Finally the Church says "no official position on Evolution"

[_Quasimodo]

Dogs have always been dogs, which is why there are dangerous packs of Chihuahua'a roaming the Midwest, and you have to capture and tame one if you want it for a pet.


Although if you believe the Earth is 6000 years old, then for sure dogs have always existed since 6000 years ago.

And, of course, Noah must of had two of every breed of dog on the ark. There seems to be around 350 breeds of dogs. So that's about 700 puppies on the ark. He must have needed a very durable pooper scooper.

[_Hagoth]

Now here's the thing.
I know for a fact that I have an element of Neanderthal DNA (that will come as no surprise to many of you )
Which, according to the Church, means I am descended from Adam, Eve and a Pre-Adamite who had no spirit.

I think they need to read their DNA essay. It admits that there were humans in the New World thousands of years before Adam and Eve. Oops.

[_Corsair]

Now here's the thing.
I know for a fact that I have an element of Neanderthal DNA (that will come as no surprise to many of you )
Which, according to the Church, means I am descended from Adam, Eve and a Pre-Adamite who had no spirit.

I think they need to read their DNA essay. It admits that there were humans in the New World thousands of years before Adam and Eve. Oops.

Are there any prominent McConkies still teaching in the BYU religion department who would have been deeply bothered by this admission? Surely there are some Young Earth Creationist, "No Death Before the Fall of Adam" believers who are seething over this.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created.

Uh. Who did they belong to then? Because everything is created spiritually before it's created physically those pre-adamite homosapiens had spirits.

This could be an interesting thought exercise for Mormons!

- Doc

[_cinepro]

So who were all those humans? Is the church now saying a human body can exist without a spirit? How exactly does that fit into the plan of salvation? Are there humans living today without spirits also? Crazy breeds crazy

Wasn't it BH Roberts and Talmage that posited a spirit-less humanoid/neanderthal "pre-Adamite" race may have existed before Adam/Eve? I even recall the suggestion that Adam/Eve may have been born into that race. While a lot of leaders have said things about this, from what I understand there has never been an "official" position. Even back in BH Roberts time FP refused to issue an official ruling one way or the other.[/quote]

Well, there's this:

It is held by some that Adam was not the first man upon this earth and that the original human being was a development from lower orders of the animal creation. These, however, are the theories of men. The word of the Lord declared that Adam was “the first man of all men” (Moses 1:34), and we are therefore in duty bound to regard him as the primal parent of our race. It was shown to the brother of Jared that all men were created in the beginning after the image of God; whether we take this to mean the spirit or the body, or both, it commits us to the same conclusion: Man began life as a human being, in the likeness of our Heavenly Father.

https://www.lds.org/ensign/2002/02/the- ... n?lang=eng

[_Nightlion]

Somebody with connections to the brethren ought to send them my link (below) about New Mormon Theology.
I solved this conundrum over thirty years ago and Gordon B. Hinckley knew about it.

[_SuperDell]

Show the man some respect. You need to recognize his calling. He is an Idiot for The Lard!

[_DoubtingThomas]

The church has taken this position for many decades

but it wasn't that clear. I think it is the first time a church publication says "no official position on evolution" and "no spirit children ... before Adam"

[_Hagoth]

OK, so there were people-ish things without genuine children-of-God spirits living on the earth, hunting, raising crops, making tools, building cities, developing writing, creating art, and everything else that "real" people can do but they weren't really people because they didn't have spirits yet? Anatomically modern humans (AMH) go back about 200,000 years and were living in every ice free part of the planet starting at about 80,000 years ago and reaching the final destination, the most remote tip of the South America, by probably 14,000 years ago.

And then God plants two real people in a garden in Missouri, then kicks them out again, and they start trying to catch up with what all of those non-real people that have been at it for millennia. In the meantime all of the non-real people, who are living everywhere on the globe except Antarctica by now, continue expanding and advancing socially and technologically, as do Adam and Eve's descendants, but with a huge head start.

So where does that leave us today? Am I a real child-of-God person or the other variety?

Jeffery Holland's A Promised Land article: https://www.lds.org/ensign/1976/06/a-promised-land?lang=eng that says there were no people before Adam and Eve and that the Americas were intentionally kept empty until the arrival of Jaredites/Lehites. Compare that to the DNA Gospel Topics essay that claims there were people in the Americas thousands of years before the biblical calendar started, which drowned out any potential DNA evidence of the Book of Mormon.

What a grade A can o' worms. Somebody's got some 'splainin' to do!

[_Franktalk]

Evolution is a real thing. It can be demonstrated with ease. The only real question that remains is if the evolution of this planet was guided. I believe it was. But it is also safe to say it was not. Having no position on evolution just goes to show the lack of thought the church leadership has placed on this subject. It also shows a complete lack of any connection to a higher power. This is a big mistake on their part. Their continuous statements about being seers and revelators means nothing if they are clueless about how man got here.