Chapter 19

The Church drops creation and adopts atheistic organic evolution at BYU, embracing the teachings of men

Introduction

This is the most upsetting topic of all to me, the heart of darkness, the worst case, of what the church has gradually done to the gospel. This is a complete surrender to the dark side, even including a celebration of that surrender. If some of the other retreats to pre-Christian theology and practices might be upsetting but bearable, this one is not bearable. For me, this is the last straw.

The ideologies of atheism have such a grip at every level on our nation and, apparently, our church today, that I have no way to know how many people still insist on believing that God is the creator of the Earth and all life upon it. But I would venture to guess that it is still a majority of the church members who believe that God is the creator, even if their church leaders and church school administrators do not.

I assume that BYU teachers and administrators still get complaints and expressions of irritation and worry from students and, especially, from their parents, on the way that BYU handles issues of creation and evolution. I assume that the school staff have steeled themselves to pay no attention to these people. But, on the other hand, if the church members actually had a say in how the premier church school was operated, they would change this doctrine and policy and practice concerning creation and evolution.

As it is, BYU is sealed off from any adult church members and alumni, twice removed from their influence. The members have no control whatsoever over the doings of church headquarters, having been officially excluded from any such influence in 1923, when the church reinvented itself as an aggressively independent corporation sole, and the members now have no effective way to influence the school, since the school is totally under the control of the church headquarters, and the church headquarters is under the control of no one but themselves, totally unencumbered by any effective legal duties or responsibilities.

For many schools with large endowments, voluntarily contributed by the alumni, those alumni at least indirectly have a say in how the school is administered. One of the bad influences of having a highly subsidized church school is that there is no place or way for the alumni to influence school behavior through their contributions or lack of them. If everyone had to pay full tuition, or rely on alumni contributions to supply scholarships, then the church would have to be responsive to those who are willing to directly pay the cost. As it is, the church headquarters and school administrators can essentially ignore what the parents may have to say.

The worst-case scenario

In most of this book I have been pointing out how the LDS church leaders have been directing and overseeing the deterioration of the church back to the pre-Christian gospel of the law of Moses, a semi-pagan precursor and schoolmaster that was intended to prepare a people to receive the true gospel.  Apparently, we did receive the true gospel in our time, but then soon lost it again, slipping back to the law of Moses level.  And we seem to be stuck there forever unless something cataclysmic happens.

Now I want to focus on the place and methods where the church has further directed and overseen the deterioration of the church even beyond the pre-Christian law of Moses, back to a pagan doctrine of many petty and competing gods, and then a further step back to pure atheism/materialism involving the ideological elimination of all spiritual influences in the universe.

Darwinism

I find it difficult to exactly classify Darwinism on this scale from the robust theism of Christ's gospel, through law of Moses rigidity, to its near-twin paganism, to total atheism/materialism. Darwinism is materialist in the sense that only non-spiritual materialist forces are allowed to be considered in its many speculations about how life came to be and how man came to be. But I also see Darwinism as pagan in that it worships the products of man's hands and brain, which have created a library full of speculations, the most important ones without scientific basis, that create an intellectual Tower of Babel, which is really a fragile house of cards. There is another pagan aspect in that the devotees of Darwinism seem to always be looking for ways to slip in aspects of intelligent design -- mini-gods or forest sprites -- who do magical things at critical points but cannot be explicitly recognized or named because their strictly materialist paradigm forbids it. There are a whole host of unknown and unrecognized gods in this pagan version of materialist Darwinism. Acts 17:23.

With Charles Darwin's publishing of On the Origin of Species in 1859, he initiated a 160-year multi-trillion-dollar seemingly loosely organized effort or industry to create that library full of materialist speculations which supposedly provide a way to explain all life on earth without there being an all-powerful creator involved. In effect, it has been very much like the building of the Tower of Babel through the centralized administration of the political economy and related ideology to create a way and a structure that would make man independent from God, either being able to create his own heaven on earth, or to go to heaven on his own terms. One might suspect that this seemingly loosely organized effort has in fact been very tightly organized by the father of lies.

The Tower of Babel today

That general atheist/materialist ideology has progressed so far that we now have a godless "climate change" movement which argues similarly that man is in the process of quickly destroying his environment, this earth, and that the only plausible solution is that, Tower of Babel-like, some single political power center should take control of the entire earth and all its population and resources so that we can somehow save ourselves from certain doom. Besides imagining that we can get control of our entire earth to prevent this supposed catastrophe, some would go further and say that we need to get control of our entire solar system by finding a way to move our sun and all its associated planets a few million miles or light years to avoid a catastrophic collision with another galaxy a few million years from now. Obviously, these people have no faith that there is a God who controls the universe or that, if there is such a God, that he cares about what happens to us or has made any provisions for our future.

All the three steps of gospel deterioration, taking us from the gospel to the law of Moses to paganism and on to atheism/materialism, have only visibly happened at BYU, the church's premier teaching institution.  Apparently, it is not considered wise or good public relations to teach atheism/materialism and Darwinism at the ward and stake level, but it is perfectly fine to go even further into paganism and atheism at the church's premier school.

Evolution at BYU

In about 1910 it was a big source of concern to find teachers at Brigham Young Academy teaching evolution, and teachers were fired for teaching that anti-Christian doctrine.  Now, at the church's premier university, people who teach those exact same things, even more emphatically than was done in 1910, are celebrated as heroes.  The on-campus Bean Museum accepts and proudly teaches the ape-to-man thesis of atheistic organic evolution and trumpets its acceptance to the world. The biology department at BYU considers it a major achievement to have every one of their graduates fully accept atheistic organic evolution by the time they leave Brigham Young University.  Also, that same biology Department celebrates the fact that their continual teaching of atheistic organic evolution for a small part of the typical introductory biology class has gradually convinced more and more people, non-biology majors, that evolution is the right answer to how life came into being.

It seems incomprehensible that the leaders of the biology department, the leaders of the University, and the leaders of the church have not realized that teaching pure atheism and materialism does not mesh very well with teaching the theology of an all-powerful God creating the universe and everything in it, including all life forms. It does not take a great genius to figure out that there is no plausible way to reconcile the vigorous theism of a heavenly father with the cold materialism of atheism as embodied in all Darwinian speculations.

In other words, the church has shown its true colors, at least in this one sensitive doctrinal and educational place, by teaching and supporting pure atheism while simply avoiding this embarrassing topic and policy among the regular members who apparently are considered too ignorant to understand the beauty and power of pure atheism/materialism (and it's always-accompanying support for the central administration of everything human.)