I am often asked by students: What about those people that
lived thousands of years before Adam? They usually ask after class and expect
me to give a definitive answer before leaving the room. Why don't I bring up
the subject in class? I did for twenty years, and then gave it up--it was a
waste of time. Within the past ten years, however, things have changed so much
that it is time to resume the discussion if only to reorient my own thinking on
a subject that is impossible to avoid.
is a reproduction of a heroic
relief sculpture on the wall of the so-called National Cathedral in
Right down to the present day we have been the spectators of
a foolish contest between equally vain and bigoted rivals, in which it is a
moot question which side heaps the most contempt on God's creatures. For the
fundamentalist, to associate man too closely with God's other creatures was the supreme insult to God and man. Man, say
the Christian theologians, faithfully following Aristotle, is the rational
animal-the only rational animal. All other beings in nature are soulless,
speechless, thoughtless automata. Moreover, Adam was not only the only
rational, immortal creation of God on earth, but the only intelligent actor on
any solid world anywhere, being created out of nothing on the only inhabited
planet in the entire universe-the solid earth, which was obviously the heavy
center of everything, around which all other things revolved and onto which
everything fell. Beside that, all was spirit.
This futile quarrel should be no concern of ours. For one
thing, we have a story to tell before Adam. Religion and science have none,
absolutely none.
For the churchmen, the whole universe comes into existence
in the week before Adam's own creation. But for the scientists, too, there is
nothing to tell before the history. They set the stage for human history, but
until a man with a book walks onto the stage there is no story, no play.
Science studies the properties and the sets for the play, but the set is the
play. The medium is the message. There is no more to follow. All around us in
the universe, things are just happening. If they didn't happen one way, they
would happen another. What difference does it make?
The scientists of past decades have been proud of the erhabene
Zwecklosigkeit, the "majestic
meaninglessness" of it all. Since this is not to be my subject, one
quotation, the classical remark of Tyndal, will
suffice: "In the purely natural and inevitable march of evolution, life .
. . is of profound unimportance, . . . a mere eddy in
the primeval slime." The wise men gloried in the strength of mind and
character that enabled them to look an utterly indifferent universe in the face
without flinching (after all, they had tenure), insisting that the rest of us
rid ourselves of our infantile longings for more. When we visit the planets and
their satellites today, what do we find? Nobody at home! Somewhere the side of
a cliff slips and slumps, somewhere dense clouds of dust are blown by
super-winds, somewhere gas or magma seeps through cracks in the ground or huge
blocks of ice collapse or collide, somewhere a meteor lands without a sound,
somewhere. What difference does it make? It is all, as some of my professors
used to remind their impressed but unhappy classes with malicious glee, utterly
meaningless.
I spend my days in the midst of noise, dirt, ugliness, and
absurdity, in order to have easier access to well- equipped laboratories,
libraries, museums, and a few sophisticated colleagues whose material existence
is as absurd as mine. I doubt that mankind can tolerate our absurd way of life
much longer without losing what is best inhumanness. It is religion that makes
man humble in the face of nature, Dubos infers, and
science that makes him arrogant, not the other way around ů
Now as to the past, when I first joined the army I was sent
to weather school and became a weatherman, working with the primitive charts
and diagrams of the day. Coordinating the information that came over the
teletype from a hundred other weather stations, I tried to report and predict
the weather at
The sensational new discoveries in
Now it is admitted, in the words of W. W. Howells, that all
those years when everybody was sure of the answers, "no
scheme was presented that intelligibly interpreted the fossil record." And
now the interpretation is far more difficult than ever, because there are just
too many types to relate and explain. It is a strange fact, "a paradoxical
problem," as Pilbeam puts it, that "the
hominids are one of the poorest represented of fossil mammal groups, relative
to their apparent past diversity." An astonishing number of different
types are running around (there are seven at Olduvai),
and yet so very few specimens! What is wrong? It is no longer enough to fall
back, as S. Washburn does, on the old chestnut: "Surely as more fossils
are found. . . [his tool theory] will be found to have
been a major factor." What kind of science is that--basing our theories on
evidence not yet discovered?
This is a reminder that those who study the origin of man
begin with the final answers. The ultimate questions that can only be answered
after all the returns are in are the very questions with which Lyell and Hutton and Darwin began their explorations. Our
thrilling detective drama begins by telling us who did it and then expects us
to wait around with bated breath while the detective brings in the evidence.
