950s and 60s with several supreme court rulings that say schools can't impose prayer schools can't oppose bible reading and so conservative religious people including people like ezra taft benson go this is secularism this is encroaching socialism and communism and it goes back to godless evolution yeah now josephine smith was very vocal as an apostle you know maybe you could mention some of his works that that you know that that he that he created while an apostle um my understanding is he got much more quiet about this subject when he became the prophet what's your take on that so throughout his life consistently boldly with no doubts whatsoever he preaches against an old earth he preaches against evolution and um he does this very early in his life he's got a uh general conference talk in either 1918 or 1920 where he just takes on evolution as a satanic heresy meant to completely destroy the gospel and everything he argues with apostles for decades and then in 1954 he publishes his book called man his origin and destiny which is his anti-evolution procreationism book and some of the text in there he wrote 30 years earlier and there are various second-hand stories from byu professors at the time and in church archives that say as long as there was someone in the quorum like whitso or talmage they acted as kind of a barrier and said this isn't true you can't say this you can't publish this as an apostle well talmadge and roberts are both dead in 33 which those dead in 52 and um in 54 he publishes this book it gets used as a training manual for institute teachers and then gets pushed back from the first presidency from president mckay and clark but it has a huge impact on the church there's one byu biology professor who says that when he was growing up he was taught that that book was just as true as scripture yeah and his other his what is it answers to gospel or there's like a three volume um he was kind of the church so he functioned officially as the church historian for decades from about 1910 onwards and because he had this encyclopedic knowledge of scripture that no one else had and of course there aren't computers and most people don't use a concordance when questions came into the church he would answer them and there are literally thousands of letters in the church archives of him responding to doctrinal questions and a bunch of these got published there is the four volume answers to gospel questions and then there is the three volume doctrines of salvation edited and published by his son-in-law bruce r mcconkie and apparently smith did not know mcconkey was doing that it was a surprise to him when it got published you know it's funny because those those works were some of the first works also to be translated into like spanish and i remember finding those books in people's houses in chile on my mission and reading those and you know i was i was a creationist as a missionary so it's funny i'm an evolutionary biologist now because i was completely a creationist and i loved reading that stuff and then going and teaching because i thought i was teaching out of the higher you know the the deeper doctrines yeah it's it's amazing how i saw that influence you know clear down in south america and those those books address a number of secondary and tertiary questions like well okay what about what about dinosaurs and fossils what about all the scientific dating methods that show an old earth what about all this other stuff so smith addresses those in various ways sometimes he's dismissive sometimes he just says the scientists are wrong sometimes he says well you know scripture is true and divine and science is human and so you believe the revelations or you reject god that's that's it but what about though when he becomes the prophet what what in your studies what do you see that he is writing president of the church in [Music] about 1970 71 and he's president for about 18 months now there are some very interesting things here but it's important to point out that at this point he's quite old uh he's in his 90s he's not in great health but he's also not uh comatose or anything um he does not issue any kind of statement as president of the church and he could have uh i don't think he does anything new in general conference although he does say at one point you know i stand by everything i've taught and written but on the other hand 1971 is when dedicated evolution classes start being taught at byu they've been taught since at least 1925 but always in some other you know we're doing biology speciation we have to talk about evolution but in 1971 they actually get broken out into this class is called evolution and that was started with dwayne jeffrey yes is he the one that started that yeah he's one of the three yeah and several people on campus professors or admins one of those just can't believe this and it gets rough the flagpole to the first presidency and joseph feeling smith on several occasions confirms they are completely allowed and approved to be teaching evolution on campus now my take on that is not that he had changed his mind or that he was somehow out of his mind and didn't understand what he was doing nor that it was kind of a cynical calculus about we have to look good to the world joseph fielding smith was not down with that right um i think it was more of a commitment to education if this is what the science says we need to understand it if only to fight against it better those byu biologists just aren't doing that and that's speculative on my part but that's right that makes the most sense to me right now who carries on his no i don't want to say his legacy but who carries on kind of this this uh viewpoint that the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints ought to be more of a young earth creationist church instead of you know not being that so there are a number of general authorities who continue to echo those things uh elder mcconkie for one his son-in-law his son-in-law uh who was very similar in a lot of ways same same hermeneutical assumptions same kind of authoritative presentation very monolithic and not recognizing alternate views in church history mark e peterson who was also an apostle through the early 1980s i believe he had been a newspaper man and he ran the