The Creation, According to Me
I started a series of posts a couple of years back on the Creation. My motivation to finish them fizzled out, mostly because I wasn’t sure where I was going with them. However, I’ve been thinking about the topic again, and am going to try a different approach, which is simply to walk through what I believe about the origin of people on this planet. My goal is to help anyone who might be struggling to reconcile the scriptural accounts with what is now considered to be scientific fact.
Mormon theology actually makes this a little more challenging than it might be for some Christians. It would be easy to take the story of Adam and Eve, and in the light of modern science consider it simply a symbolic myth, or to consider the story of the creation of the Earth as worshipful poetry. I have spoken with many Christians, and a few Mormons who take this perspective. Unfortunately, one of the many angels Joseph Smith claims to have been visited by was Adam. Furthermore, the creative power of God is very explicit in a number of Mormon scriptures.
So, if we believe Joseph Smith, and I do, we have to find some way to reconcile the stories of the Creation and of Adam and Eve to some form of coexistence with the creation of the world as we understand it to have come into being based on our scientific observations.
For the Creation, honestly, it’s not that hard. Any astrophysicist can tell you how astronomically small the chances are of a world forming in a region of space that will allow life to take root and thrive. The planet has to be close, but not too close to a stable star, it has to have sufficient water, the right kind of composition to have a reasonably strong magnetosphere, etc., etc. And, it has to not get completely demolished by some gravitational hazard or stray comet long enough for life to form.
Scientists typically use probabilities and a principle called Occam’s Razor to conclude that the reason life evolved on Earth was that in the billions-to-one odds, we just happened to be the one. You can’t really argue with that logic, as there’s nothing really to argue against. However, you can propose another plausible reason life evolved here: God made it happen. It’s equally impervious to argument, but given a reasonably powerful entity, and the will to do so, there’s no scientific reason that God could not have changed the trajectory of asteroids, planted the seeds of life, nurtured those seeds and protected the planet from ill-timed Armageddon-sized asteroids until it was ripe for human kind to populate. In fact, if you believe in God, it is far more likely to have been God’s intervention that allowed Earth to produce life, than that He just happened to be passing by as humans evolved, and took an interest.
So, we have a choice: choose to believe that enough infinitesimally unlikely things finally happened on our planet in the proper sequence to start life, or choose to believe that life was placed here, and cultivated, much as many a sci-fi writer has imagined humans might someday terraform other planets.
Like I said, that’s the easy part to reconcile. The Adam & Eve story is a bit more complicated. Adam is supposed to have been the first man, and Eve, the first woman. As I’ve implied in my previous paragraphs, I’m pretty well sold on evolution. So where does that put Adam & Eve? My current thinking is that they were the first children of God on the Earth. Homo sapiens prior to Adam and Eve may have been biologically compatible with them, but their spirits were more like the spirits of animals. Humankind as the spirit children of God sent to Earth began with Adam and Eve.
Were they created from the “dust of the Earth?” I could go either way on this one. I think it matters little whether this is a symbolic/metaphoric reference to all life being literally composed of molecules that were once part of the planet’s crust, and passed up through the evolutionary chain, or whether God literally assembled Adam molecule by molecule. On one hand, that doesn’t seem to be God’s typical MO. On the other, it would make the 1000 year lifespans of the patriarchs much more likely to be literal. Of course, merely believing that the latter is possible increases the likelihood that 1000 year lifespans would have also been possible due to miraculous modifications to existing patterns.
So, yes. I believe in the Creation, but I also believe in dinosaurs. God’s plan for us to grow through this Earthly experience requires that scientific proof of His existence be out of reach. He wants us to have faith, which, at times, requires that knowledge be withheld. The spirit of the Creation story is true, but it is not a science textbook. Its primary goal is to teach us about God and His relationship to humankind, not to teach us about the Earth and the universe.
Mormons and Extra-terrestrials
I came across a post on IFLScience the other day, about the likelihood that we will very soon be identifying extra-terrestrial planets that have life of one form or another on them. The author then went on to pose the philosophical and theological question of how our human religions might react to the information. I read through the first part of the article with a bit of smugness, as I am confident the Mormon perspective here is rather unique and robust in the face of this particular “disruption.” I was then rather surprised to see the Mormon beliefs called out in particular, in a section with several examples. I guess that’s progress – people know something about us besides the fact that we used to condone polygamy.
Anyhow, the doctrine about other worlds is not really central to our perspective of the Gospel, so it’s not talked about much, nor are there many details laid out specifically. So, it’s not surprising that IFLScience’s summary of our belief does not appear to be fully inline with my understanding of the doctrine. I do admit, however, that much of my explanation that will follow will be an extrapolation from the revealed word, and so, may also not match explanations other Mormons might give. Nevertheless, as this is probably one of those things that people might classify as cult-ish, I will endeavor to explain how the doctrine fits in with the rest of the Mormon belief system, and how it therefore makes sense.