The premise is stated, for example, by G. G. Simpson: "In the evolutionary
pattern of thought there is no longer need or room for the supernatural. The
earth was not created: it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that
inhabit it, including our human selves, . . . mind and
soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion." Well, if we grant that,
we already have the answer to the big questions. We know the final score. And
as giving the plot away spoils the fun, so Simpson must go back to the Bible
whenever he wants to interest an audience.
Here it is important to bring to attention the great number
of knowledge banks that must be brought under contribution before we can get it
all together. There was a time when the Bible was the only knowledge bank. Some
fathers of the church, like Hilary, declared that anything not specifically
stated to have happened in the Bible could not possibly have happened anywhere.
When Aristotle's only knowledge bank became available, the doctors of the
church diligently accommodated the Bible to his teachings. With the study of
the heavens, the stars became the next great source of guidance to the real
nature of things. Then Bacon opened the book of nature. Next, geology and biology
called the tune. Geology took a direct look at the past--we had to believe what
it told us--while biology examined the active processes that brought about the
visible changes. On these two hung all the laws and the prophets.
And why not? Where else could one
turn for answers? It is an illusion to look elsewhere, Freud explained in a
famous essay, "The Future of an Illusion," for what other science is
there except science? Duly impressed, the world failed to ask whether those
data, no matter how concrete and precise, were adequate for the immense burden
of proof that was needed. The prestige of science rested on
shocking oversimplification and elaborate tautologies. "Never mind
the details," we were told. "We can fill them in later"--which
means, as noted, that the great search for truth begins with the final answers.
appeared perhaps as recently as
50,000 years ago." Fortuitously discovered tools vigorously pushed man
toward his full-blown glory, and yet 2 million years of that exhilarating
process left not the slightest effect on their users. Just how powerful is the
influence of the gadgets?
"Considerable academic debate surrounds the date for
the appearance of modern man," Washburn tells us. "By 35,000 years
ago, however, the hunting populations of western Europe were biologically
indistinguishable from modern man. " Yet he also
tells us that "man began when populations of apes, about a million years
ago, started the bipedal, tool-using way of life." In the same volume of
essays, H. de Lumley reports on the 350,000-year-old
village of Terra Amata, with its well-made huts,
central heating (a hearth), and a special compartment for tool-making, the
oldest known man-made structures. What kind of men? R. G. Klein tells us that
"modern man (Homo sapiens) seems to have made his first appearance between
45,000 and 35,000 years ago," and then goes on to describe one of some 100
Pleistocene sites in the Ukraine between 80,000 and 75,000 years old, where the
people wore furs and beaded garments, buried their dead, and built substantial
heated huts. The artifacts were Mousterian and, to quote the same scientist,
"Mousterian artifacts invariably belong to Neanderthal man." But
didn't Neanderthal man become extinct? Some say he did, some say he didn't.
Which is it to be, 2 million years, 1 million years, half a million years,
50,000 years, or 35,000 years? Each one introduces a new species, though all of
them used tools.
According to Klein, when "true sapiens" appears,
it is with a sudden "quantum advance in human culture evolution." By
definition evolution comes only by minute and gradual steps--a quantum advance
must be something else. T. Dobzhansky, who lays
particular emphasis on the tiny steps of micro-evolution, explains the anomaly
by noting that culture brings an entirely new element into the picture:
"The cultural evolution of mankind is superimposed on its biological
evolution; the causes of the former are non-biological." But once caused,
he insists, they contribute to biological changes by natural selection.
"Genes determine the possibility of culture but not its content, just as
they determine the possibility of human speech but not what is spoken."
Whatever is behind it, it is the culture that marks the appearance of man as
such, just as by very definition it is the written record that begins his
history.
When about twenty years ago it was decided that man himself
is the chief conditioner of his evolution, scientists began to view him as
outside and independent of the mainstream of organic evolution. Here was a new
dimension, an evolution that no longer operated on blind chance. To define true
man is to discover the uniqueness of man, that which he does not share with any
other creature. It can only be his culture. And when do you get a real culture?
Not until you get Adam. Those 100,000-year-old villages have nothing to tell us
that we do not know. It is time we got to Adam.
To recapitulate, religion has no plot. Science has no plot.
This means that Joseph Smith is the only entry. He, at least, has given us a
picture. But is it a convincing picture? The fact is,
we have never looked at it closely! We have drawn back from that assignment,
preferring to save a lot of trouble and take sides with the traditional
schools.
