Science and the Book of Mormon

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and beliefs, whether about this blog, scientific claims, or just matters in general—such as how old the Earth really is, how it was formed, how mankind came into being, and what hand God played in all of this. At the moment, there seems to be three major belief systems regarding all this: 1) God created all things in the manner the scriptural record states; 2) Creation of everything, including life, was a long-term evolution, including the Big Bang for the Universe and Earth, and life forming out of the heated swamps and evolving into what it is today; or 3) A combination of A and B.

Each person must come to grips with their own opinion and what they are willing to accept. But the choice is basically between two ideologies: 1) What God has told us, through his dictation to Moses and his modern revelation to Joseph Smith; or 2) What scientists have presented as a workable hypothesis.

 בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ. That is, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” To some people, including a few LDS, this means God created the Earth through the means of evolution as is stated by the scientists and the evolutionists. To others, this means that God mysteriously created the universe, the earth, the heavens, and all living things. And to most LDS, it means that God organized the Earth out of existing material, formed man in His own image, and placed on the Earth all living things.

It is simply a matter of which method one believes how all that is around him or her was created, organized, or formed. However, there is one matter that should be clearly understood by all, and cannot be ignored or denied—those individuals, scientists, and evolutionists who believe the earth and man were created by chance are basically opposed to God and have clearly stated opinions against God, rejecting all factors that suggest God had a hand in any of this.

God formed the Earth and everything in it, then formed man in his own image. Man was not created through an evolutionary process, but formed in the image of his Creator

That is, all their hypothesis, theories, studies, and claims center around an anti-God belief-system. To scientists and evolutionists, there was no creation by God, no separating of the land during Peleg’s time, no Flood during Noah’s time, no restructuring of the Earth in the Land of Promise at the time of the Savior’s death. This has, of course, pushed the “beginning” of the Earth back millions, then billions of years, to allow for enough time for things we see today to have happened accidentally over enormous time frames.

It also must be understood that many “theories” and “facts” understood today were developed by those people who reject God’s hand in any thing, let alone in all things. Take, as an example, Dr. Willard F. Libby’s decision to accept that the Earth was over 30,000 years old when his own experiments showed it was not, even that it was only around 12,000 years old, when he said, “Everyone knows the Earth is older than 30,000 years,” and went on to base his Time Clock on his belief rather than his experiment results. (see last post)

Take also for example, the attitude of scientists to believe assumptions as facts in how much measurement chemicals existed in the beginning of rocks and their formation they claim are billions of years old. How arrogant it is to say something existed even millions of years ago when there is no way to know what those rocks contained in the beginning or what happened to them over the course of time—thus are immeasurable today, though scientists claim they are. (see earlier posts)

Also consider that the measurement devices used today to tell us how old the Earth is show different times under different measurements of the same rocks—differing as much as a billion years or more. And also consider that, when the correct measurement is used, rocks and other items show the Earth to be about 13,000 years old. (see earlier posts)

The problem lies in the fact that scientists have their own belief systems by which they make decisions, develop hypothesis and create theories, and those beliefs reject there being a God involved in any of it.

It should also be noted that evolutionists, who were first to establish the long time needed for evolution to conceivably have happened, were actually the cause of what is called the geologic column today, for when geologists, Paleontologists, paleobiologists, etc., began assembling their data, they found the need to conform with the millions and billions of years evolutionists had already determined existed in Earth’s history.

What science claims took millions upon millions of years, God accomplished in a matter of hours, days, and weeks

The simple fact is, science today and for most of its modern existence, is based not upon God and His dealings with man or His extended creations, but upon a Godless universe.

Take Charles Darwin, the so-called father of evolution (though he was not the first to suggest it), who grew up embracing the ‘intelligent design’ thinking of his day—William Paley’s renowned argument that the design of a watch implies there must have been an intelligent watchmaker, and so design in the universe implies there must have been an intelligent Creator. Concerning this, Darwin wrote in his own autobiography and numerous letters, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology, I could almost formerly have said it by heart”; however, in a few short years, he rejected God and all His works. He said at the age of 29 in 1839, “I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos [sic], or the beliefs of any barbarian.”

To show the impact of Darwin, Sir Julian S. Huxley, an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and internationalist, a believer in natural selection, secretary of the Zoological Society of London, the first Director of UNESCO, and Oxford Fellow, said in 1961, “Charles Darwin has rightly been described as the 'Newton of biology', he did more than any single individual before or since to change man's attitude to the phenomena of life and to provide a coherent scientific framework of ideas for biology, in place of an approach in large part compounded of hearsay, myth, and superstition. He rendered evolution inescapable as a fact, comprehensible as a process, all-embracing as a concept.”

It should be noted that Huxley’s comment shows how so many scientists see religion—as a superstition!

This, then leads us to understand the type of people who are making the claims, and trying to sell us on the ideas, that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, the Universe resulted from an accidental explosion, and that humanity groped its way up out of a primordial soup as life formed and evolved.

Strip away their pre-determined beliefs which they unabashedly foster on us today until much has become part of the social conscience, and you find the facts show the Earth is only about 13,000 years old and that the Book of Mormon is absolutely accurate with all its claims as the previous scores of posts have been directed. (Also see the book Scientific Fallacies & Other Myths)