The doctrine of many worlds is tied to the concept of people as the literal children of God. I went into this doctrine in detail in my series on the “Plan of Salvation.” The key points are that as children of God, we have the potential to become gods ourselves, to continue the life-cycle (so to speak) and create our own progeny and worlds for them. God Himself, as an eternal being, has done this before, and will continue to do it after this world ends. As such, the greatness of His creations is truly unfathomable. It is this superlative greatness that Moses glimpsed, according to LDS scripture, when God told him, “worlds without number have I created… there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.” (Moses 1:33-35)
There are many supplementary non-canonical discussions about this doctrine that have been documented between early Mormon leaders – the nature of the eternities and of godliness seemed to be a favorite topic among them. There are some perspectives from these discussions that are in-line with the gist of what was summarized in the IFLScience post – that among God’s creations, this world is “special” because His Only Begotten was born on this world. However, I am not fully convinced of that perspective. It seems consistent with God’s established patterns that He would have a “Firstborn” of every “generation” of His descendants, and that each generation might get its own world. It might also be the case that God was trying something new with this world, and that other worlds had previously been handled differently. The doctrine of the “war in Heaven” (Lucifer’s rebellion – also mentioned in my Plan of Salvation posts) seems like it would have only have happened if the plan for this world was unexpected. In which case, other worlds would have developed in dramatically different ways.
Suffice it to say, there are many ways one could look at this doctrine to see different relationships and perspectives about how other worlds might have been organized. The point is that it is not a central point of doctrine, is not entirely clear, and that there are, have been and will be many more worlds of one form or another created for people like ourselves. There may also be other worlds created with other forms of life on them. One could even start to postulate about other universes in relation to this doctrine. The wonderful thing about this in my mind, is that these questions were being discussed and considered long before a definitive scientific answer was even dreamed as possible, and that the answers provided by science will not require any change to LDS theology to bring it in-line.
Spirits and Dark Matter
Ever since it was postulated in the early 1930’s, dark matter has been a mystery of physics and cosmology. Scientists have proposed countless theories and have done nearly as many experiments trying to detect and explain the phenomenon.
In a nutshell, scientists discovered that everywhere they looked in the universe, gravitational laws indicated that the observable motion of celestial bodies (stars and such) behaved as though there was more mass out there than we could see – a lot more. This invisible matter was dubbed “dark matter.”
As the measurements and calculations have been refined – assuming our understanding of the law of gravity is accurate on the scale of galaxies – the estimates of the amounts of dark matter and dark energy in the universe have been calculated to far outweigh the amount of visible matter and “normal” energy. See the graph (from Wikipedia) below:
While science has not been able to come up with much in terms of explanation or even detection of dark matter and dark energy, in 1843, Joseph Smith recorded a revelation that at least partially explains dark matter:
“There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.” (D&C 131:7-8)
That spirits were matter at all was a revolutionary concept at that time, but if we consider spirits to be made of dark matter, this becomes a key intersection between religion and science as to what can be real.
Although there are a lot of forms of invisible matter, the attributes of spirits indicate that they are made of a type of matter not yet understood by science, hence my classification of it as a form of dark matter. There is also some anecdotal evidence of spirits having a measurable weight in the experiments of Duncan MacDougall, which would support this theory.
While this is a mildly interesting thing to contemplate by itself, when we start considering the ramifications of this assertion, we find a number of potentially useful insights that could lead to greater understanding of dark matter.
First, let’s consider the nature of spirits. A spirit is the essence of the consciousness. To be complex enough to contain a consciousness, we need to have matter with properties that both allow aggregation and binding together, as atoms and molecules do with regular matter, with substantial complexity. To attain such a level of complexity requires particles which can be combined in many different ways. This would be further enabled by the existence of different types of particles. So, there are likely at least several different kinds of dark particles with different properties, which may be able to be combined into many different dark elements, and dark molecules.
Dark matter is affected by gravity, as that is how we know of its existence. We also know that spirits animate the physical body, so there is likely some potential for these dark particles to interact with the other forces (electromagnetic, strong force, weak force) that govern the behavior of regular particles. Alternatively, there could be some other force between dark particles and regular particles that allows them to affect each other – perhaps dark particles could affect quantum spin, for instance.
Considering these points and the fact that spirits are animate, it should be no wonder that the scientific community has had little luck detecting this kind of dark matter. The tests typical of the general scientific community look for as-yet-undiscovered particles consists of breaking apart or fusing known particles or waiting for stray particles to pass through their detection devices by chance.
I don’t know how to best to detect particles that may or may not be affected by the forces we currently understand and which may or may not be collected together in regular patterns. However, much of scientific progress starts with a hypothesis.
On the religious side, the quantity of dark matter in the universe indicates that there could be a lot more to the spirit world than we might guess.
Ultimately, the key point here is that spirits are real. Despite the inability of modern science to detect them, we have very good, logical explanations for how they can exist that fits the observed facts.
The Logical Mormon 