The stories of the garden of Eden
and the Flood have always furnished unbelievers with their best ammunition
against believers, because they are the easiest to visualize, popularize, and
satirize of any Bible accounts. Everyone has seen a garden and been caught in a
pouring rain. It requires no effort of imagination for a six-year-old to
convert concise and straightforward Sunday-school recitals into the vivid
images that will stay with him for the rest of his life. These stories retain
the form of the nursery tales they assume in the imaginations of small
children, to be defended by grownups who refuse to
distinguish between childlike faith and thinking as a child when it is time to
"put away childish things." (1 Corinthians 13:11.) It is equally easy
and deceptive to fall into adolescent disillusionment and with one's
emancipated teachers to smile tolerantly at the simple gullibility of bygone
days, while passing stern moral judgment on the savage old God who damns Adam
for eating the fruit he put in his way and, overreacting with impetuous
violence, wipes out Noah's neighbors simply for making fun of his boat-building
on a fine summer's day.
This is another case of what I have called the gentile
dilemma or, if you will, the devil's dilemma.
Joseph Smith gave the world something that nobody else
could. That is why I say that Joseph Smith, with nothing going for him and
everything going against him, simply could not lose. He told us what the play
is all about. If you can come up with a better story than his, more power to
you, but up until now no one else has had any story at all to place before us.
If only for that reason, I believe, the Prophet's story deserves a hearing.
The Latter-day Saints have four basic Adam stories, those
found in the Bible, the book of Moses, the book of Abraham, and the
temple--each seen from a different angle, like the four Gospels, but not
conflicting if each is put into its proper context. And what is that context?
One vitally important principle that everyone seems to have ignored until now
is the consideration that everything is presented to us in these accounts
through the eyes, or from the point of view of, the individual observers who
tell the story. Historians long ago came to realize that the boast of German Geschichtswissenschaft--to report what happened at all
times "wie es eigentlich geschah," the
whole truth, the complete event in holistic perfection as it would be seen by
the eye of God--is a philosopher's pipe dream. And, indeed, it is from the
philosophers that we got it, rooted as the fathers and the doctors are in the
sublime absolutes of
The Latter-day Saints, inheritors of the Christian version
of this teaching, are constantly converting statements of limited application
to universal or at least sweeping generalities. To illustrate, I was told as a
child that the
A recent study points out that the charge that Abraham's
story in the Bible must be fictitious because no one could know the highly
intimate things reported there--nobody, Hamming admits, unless it were Abraham
himself. The earliest Abraham books are supposed to be autobiographies, and the
story told from his point of view makes perfectly good sense. So with Noah in the ark. From where he was, "the whole
earth" (Genesis 8:9) was covered with water as far as he could see; after
things had quieted down for 150 days and the ark ground to a halt, it was still
three months before he could see any mountaintops. But what were conditions in
other parts of the world? If Noah knew that, he would not have sent forth
messenger birds to explore. The flood as he described it is what he saw of it.
"He sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off
the face of the ground." (Genesis 8:8.) Couldn't he see for himself? Not
where the dove went. It was not until seven days later that he sent it out
again; and after flying all day, the bird came back with a green leaf fetched
from afar; "so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the
earth." (Genesis 8:11.) Still he waited another seven days. When the dove
did not return, Noah had his answer. In some distant place, trees were bearing
and there was bird-food to be found. But not where Noah was. All that time he
had not dared to open up.
Note that the author does not fall into the literary trap of
telling where the birds went and what they saw. That became a standard theme of
early Oriental literature, faithfully reflected in the classical stories of the
sea-eagle and the hoopoe. All Noah tells us is what he saw of the birds and the
flood. The rain continued at least in spots, for there was that magnificent
rainbow. Why do Christians insist on calling it the first rainbow, just because
it is the first mentioned? Who says that water drops did not refract light
until that day? Well, my old Sunday School teacher,
for one, used to say it. The rainbow, like the sunrise, is strictly the product
of a point of view, for which the beholder must stand in a particular place
while it is raining in another particular place and the sun is in a third
particular place, if he is to see it at all. It is a lesson in relativity.
Nowhere is the principle of this relativity more clearly
proclaimed than in the cosmologies of the book of Moses and the book of
Abraham. Both epics begin in realms above, far from the earth (which has not
yet come into existence). At each step it is made perfectly clear who is
speaking and from what vantage point. "I dwell in the midst of them all; .
