Korihor was Anti-Christ; he had a wicked heart.
He fooled many people with his cunning and his art.
In the end he got himself run over by a cart
Makes you think
He was not
All that smart.
–Doug Stay
Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: people who don’t believe in evolution are ignorant (haven’t heard the facts), stupid (don’t understand the facts if they’ve heard them), delusional (dysfunctionally believe other than the facts) or wicked (are out to deceive). I happen to agree with this.
I also have the fact of the deep inner peace I get from living the Gospel.
What do you want to believe? What kind of a universe would you rather have? What priors are you going to pick? “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.”
I find Dawkins’ and Korihor’s philosophies very seductive. But I know that the choices I would make, were I to believe them, would not bring me happiness.
Agency: the war in heaven, the probationary state, the promise of eternity
August 1, 2008 at 10:36 pm |
So where would you place Joseph Fielding Smith in the four choices given? Not ignorant given the debates he had with Talmage and Eyring. Surely not wicked. That leaves stupid or delusional.
August 1, 2008 at 11:44 pm |
Humanity as it exists now shares ancestors with all other mammals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus
http://vwxynot.blogspot.com/2007/06/endogenous-retroviruses-and-evidence.html
Since this kind of evidence was not available at the time of Joseph Fielding Smith, I’d have to say he was ignorant.
August 2, 2008 at 11:30 pm |
Actually, now having read this:
http://www.signaturebookslibrary.org/harmony/chapter6.htm
it’s clear that Smith probably would not have believed even this evidence, and so I’d have to say he refused to understand. I’d say it was a form of wickedness, intellectual dishonesty.
If, however, one claims that evolution justifies Korihor’s doctrine, precluding a fall and obviating the notion of sin, then one is making a far more grievous error, and stands to lose his salvation because of it.
As far as I can tell, the official position of the Church on evolution is, “Don’t lose your testimony over it.”
August 31, 2008 at 9:20 pm |
Actually, I think the first line was “Korihor the Anti-Christ was in another part” but yours makes more sense.
August 31, 2008 at 9:33 pm |
I think you can allow that Smith didn’t feel it was right to even explore the possibility of those kinds of ideas. He wasn’t being dishonest– he sincerely professed what he thought was true– but he had different attitudes about how to go about finding truth than you and I do. He placed a much heavier weight on traditional interpretations of scripture than on scientific evidence. That has a lot to do with the culture and family he was raised in.
September 1, 2008 at 7:05 pm |
Doug liked this bit from the signaturebooks link above:
“[Talmage] was bold enough to point out that according to a tradition in the Church based on good authority as having risen from a declaration made by the Prophet Joseph Smith, a certain pile of stones at Adam-ondi-Ahman, Spring Hill, Mo., is really part of the altar on which Adam offered sacrifices, and that I had personally examined those stones and found them to be fossiliferous, so that if those stones be part of the first altar, Adam built it of stones containing corpses, and therefore death must have prevailed in the earth before Adam’s times.” — James Talmage to Sterling Talmage, 21 May 1931, S. Talmage Papers.
September 1, 2008 at 7:22 pm |
In Newton’s Wake, there’s a world called Eurydice that has a fossil record, strata of previous civilizations, old war machines, and evidence of a technological singularity (once you hit it, you leave the universe as we know it and go on to better things). Here’s the resolution: http://tinyurl.com/6da6ut (bottom of page 262 onto 263–does anyone know how to link to a particular page?)
That seems to be the only way I could possibly hope to reconcile a traditional interpretation of scripture with the evidence we have.