church news and he wrote the editorials for church news and those editorials were often anti-evolutionary kind of anti-science kind of procreationism i don't know that he himself was a young earth creationist but i don't know that that was evident from those articles but then there was kind of a second tier and in this second tier we have to kind of make some fine distinctions because there are lots of people who are opposed to evolution who don't necessarily have a strong position on the age of the earth or where fossils come from or things like that and in that category was definitely elder packer and he was one of the ones who echoed an earlier lds tradition that was kind of formalized by um jay reuben clark with the chartered course of the church in education that said our revelation our teachings are purely doctrine we don't trust outside stuff it's got to stay pure and that kind of drew a dividing line between our traditions are divine and don't trust outside stuff and packer in the church education system had echoed that a lot and so church education people still today generally did not get degrees in history or scripture or things like that and so the church education system that wrote manuals generally echoed smith mcconkey and so on right the 1980 old testament manual still quotes from a seventh-day adventist right on supposed scientific evidence against creationism it quotes chosen fielding smith that you must choose between evolution and the gospel now we don't use that manual anymore but it was used up until that is still the current manual oh it's still the current man get online and look for the lds institute manual that is still the current manual it's translated into a bunch of languages and um i know in print uh there was a history of latter-day saints in italy put out in the last year or two by um toronto at byu and some other people and they they said that manual caused serious faith issues for a bunch of people in italy yeah and and you see this uh the church education system maybe being a powerful kind of entity maybe not on purpose but clearly then it affected generations potentially right yeah it really did and that's not that's not an individual fault i mean the church education system is designed to echo and reinforce the teachings of prophets and apostles and we had prophets and apostles teaching you have to choose between evolution and jesus and so it's not surprising that ces would echo that to their students okay so you see this to start to maybe shift is it is it going into the 1990s kind of or when do you start to see a shift in both the church both at what's happening at byu maybe what's happening in church education system when do you start to see some of this or what evidences do you have for that i can't speak to the church education system uh byu i know a lot more about um you know starting in the 50s and 60s byu is growing a lot it's hiring a lot of scientists and these scientists all have very high level phds you know from from stanford and things like that and um vast majority of them are convinced of evolution there are a few who aren't and there are internal debates over this at byu but you end up having uh problems between the scientists and the religion department because the religion department does not have nearly as many phds and the phds it does have tend not to be in ancient scripture or history or anything relevant um that changes well i'm still figuring this out because my evidence is is going in different directions i have byu religion professors in the 60s and 70s who are so frustrated that byu is so overwhelmingly pro-evolution and they feel like they can't publish their true gospel stuff that is anti-evolution anti-communist and that the the church is losing this internal battle in fact one of them quits his job at byu in 72 because of this he has um byu's already been lost to babylon to the humanists and the communists and evolutionists it's beyond saving meanwhile you have lds scientists at byu and the u who are very frustrated that they can't get published they're kind of their side of things uh william lee stokes is a lds geologist at the u he has manuscripts and he can't get them published by the church even by any of kind of the secondary or tertiary publishers he gets one or two published by non-lds publishers he self-publishes a couple at the cost of you know eight or ten thousand dollars of his own money in 1970s right and so i think what what that speaks to is that somewhere in the middle tier there is a real caution about taking a position on this yeah they don't want to publish the anti-evolutionary stuff they don't want to publish the scientist stuff and things that do get through tend to get through because there's someone big backing it so in the 1960s for example in the church magazines you have um uh the magazine editor and henry eyring who's on the sunday school board and the two of them push through a series of six or seven very pro pro-science and even pro-evolution articles in the church magazines and the people on the other side of this write in to joseph field smith and say how can we teach the gospel when our own magazines are preaching these heresies right um so henry eyring had something to do with this whole story as well yeah he did he did and then and then as we come you know closer because i think about the time when i started at byu was 1992 okay that's a significant year it is a significant year um would you want to talk a little bit about why that was such a significant year and why maybe that we could look at the 1990s even that year 1992 is kind of a moment where we shift so 92 is when the encyclopedia of mormonism gets published now that may sound uh completely unimportant but the church had been asked to produce this by macmillan which was kind of a big educational publisher excuse me and they said okay it's got to be doctrinally accurate but it also has to speak to non-lds people and be historically accurate and put our best foot forward and so the primary editors are byu professors and then there's kind of a secondary and a tertiary tier of editors and then there are a couple of um i don't remember what they called them doctrinal oversight or something their their connections are uh elder maxwell and elder oaks who