. . I came down in the beginning in the midst of all the intelligences thou
hast seen." (Abraham 3:21; italics added.) First, second, and third
persons appear in a large cast of characters leaving one place for another.
"We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these
materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell." (Abraham
3:24; italics added.) What a world of inference opens up as we are launched
into the mighty drama! Yet we immediately begin to feel ourselves into the
situation. Those to whom the speaker refers (and there is no doubt who he is!) are known to Abraham from aforetime--they are
"all the intelligences thine eyes have seen from
the beginning." (Abraham 3:21; italics added.)
Before being introduced to his home planet, Abraham is given
a view of the cosmos, in the which he is reminded
again and again that all distances, directions, and motions are to be measured
with respect to his own position only. From another position, the picture might
well look very different.
Kolob, as we noted, is not the
center of the universe but governs only one class of stars: "I have set
this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which
thou standest." (Abraham 3:3; italics added.) In
the apocryphal Abraham literature, which has very recently and very suddenly
taken on extreme importance in the eyes of the learned world, this point of
vantage is a place in the heavens to which Abraham has been taken. There he is
at first terrified because he finds no place on which to stand, until the angel
who is with him gives him a correct orientation by drawing a round diagram of
things. This is reflected in Facsimile No. 2 of the Book of Abraham, but we
cannot discuss that here.
Time also is not reckoned in absolutes but is limited to
Abraham's system; "the reckoning of the Lord's time" is not reckoned
absolutely but "according to the reckoning of Kolob"--an
in-between element to gear Abraham's time to a larger but not necessarily the
largest system. There is also reckoning by sun and moon, relative to "the
earth upon which thou standest." (Abraham
3:4-5.)
In verse 6 the expression "set time" is used four
times, reminding us that there is more than one frame of time reference. One
must in the "times of reckoning" take into account that "two
facts" can exist, the one not excluding the other. This is one of the mysteries
of cosmology today. The Doctrine and Covenants explains it by the necessity of
limiting all "existence" to closed systems, for "otherwise there
is no existence." (D&C 93:30.)
Kolob's influence and time governs
"all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest"--the expression here used for the seventh
time. (Abraham 3:9; italics added.)
After being apprised, like Moses, of the endless nature of
God's works--"I could not see the end thereof"--Abraham is reminded
of the glory elsewhere "before the world was." (Abraham 3:22.) Then,
at the beginning of chapter 4, we see a delegation going "down" to
organize this earth and its heaven. To begin with, we see bare rock,
"empty and desolate," as the other planets and satellites of the
system seem to be today, "because they had not formed anything but the
earth." (Abraham 4:2.) Then the whole thing is water-covered beneath a
dense envelope of cloud-- "darkness reigned upon the face of the
deep." But things were already being prepared for what was to follow, for
"the Spirit of the Gods was brooding upon the face of the waters."
Dictionaries define brooding as "to sit or incubate (eggs) for the purpose
of hatching." As
Next, in verse 3, "there was light." Where? It is
an exercise in point of view again. All this time the Gods had been dwelling in
light and glory, but the earth was dark. It was to where "darkness
reigned," according to our text, that the light came. (Abraham 4:2.) This
was not the first creation of light. Wherever light comes into darkness,
"there is light."
The next verse reminds us that light itself is relative, a
part of the energy spectrum seen by some being with the capacity to be aware of
it: "They. . . comprehended the light, for it was
bright" (Abraham 4:4), that is, visible. Basic chemicals react to light,
but are they aware of it--do they comprehend it? In verse 5 we are introduced
to the dualism of night and day, land and water, which is peculiar to the earth
and conditions of all life upon it.
The creation process as described in the Pearl of Great
Price is open ended and ongoing, entailing careful planning based on vast
experience, long consultations, models, tests, and even trial runs for a
complicated system requiring a vast scale of participation by the creatures
concerned. The whole operation is dominated by the overriding principle of
love. You may accept the Big Bang, with its potential for producing all that
came thereafter, but by any reckoning the earth was definitely not among the
instantaneous productions of the first millisecond or even of the first fifteen
minutes. No matter how you figure, it came along much, much later after a great
deal had happened. "Worlds without number" had already come into
existence and gone their ways: "And as one earth shall pass away, and the
heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works,
neither to my words." (Moses 1:38.)
