The Science Is True and the Church Is Too blog is 1 year old today! Can you believe it? It feels like we’ve been going for so much longer than that, yet there is still so much more to talk about. Reconciling the LDS faith and scriptures with science is a huge topic, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
I thought maybe I’d do a short review post every 6 months (here’s the first 6-months review post) to recap my published thoughts during the previous half year, but these last 6 months have been super busy and I didn’t get around to posting as much as I did during the first 6 months of the blog. Due to this, I may just start doing yearly recaps, especially since the blog’s birthday falls so close to New Year’s (January 18th). But we’ll see how it goes!
For now, here’s a quick summary of what we’ve discussed on the SITATCIT blog since July 2019. Enjoy:
First Presidency Statements: 1909 vs 1925
I don’t know if anyone has ever done this before, but I was curious about the differences between the 1909 and 1925 First Presidency statements on evolution… so I wrote this post. It’s a side-by-side comparison of the two statements. The 1925 one is a lot shorter, since they took out a bunch from the 1909. And what is most interesting of all is that the most anti-evolution paragraph in the whole 1909 version is completely missing from the 1925 version. Why do you think that is?
Spectrum of Human Ancestors
If you could line up all of your direct ancestors from your dad to the theoretical primal microorganism LUCA, you would see a spectrum of body sizes and shapes. You would also see a spectrum of intelligence. Could the Spectrum of Intelligence in heaven that Abraham 3:18-19 (and all of Abraham 3, really) describes be related to the reason why we see spectra of bodies and intelligence level in the fossil record and biosphere we have here on Earth? Could Abraham 3 be talking about evolution?
Animal Intelligence 2019
Here I gathered all the news articles I could find from 2019 about animals being intelligent, sentient, emotional beings. I pulled some cool quotes from some of the articles, and this post is worth reading just for those, honestly. Also, it’s a good one to check out some of the things we’ve learned about our nonhuman fellow earthlings. In many ways, they are much more like us than we typically think. My top four favorite news items from 2019 are 4) bees are actually pretty good at math, 3) rats love to be tickled and play hide and seek, 2) great apes likely possess theory of mind, and 1) rats have learned how to drive cars and love doing it. Take my word for it: seeing a rat driving a car is pretty special… and hilarious.
Postmortal Animals from a Premortal Heaven
Revelation chapters 1-11 has puzzled generations of Bible readers, and a big part of that is its mention of the Four Beasts around the throne of God. From what Joseph Smith taught during his life, the Four Beasts were once-mortal animals that had been saved from other worlds and were seen by John in heaven because, well, they’re in heaven! And not only are they in heaven, but they are kings and priests unto God, as the Book of Revelation implies. Now, if animals are in heaven after this life, wouldn’t it mean that they were in heaven BEFORE this life too? That’s true for humans, since we were all living with God before we were born, so why wouldn’t it be true for sea turtles and clownfish too? I think the intelligences gathered and organized “before the world was” included all the nonhuman creatures on Earth.
Latter-day Saints Are Ready for Extraterrestrial Life
If scientists suddenly announced they have evidence of microscopic life on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or any other non-Earth body out there, the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should have nothing to fear. They should accept it with arms excitedly, and nerdily, wide open. I used to be scared of an announcement like this because it would add credence to the theory of evolution (something my former self was not ready to accept). But now I know that out of all the churches in all the world, our church should welcome a discovery such as this more than any other. Our doctrine, from the very beginning of the Restoration, has included space for and I would say even predicted the existence of a universe full of life on all sorts of different worlds. Joseph Smith was way ahead of the game. Bring on the aliens, people.
Conclusion
A lot of really fun stuff. But stay tuned though, because these next 6 months are slated to have some pretty dang awesome posts. You won’t want to miss any of them (hopefully). I’m very excited for what the future holds. As always, thanks for reading!
Notes: The featured image for this post is a screenshot of some of the comments on a Facebook post by NOVA sharing an article about rats driving cars. Pardon any profanity.
Science Is True and the Church Is Too 