Now that I'm back at work, every day one or two people tell me, "You look so tired" or "Didn't get much sleep, huh? I feel like, baby or not, When charged with a crime, do Utahns call upon fellow citizens, sitting as a jury, to decide their guilt or innocence? No way. Of the federal criminal cases resolved in Utah in , according to the United States Sentencing Commission, only four or 0.
Primary Children's, U of U Health team up to open new fetal care center. As one examines the rock layers, it becomes evident that there is a highly ordered pattern in the occurrence of fossils. As Elder James E. Talmage, a geologist, wrote in the Deseret News on 21 November The sequence in the occurrence of fossils repeats itself in sedimentary rocks throughout the world.
Furthermore, whether they were in Australia, Africa, the Americas, or elsewhere, the various forms of life on earth appeared and disappeared at the same time. To the faithful student of the scriptures, this precision reflects the ordered processes of God, the divine Creator.
The sequence of the creation of life on earth as recorded in Genesis—first plants Gen. A conflict arises only when we assume that God has revealed all he is going to reveal on the subject or forget that scientific theories change as new discoveries are made.
We also need to remember both the purposes for which the scriptures were given and the objectives of the scientific method. Foremost, the scriptures testify of Jesus Christ and how we may receive the blessings of salvation and exaltation through his atonement.
They reveal why not necessarily how the earth was created, and what laws and principles a person must follow to obtain eternal life. The goal of science, on the other hand, is to learn how not why the world was made and to understand the laws and principles governing the physical world.
The different roles science and religion play is illustrated in a study of the dinosaurs. From the fossil record we learn that the dinosaurs were the dominant animals on earth between and 67 million years ago. Some were carnivorous, others herbivorous. Some were small, while others were gigantic, weighing up to eighty tons and growing to lengths of more than ninety feet.
The existence of these animals is indisputable, for their remains have been found in rocks all over the earth.
What eternal purpose they played in the creation and early history of the earth is unknown. The scriptures do not address the question, and it is not the realm of science to explore the issue of why they were here.
These lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation. The divorce between science and religion, once so closely allied, was underway. We can trace the same general processes at work in geology and biology. In the s, the most widely accepted theories still required God as part of their theories. Cuvier had concluded that the earth had passed through a series of geological ages, each characterized by unique life forms. But what had happened to the older forms and where did the new ones come from?
He argued that each age must have ended with a great catastrophe that destroyed all or most living things and was followed by a new creation. This succession of catastrophes and new creations obviously required a Creator. The connection with Genesis was clear for holders of this view. The Flood was exactly such a catastrophe.
The catastrophists did not, however, accept all of Genesis. And Genesis speaks of only one creation, not a series of creations. Even so, catastrophism formed the basis of most reconciliations of science and religion in the mid-nineteenth century. Then Charles Lyell, the real founder of modern geology, proposed another theory in the s that better supported naturalism. The geological processes of this theory include sedimentation the formation of fossil-bearing rock layers at the bottom of shallow seas , uplift raising the layers above the sea , the gradual erosion of these layers, and the sinking of uneroded layers back under the sea where sedimentation begins again.
This theory holds that abrupt changes in the layers of rock are explained, not by catastrophes, but by long periods of time when no new rock was formed. The consequences of all this for the Biblical account were obvious.
The six-thousand-year span of earth-history that the Bible speaks of was a totally inadequate period of time for uniformitarian geologists. And, to them, if Adam and the fall had not existed, the resurrection and redemption offered by Christ could only be seen as equally unhistorical, since these occurrences were not seen as naturalistic, uniform processes. Nor, to them, are the events of the last days, foretold in the Old and New Testaments. The result was a complete and total setting aside of the impact of God in the lives and affairs of the earth and its inhabitants.
And naturalistic theories for the origins of human societies and institutions—including religion itself—followed rapidly. Scientific naturalism seemed to have swept away everything before it. Some place, they felt, could and must be found for a belief in God, who had so rapidly been reduced from a position of being absolutely necessary to the scientific world to a position of being not only unnecessary but even in the way. Theologies and scientific viewpoints were thus worked out which viewed God still as the Creator and Upholder of the natural order, and viewed evolutionary processes as the means by which God worked.
But such accommodations left a residue of uneasiness. Succeeding generations often felt that it was more honest to the theories, as well as simpler, to completely reject the Bible view as an anachronistic holdover from a more ignorant past.
Thus it was into the midst of these developing tensions and unresolved differences that the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored in the nineteenth century. Under the inspiration of truths, revealed anew to the Prophet Joseph Smith, modern prophets powerfully turned the age-old question around: since God had in the past performed miracles and called prophets, why should he have stopped?
The testimony of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was and is now that God does call prophets, does give revelations, and does perform miracles on behalf of believers today, just as in days of old. It is the clarion message of modern prophets that as a result of modern revelation and by the witness of the Holy Spirit, the realities of older revelations can be verified.
Revelations given through modern prophets do in fact confirm the truths of Genesis and other scripture: there was a creation, a fall, a flood, and a necessary atonement. It was revealed anew that the prophets who recorded the ancient scriptures were able to see through time and record future events. The restored gospel teaches that God is intimately associated with nature both as its Creator and Sustainer.
And miracles show his power over the natural order. In other words, the view taught by modern prophets shows that the order of nature is not simply a given, as scientific naturalism would claim.
Thus, as Latter-day Saints we understand how science can discover truths about our present order. In other words, as Latter-day Saints, we recognize that there are some limitations about the extent of uniformity in our present mortal order of nature. Imagine, for instance, the biology of a world in which there is no death. Thus, since God has promised that he will indeed exercise his power if we seek him in faith, he encourages us to seek his aid.
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