Consider how it was done: "And the Gods said: We will
do everything that we have said, and organize them." (Abraham 4:31.)
"And the Gods saw that they would be obeyed, and that their plan was
good." (Abraham 4:21.) "We will end our work, which we have counseled.
. . . And thus were their decisions at the time that they counseled among
themselves to form the heavens and the earth." (Abraham 5:2-3.) After the
talk they got down to work. "The Gods came down and formed these the
generations of the heavens and of the earth, . . .
according to all that which they had said. . . before." (Abraham 5:4-5.)
They worked through agents: "The Gods ordered, saying: Let [such-and-such
happen] . . . ; and it was so, even as they ordered." (Abraham 4:9,11.)
the
earth to bring forth grass" (Abraham
"Let us prepare the waters to bring forth abundantly. .
. . And the Gods prepared the waters that they might bring forth great whales,
and every living creature that moveth." (Abraham
4:20.) Note the future tense: the waters are so treated that they will have the
capacity. The Gods did not make whales on the spot but arranged it so that in
time they might appear. They created the potential. "And the Gods saw that
they would be obeyed, and that their plan was
good" (Abraham
"They obeyed" is the active voice, introducing a
teaching that, in my opinion, is by far the most significant and distinct
aspect of Mormonism. It is the principle of maximum participation, of the
active cooperation of all of God's creatures in the working out of his plans,
which, in fact, are devised for their benefit: "This is my work and my
glory." (Moses 1:39.) Everybody gets into the act. Every creature, to the
limit of its competence, is given the supreme compliment of being left on its
own, so that the word "obey" is correctly applied. "We will go
down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will
make an earth whereon these may dwell." (Abraham 3:24.) Why? "And we
will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord
their God shall command them." (Abraham 3:25.) What he commands is what
will best fulfill the measure of their existence, but they are not forced to do
it-they are not automata. Adam was advised not to eat the fruit but was told at
the same time that he was permitted to do it. It was up to him whether he would
obey or not. If he did obey, he would qualify for a higher trust.
Abraham 4:11-12 continues: "Let us prepare the earth to
bring forth grass. . . . And the Gods organized the earth to bring forth grass
from its own seed, . . . yielding fruit [the fruit is
the seed], whose seed could only bring forth the same. . . after his kind; and
the Gods saw that they were obeyed." Here are levels of independence down
to a complete programming by which the "seed could only bring forth the
same." It reminds us of DNA, but nothing is completely automatic, for the
Gods watched those things which they had ordered "until they obeyed,"
that is, until they could be trusted to carry on their own. This is not Deism,
the prearranged harmony of Leibniz, for the Gods keep
up an active interest in the operation in which indeed things often go awry:
"We shall go away now," they say, "but we shall visit you
again," which they do from time to time, keeping up an active interest.
The most important provision of all is, "We will bless them," and
"cause them to be fruitful and multiply." (Abraham 4:28.) That
blessing of everything makes all the difference. The Darwinists might say,
"You people are simply describing a natural process in humanized
terms," for they have always made much of the completely natural,
inevitable, mindless, undirected, spontaneous, mechanical aspect of natural
selection necessary for its operation as a purely and completely physical law.
They ever gloated on the unfeeling cruelty of the whole thing--"nature red
in tooth and claw," as Kipling put it. The
blessing is the whole difference between a play and no play.
one
who sees things as they were not seen before, who sees things which he in
another condition could not see. He is in a new ambience. Cast out of the
garden, he finds himself in a dry climate and changes his diet from fruit to
grains, which he must work hard to cultivate.
The book of Abraham is more specific. After
the great cycles of creation come the smaller cycles, starting with a very dry
planet followed by a very wet phase. (Abraham 5:5-6.) Man is formed of
the elements of the earth like any other creature, and he lives in a very lush
period, a garden, which is however reduced to an oasis in an encroaching
desert. (Abraham 5:7-10.) To this limited terrain he is perfectly adapted. It
is a paradise. How long does he live there? No one knows, for this was still
"after the Lord's time," not ours. (Abraham 5:13.) It was only when
he was forced out of this timeless, changeless paradise that he began to count
the hours and days, moving into a hard semi-arid world of thorns, thistles, and
briars, where he had to toil and sweat in the heat just to stay alive and lost
his old intimacy with the animals. (Genesis 3:17-19.)
The questions most commonly asked are: When did it happen?
