Posted by:
johnsmithson
(
)
Date: January 09, 2013 02:06PM
Thanks for the information. That's very helpful. All I have been able to find is the "BYU Packet" on Evolution and the Origin of Man at
http://biology.byu.edu/DepartmentInfo/EvolutionandtheOriginofMan.aspx As some people have noted, although it purports to give the "official position" of the Mormon Church on evolution, it really takes no position at all. I wondered what other people were hearing.
As for the age of the earth, I have not seen anything since the Henry Eyring (the father) story:
“When President Joseph Fielding Smith’s book, Man, His Origin and Destiny, was published, someone urged it as an Institute course. One of the Institute teachers came to me and said, ‘If we have to follow it exactly, we will lose some of the young people.’ I said, ‘I don’t think you need to worry.’ I thought it was a good idea to get the thing out in public, so the next time I went to Sunday School General Board meeting, I got up and bore testimony that the world was four or five billion years old, that evidence was strongly in that direction.”
I was thinking about this as I hear some people in other churches say unusual things about the dinosaurs being fake and the earth being 6,000 years old. I wondered if any of that craziness made its way into the Mormon Church. It sounds like it does, occasionally, but in a muted fashion compared to other churches.