as far as i understand read every article and the big things here were that there were articles on evolution and one on creation and creation accounts and i think a third one on the origin of man or maybe that was a draft that got melded in i've been in all of these papers and interviewed several people involved so the memory is going to be a little bit fuzzy but um because that one becomes part of the byu evolution packet so the evolution article goes through dozens of drafts and you know there's feedback coming in from all sides on this and you know it's an encyclopedia so it has to be accurate and semi-complete but they also have pretty severe word limits and this article doubles and triples and quintuples in size in order to accurately represent lds history and thought and it just gets unwieldy and there are there are problems with it and pushback and before i get to the end of that a lot of people who are involved look at this and think uh i'll actually quote someone here one byu professor says you know the israelites were lost in the wilderness for 40 years and i think we got lost in the wilderness in 1954 with man his origin and destiny and these articles in the encyclopedia of mormonism are going to bring us out and someone else involved says yeah i think this is going to put an end to the evolution creation controversy this is going to solve it for us and so what ultimately happens with this article is it gets sent up for further review at high level and i will say that my sources differ on this um and they are very high level sources but essentially the way i understand these is what apparently happens is president hinckley gets this lengthy draft and he ghost writes the published article and what he does is he basically goes for uh previous church statements and then he takes something out of the uh first presidency archives with internal notes from the 1931 controversy with bh robert's manuscript about pre-adamites and death before the fall and things like that that was not accessible to the byu people working on this right and he sends that back down now it kind of goes back and forth a couple of times even after he does that apparently and i say apparently because this is uh this is a little bit of historical mind reading but at the time hinckley is basically he's not president of the church but he is running it because the president of the church is not in great shape mentally and the other counselor is also not in very good shape and hinckley's views and the president's views are not necessarily aligned and so hinckley is very much trying to make sure that he is representing the presidents of the church views and not his own in this thing and so it comes out and says very little that says these are the official statements that's it my understanding for a number of years if anyone ever wrote the first presidency or someone higher up hey what's the official view that that article many times was sent back down you know to a stake president or a bishop or something and so shortly thereafter um and i'll shorten this byu takes the that encyclopedia mormonism article and by the way it's entirely available online now it's eom.byu.edu so you can go read these that article combined with some of the first presidency statements gets put together in what's called the official byu packet which is approved by the board of trustees which is the quorum of the 12. and so there is kind of an official packet at byu for professors to point students to where they say what's the church's position on this go read the approved packet yeah that's it beyond that it's not official right and there hasn't really been much since then except for that maybe that article that came out in what was it 2006 the new era in 2016 had evolution that article doesn't say who the author is do you know do you have any insight into who wrote that or who i have inquired and i have met a wall of bureaucracy okay i don't know um but what i do want to go back to with the encyclopedia of mormonism in this packet is the people who thought this would solve the issue tended to be scientists right if you read these articles and the packet nowhere in there do they address any kind of assumptions about what does scripture say and how do we understand it and consequently um lds creationism of one kind or another and especially anti-evolutionist thought is very much alive and well today because we still have those same hermeneutical principles being modeled in church materials yeah that that scripture is simple its meaning is obvious you need no expertise to understand what isaiah was talking about or what genesis meant you just read it and it's it's plain right i don't think i should be clear i accept evolution on the basis of the authority of science and 98 of scientists do i am not interested in pushing evolution on people what i am interested in doing is mitigating evolution as a black and white faith-destroying kind of issue sure yeah and so for me the way to do that is to help people understand the things in history that have been obscured um one of the things that happened in the 50s and 60s as you have uh smith and mcconkey and peterson talking about this stuff is they don't refer back to 1931 they don't refer back to talmadge and witso or any of these church articles or other things they portray this very monolithically as the church has spoken on this issue scripture is clear on this issue and what happens in the 1970s is you start getting people like dwayne jeffrey digging into the history and saying hold on our history here is not nearly as monolithic and people have been making declarations on behalf of the church where no such declaration has been made um jeffrey writes several articles in the early 70s another guy who does is richard sherlock who did some history of science and what many people don't know is that while sherlock was a graduate student at harvard during his summers he was employed at the church history library and he was assigned to go dig into a whole bunch of these restricted manuscripts and he wrote a 70-page internal paper on these issues and that paper got broken out and edited into his publications on um the robert's tallmadge smith debate right and the follow-up on that so um there's kind of this rediscovery of