How long did it take? Our texts make it very clear that we are not to measure
the time and periods involved by our chronometers and calendars. Until Adam
underwent that fatal change of habitat, body chemistry, diet, and psyche that
went with the Fall, nothing is to be measured in our years, "for. . . the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his
reckoning." (Abraham 5:13.) Until then, time is measured from their point
of view, not ours. As far as we are concerned it can be any time, and there
would be no point to insisting on this again and again if all we had to do to
convert their time to our time was multiply our years by 365,000. Theirs was a
different time. The only numbers we are given designated the phases of periods
of creation: "and this was the second time" (Abraham 4:8), "and
it was the third time" (
"It was from morning until evening that they called
day; and it was the fifth time." (Abraham 4:23.) How long is such a time?
In the "fourth time," we read, "the Gods watched those things
which they had ordered until they obeyed." (Abraham 4:19, 18.) That
important word "until" tells us two things: (1) that they took all
the time that was necessary, no matter how long it might have been, measuring
the period in terms not of a terminal date but in terms of the requirements of
the task; (2) "until" means up till a certain time, but not
thereafter. When things were running smoothly, they were left on their own, which implies a shift from one time-scale to another. When,
for example, "the Gods prepared the earth to bring forth" (Abraham
The relative times are clearly shown when "the Gods
organized the lights in the expanse of the heaven." From our position that
is just what they are--lights, nothing more. "And caused them to divide
the day from the night"..... Such a division had already taken place at
the beginning, but this was a new time-system for this earth. . . . "And organized them to be for signs and for seasons, and for
days and for years." (Abraham 4:14.) A sign is a symbol, a mark, an
arbitrary indicator, a means of measuring. It is only a sign relative to a
particular observer. These lights were not originally created as markers of
time, but they could be used as such, they could be "organized for"
such. The moon was not created for my convenience; but just the same, from
where I stand it can be made to serve a number of special purposes. Aside from
measuring time, those heavenly bodies do "give light upon the earth. . ., the
greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; with the
lesser light they set the stars also." (Abraham 4:15-16.)
Here we get what is perhaps the most striking instance of
"anthrocentric cosmology." An astronomer (I
think at Notre Dame) recently calculated the probability of a planet in the
solar system having a moon (just one moon, at that) that subtended exactly the
same arc in the sky as does the sun from the surface of the same planet. The
chances are astronomically remote, so remote, indeed,
that there seems to be something deliberate about what is otherwise a stunning
coincidence. From no other point of view in all the
universe will the sun and the moon have exactly the same size. It is also
arranged that the stars come out with the moon--though the ancients knew
perfectly well that they were there in the daytime too; yet for us, again--from
our point of view only--they are simply not there. The North Star does not
really stand still while the other stars circle around it (move away from the
earth and all your calculations will be spoiled). Hence the repeated insistence
on specifying, according to the time appointed as that "upon which thou standest." (Abraham 3:3.)
What the book of Abraham shows me is that we are in the
midst of eternity, surrounded by evidence of the fact. Every morning on the way
to work, I behold those very old rocks at the base of
Mystery No. 2: Why should it be so organized? Its natural
state calls for progressive disorganization--the Second Law. But organizing is
the exact reversal of that law. Whose idea was it to build this elaborate
organization-- which we can see for ourselves exists, however contrary to
natural law? Many scientists are puzzling over that just now. Trust the book of
Abraham to anticipate such problems; this sort of thing has been going on for a
long, long time. It is planned, programmed, and tested. The "anthropic cosmological principle" recognized that the
state of organization depends on the observer. He reads order into the chaos.
We may be looking at total chaos or at nothing, but to us it makes sense. Not
just to me but to us. If it were only to me it could be an illusion, so we
check with each other. Many find the whole thing absurd. Eminent scientists tell
us that we are living in an absurd world. But that only means that we know that
it should be different. When I say it is absurd, I am complaining that what I
see is "not the way it really is." And who are we? Abraham sees that
as the ultimate question and meets it handily: intelligence--awareness--is the
beginning and ending of it all. You start out with "intelligences,"
beyond which nothing is to be said. You can doubt everything else, but that
much you must grant--there were those intelligences, because they still are.
What the book of Abraham tells me is that, if this moment of consciousness is
real, then it is all real. I can bear unshakable testimony to one thing: I am
here. I am under no obligation to explain it or prove it before it can be
believed.
