“Didn’t worry me then. Doesn’t worry me now.”

“Didn’t worry me then. Doesn’t worry me now.”

 

Cole, "Garden of Eden"
Thomas Cole, “The Garden of Eden”
(Click to enlarge.)

 

Few American theologies are more complex than that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but its flagship Brigham Young University teaches off-the-shelf, industry-standard evolution. That has been the case since 1931, when the church officially said: “Leave biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research.” … What the church requires is only belief “that Adam was the first man of what we would call the human race,” says Gordon Hinckley, the church’s living prophet. Scientists can speculate on the rest, he says, recalling his own study of anthropology and geology: “Studied all about it. Didn’t worry me then. Doesn’t worry me now.”

Larry A. Witham, Where Darwin Meets the Bible (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 176-177.

 

 


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