the the openness of history in the 70s and 80s and that helps give rise to what happens in the 90s even though the problem doesn't get fixed because the real problem is how do we read scripture yeah but you know i mean i think about my my own history with this and it's like maybe all of that was going on but by and large members normal members of the church have no idea you know that jeffreys and and and other sherlock and ash and others are writing in dialogue in these other journals because that stuff is only for you know the intellectual mormons that are over there reading this stuff and right for them for the majority of us we grew up still reading the old testament manual yep where where we're seeing and that's why you know even even until after my mission i continued to still think that evolution was evil and there was no death before the fall and the flood was you know an absolute global flood that and there was an ark that had all of the you know the terrestrial animals on it i mean that that was my world view and i think that was the world view of a lot of people and i don't blame my parents and i don't blame my seminary teachers because i just think that was the nature of the church so coming out of this i think we're as you're i think what you're arguing is that it's both the lack of of our knowledge of how to interpret scripture but also the fact that the church hasn't dealt with this stuff kind of on a broad level right yeah i i mean it's a it's an institutional issue that's kind of self-perpetuating and i i do think that's changing slowly so what what could the church do to to to maybe move this along a little bit what what do you see any solutions that the church could do um what are they doing maybe that is good and then maybe what are some other things they could do so um i know there are new manuals being written although i don't know the content i'm not involved with any of that at all i think effective change tends to happen slowly um and i think the church could model different approaches to scripture in talks in magazines and give those broader broader reach i mean i would i would love to see someone get up in uh i don't know a general conference even and give a talk about interpreting scripture um now i should be clear at this point in the interview because people who may not be familiar with any of these things who are going wait how can you how can you have death before the fall how can you how can you not have a worldwide flood this is this is really the bridge i'm trying to get at with because having studied scripture literally in the original languages for 20 years i do not come to these things by abandoning or disbelieving scripture scripture is doing things different than we have thought i am big on prophets and a historical book of mormon and the church being inspired it's just all of that doesn't carry the implications that we think for this for this other stuff i think the church has been doing a wonderful job with church history bringing in expertise and that has resulted in things like revelations in context and the church history library and gospel topics essays yeah and what that has entailed is kind of a i think we're mature enough and stable enough as a church that we can look at our own history and say you know what this wasn't very good here yeah and we're gonna correct that and uh my question has been well if we need that for church history that's only 200 years old how much more do we need that for scripture that is 2 000 years old where we also have assumptions and traditions that are not necessarily justifiable but that we tend to repeat because at this point they've got 200 years of tradition behind them yeah you know i sometimes do this with missionaries because missionaries still read jesus the christ and they just kind of take it as he wrote it in the temple it's an inspired book there was a gate in jerusalem called the uh the eye of the needle and a camel had to get down on his knees and get stripped off to go through and it's like well a there's no archaeological evidence of any gate b the history of that interpretation arises in the mid-1800s because it preaches well and see if you put a camel on his knees he can't move and they're like well is talmadge wrong i'm like yes he's still an apostle his his apostolic calling does not extend to knowing all of these things automatically i mean talmadge was doing research in protestant scholarship to write jesus the christ i have uh i had a person reach out to me in a private message no no no that was a different one take this with a grain of salt because it's anecdotal but i did have someone tell me my mission president told us that talmadge wrote it in the temple which is true but jesus appeared to him and gave him the details about it and there is nothing to support that but that's kind of our extension of what do we think revelation is how do we think apostles work jesus appears and dictates the information is always consistent it's always perfect it's always factual because that's how revelation and prophets work and that simply isn't the case that doesn't mean they're not inspired that doesn't mean we shouldn't follow them that doesn't give us license to say well i guess i am going to have that beer i guess i am going to go sleep with my girlfriend right and that's that's not it right and it's funny because that same messiness i guess you know that you're describing in in scriptural interpretation i see that same messiness in the data in evolution but that doesn't or in science right but that doesn't mean i'm going to abandon all of science i just understand that i i need to realize there's messiness and and and therefore i need to be cautious i need to be tentative and i need to value you know the majority of the evidence what's the majority of the evidence pointing towards and move forward in that direction with with faith even i guess if you want to call it that but but but realize that if new evidence comes forward i may need to change my mind and we may be wrong and i think that especially nowadays uh both members of the church and not members of the church but we're it's almost like we're afraid to be wrong you know we're afraid of that we all wanna we all just wanna bunker down and double down on our