Before Richard Dawkins, There Was Orson Pratt

At By Common Consent, writer WVS shared an excerpt of Wilford Woodruff's journal, which captured a speculative explanation that Orson Pratt gave for the origin of God. After referring to the trial-and-error process that chemists often go through, Pratt said:

An eternity was filled as it were with particules of intelligences who had their agency, two of these particles in the process of time might have joined their interest together exchanged ideas & found by persueing this course that they gained double strength to what one particle of intelligence would have & afterwards were joined by other particles & continued untill they organized a combination or body though through a long process...

Pratt's process is that of an individual advancing in organization. But if you look at it from a slightly different angle and apply his process to populations, then you're not very far from 'the replicators' in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. (The 'replicators' chapter defies a concise summary quote, so you'll just need to click through and read it.)

This all reminds me of something that Terryl Givens recently wrote [1]:

Mormons ironically find an unlikely (and surely unwilling) ally in the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins. In his controversial critique of religion, he wrote that: “Any creative intelligence of sufficient complexity to design anything comes into existence only at the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.” Elaborating this point, he said that

you have to have a gradual slow incremental process [to explain an eye or a brain] and by the very same token, God would have to have the same kind of explanation. … God indeed can’t have just happened. If there are Gods in the universe, they must be the end product of slow incremental processes. If there are beings in the universe that we would treat as Gods, … that we would worship … as gods, then they must have come about by an incremental process, gradually.

It's fun when the 'new atheism' sounds like the old Mormonism!

Notes:
1. Givens, Terryl L. (2014). Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (p. 216).

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The Ways of Correlation are Mysterious: When Jesus Was Born

Lately I've been browsing through some of the newer manuals published by the Church. I've found some things that I like, and some things I dislike. And then there are other things that are just...interesting. Let's take the birth of Jesus, for example. In the old New Testament (Ha!) manual for Institute (1979), we find the following subheading in chapter 3: "Jesus Was Born in Bethlehem, April 6, 1 B.C." The manual then states:

After summarizing the opinions of various scholars in the matter of Christ’s birthday, Elder James E. Talmage compares their conclusions with modern revelation and then affirms: “We believe that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea, April 6, B.C. 1.” (Jesus the Christ, p. 104.) Of this President Harold B. Lee declared:

“This is the annual conference of the Church. April 6, 1973, is a particularly significant date because it commemorates not only the anniversary of the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this dispensation, but also the anniversary of the birth of the Savior, our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. [Quoted D&C 20:1]” (CR, Apr. 1973, p. 4.)

To help drive the point home, the manual has a graphic showing the months of the years 1 B.C. and 1 A.D. (there is no year zero), with an arrow pointing to April accompanied by the words (in two lines), "April 6, 1 B.C." and "Birthday of the Lord."

That is pretty straightforward, and it is complemented by commentary in the Institute manual for the Doctrine and Covenants. The statement by President Lee was cited by Elder Bednar in his April 2014 General Conference talk in which he said that April 6 is known by revelation to be "the actual and accurate date of the Savior's birth."

The new manual (2015) is a little different:

Concerning the year in which Jesus Christ was born, “the Church has made no official declaration on the matter” (J. Reuben Clark Jr., Our Lord of the Gospels [1954], vi). The calendar currently used throughout most of the world was created many centuries after Jesus Christ lived, and experts disagree about how to use existing historical information to calculate the year of His birth. Elder Bruce R. McConkie wrote: “This is not a settled issue. Perhaps also it does not matter too much as long as we have an accepted framework of time within which to relate the actual events of [Christ’s] life” (The Mortal Messiah: From Bethlehem to Calvary, 4 vols. [1979–81], 1:350).

For some reason the manual went from a declarative statement of belief based on revelation, to a complete punt on the year and no mention of April 6 at all. And it's not like the J. Reuben Clark quote didn't exist when the first manual was printed, so why the change?

We can only speculate, but it might in part be because in 2010, BYU religion professor Jeffrey Chadwick published an article in BYU Studies [1] that pretty much demolished 1 B.C. as a viable option, and kicked out the supports from underneath the April 6 date as well [2]. Yes, Presidents Lee, Kimball, and Hinckley made comments in support of April 6, but so far as can be determined, they were relying on a tradition started by Elder James E. Talmage in Jesus the Christ [3]. Of course it's possible that Elder Talmage was just really lucky on the April 6 part and later Church presidents felt inspired that he was right, even if his reasons were wrong [4]. Whatever the case, it seems that the authors and editors steered clear of April 6, which allowed them to avoid taking a position that would contradict a fresh conference statement by a living Apostle on the one hand [5], or lend additional support to the date on the other.

I should clarify that I support the change that the manual made, although I wish they had given the history of the topic more discussion. And who knows? Maybe April 6 will make a comeback in another manual (though I doubt 1 B.C. will). When exactly Jesus was born has zero significance to any core element of the gospel. But it is the insignificance of the issue that allows us to think about how we relate to the manuals, and issues of revelation, tradition, authority, doctrine...and of course correlation.


Notes:
1. Don't ignore the endnotes, especially 9, 10, 11, 12, and 18. A summary of the article was published in the Deseret News. FAIR also has a nice treatment of the issue.
2. Elder Talmage's use of D&C 20:1 applies with equal force to both the year and the date. In his argument, both stand or fall together.
3. In fact if you look at the first passage you will find that President Lee quoted D&C 20:1--clearly following Elder Talmage's argument.
4. Scientists, too, sometimes accidentally hit on the right answer.
5. Elder Bednar spoke in April 2014, and the manual appears to have been approved the following November. If I have misinterpreted the approval date, then Elder Bednar's talk would have come after the manual approval.

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On Being Faithful to the Future

I've been a little more active in my reading lately, but am unable to comment in detail on some of the pregnant passages I have found. So from time to time I will simply post quotations as food for thought. First up:

Often Christians focus on the need to be faithful to the past, to make sure that present belief matches that of previous generations. I support the sentiment in general, but we must be just as burdened to be faithful to the future, to ensure that we are doing all we can to deliver a viable faith to future generations.

--Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam, What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins, (pp. 147-148).

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