position yeah and i think well i don't wanna get into politics but i think the last five years have really seen kind of a balkanization of of people yeah i think people who are prone to give excess faith to science have been pushed more in that direction and gone for for scientism i think some people of faith have retreated further into their faith and if it's not in their scripture or tradition they're gonna just reject everything right um and you know between politics and pandemic and vaccines it's just it's a really messy messy world out there and people need um they want something to be just solid and dependable and always there and for some people that's science and for other people that's religion yeah and i appreciate how you you know you're like i of course i still believe and i of course i sustain the prophets because i say the same thing i mean i i in fact i just went to my temple recommend interview last night right and i i sustained these these men and women who are trying to lead us in the best way that they can um you know we've been going for for uh at least an hour i think we probably need to wrap this up because you've probably got other more important things to do but um i don't know if there's any last thoughts that you want to leave uh with the listeners today if there's any other things that you really wanted to say or share two um one in lds history because this is really simple a number of people make the claim that lds prophets and apostles have been uniformly and absolutely against evolution and that's simply not true what we do find in history is that those people who see evolution as connected to central gospel issues have spoken out very strongly against it that would be joseph fielding smith elder packer and so on others have been [Music] others who don't see it as connected have not felt a need to talk about it necessarily but apostles like stephen l richards in general conference and neil a maxwell have said things like i'm not a scientist if it turns out that evolution is the case i don't see that that has any problem from a scriptural perspective and then you have david o mckay who while he was president of the church did several things in private and in public that were very open to science and even pro-evolution at times so this is not decided from a church position and uh you really have to go back older and older to find more detailed strong anti-evolutionary statements the second thing and i want to use a visual for this i'm going to share my screen here yeah because visuals visuals are helpful so i i've talked about this a little but there's this idea that's been around for 1600 years that god gave us two books there's the book of nature and the book of nature is uh the rocks the animals the sky you know we have to observe nature and we have to interpret it that interpretation as you can see that's that's those mental gears and that interpretation we call that science and there has sometimes been this contrast that whereas the book of nature has to be interpreted by humans the book of scripture is just purely divine in god's word and therefore if there's a disagreement between scripture and science we just automatically go with scripture now that's not really a correct view because first of all scripture was produced by inspired by human prophets in cultures and contexts with their own biases and understandings of the world around them and then it also has to be interpreted by us we are the ones who decide what scripture means even under inspiration and so both science and scripture are both deeply human institutions with the same human limitations yes the spirit is a factor in interpreting scripture but the spirit has not seen fit to clarify on this issue between science and scripture with prophets and apostles so we're left back with our human interpretation and so with human interpretation i want to do the best job i can by getting as much history and language and awareness of my assumptions that i bring to genesis as well as moses abraham and the temple to figure out what's going on i i have a video on the on this youtube channel where i talk about you know the the possible areas where there can be conflict and clearly if if that interpretation that humans are bringing to the scripture the to the book of nature and the book of of scripture right if either one of those is wrong then you're you potentially have conflict or if both of them are wrong you know yeah do you agree or do you believe though that if if essentially both of those ways get it right it it converges on the same truth do you do you buy into that notion so uh you're getting it gould and noma well no not really so um or even just in the church we say that all truth will be circumscribed into one great hole right like do you do you like that idea or do you think there's still a chance there can be conflict i think there can be conflict what i do with genesis and science is i say there isn't conflict not because they agree but because they're talking about different things that's that's why they are compatible with each other not because they're both saying the answer is five but genesis is saying the answer is five and science is saying the answer is five and genesis is saying green right they're both true they're just talking about different things and we just haven't really known how to read genesis in the church okay and i have i have material on that elsewhere right so i'm going to all in the uh in the link to the video here um i'll link to some of your sites and other things so that people can can find you because uh ben has a plethora of stuff that he's written on this and uh he's been interviewed multiple times i'm really grateful to that ben was able to come with me um and and be actually my first interview we'll see if this actually catches on but i i wanted to uh thank you ben for being with me this morning it's been a real pleasure to talk to you and and i hope that this was of worth to those listening thank you thank you thank you sunshine the doors are open the skies are too the sunshine is coming in for me

Channel: Accept Truth with Joy

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Id: 0cwr5nu38lc

Length: 75min 7sec (4507 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021