Let us
consider our Adam. What kind of being is he? The same kind as ourselves--but what is that? He plays a surprising number of
roles, each with a different persona, a different name, a different
environment, a different office and calling: (1) he was a member of the presidency when the
earth project was being discussed; (2) he was on the committee of inspection that came down from
time to time to check up on the operation; (3) then he changed his name and nature to live
upon the earth, but it was a very different earth from any we know; it had to
be a garden place specially prepared for him. (4) When he left that paradise, he changed his
nature again and for the first time began to reckon the passing of time by our
measurements, becoming a short-lived creature subject to death. (5) In this condition, he
began to receive instructions from heavenly mentors on how to go about changing
his condition and status, entering into a covenant that completely changed his
mentality and way of life. "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the
last Adam was made a quickening spirit," when "that which is
natural" became spiritual. (1 Corinthians 15:45-46.) The man Adam passes
from one state of being to another, and so do we:
"as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image
of the heavenly." (1 Corinthians 15:49.) (6) In time he died and became a spirit being, the
head of all his spirit children in the waiting-place, according to common
Christian tradition as well as our own. (7) Then he became, after Christ, the firstfruits of the resurrection and returned triumphantly
to his first and second estates (8) to go on to glory and eternal lives.
In these seven or eight
The fifth chapter of Genesis begins with a very important
episode--the formal establishment of Adam's family organization. It begins with
a book, a book of remembrance or genealogy, entitled "The Book of the
Generations of Adam." It begins, "In the day the Gods set apart [bara--we are being very literal
here] Adam in the likeness of the Gods [bi-dmuth elohim] he made him. Male and female he set them apart, and
gave them a blessing, and gave them their names as Adam, in the day he set them
apart." (See Genesis 5:1-3.) Next comes Seth in
the proper line of Adam, and the patriarchal line follows. The preceding
chapter tells of the division into Cainites and Sethites, and it is significant that the line of Cain is
omitted from the genealogy of Adam. The book of Moses tells of multitudes of
Adam's children born before Cain and Abel (Moses
So we might well ask: What about those people who lived
before Cain and Abel? What about those who disappeared from sight? What about
those who were not even warned of the Flood? What about those many, many who
visited the earth as resurrected beings? What about the Watchers? What about
the sons of God who should not marry the daughters of men, and vice versa? And
what about the giants they begot when they did marry? What about the comings
and goings of Enoch's day between the worlds? What about his own status as
"a wild man, . . . a strange thing in the
land"? (Moses 6:38.) Who were his people, living in a distant land of
righteousness, who never appear on the scene? What about the Three Nephites,
whose condition so puzzles
Speaking of Noah, God promised Enoch "that he [God]
would call upon the children of Noah; and he sent forth an unalterable decree,
that a remnant of his seed [Enoch's through Noah] should always be found among
all nations, while the earth should stand; and the Lord said: Blessed is he
through whose seed Messiah shall come." (Moses 7:51-53.) Methuselah
boasted about his line as something special. (Moses 8:2-3.) Why special if it
included the whole human race? These blessings have no meaning if all the
people of the earth and all the nations are the seed of Noah and Enoch. What
other line could the Messiah come through? Well, there were humans who were not
invited by Enoch's preaching--not included among the residue of people not
entering Enoch's city. They were "the residue of the people which were the
sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the
seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain. . . had not place among them." (Moses
7:32.)
One thing we should understand is that the image of the
pre-hominid is not a discovery of modern science any more than the idea of
evolution is. Primitive man is the easiest thing in the world to imagine. Just
look at your neighbor. The Greeks were fascinated with him, and so were the Middle Ages. Albrecht Altdorfer's
painting "Der Wilde Mann," done in the
early sixteenth century, showing a real ape-man at home with his family, is as
good as anything H. F. Osborne ever turned out. Albrecht Durer
also was intrigued by the subject. Herbert Spencer had only to lean back in his
armchair to turn out the First Principles. I have never found students the
least hesitant to write papers on "A Day in the Life of Primitive
Man." They know all about it. They don't have to look up a thing.
This is a natural product of the silliest doctrine of
all--that of cultural evolution. Taking one's own, contemporary civilization as
the very latest civilization (which it is) and therefore the best (which it is
not), it is the easiest thing in the world to classify all other civilizations
on a scale of proximity to your own in time and spirit. Chrétien
de Troyes in the twelfth century begins his famous
work with such a classification. This is just as sound and scientific as
textbooks on cultural anthropology used for years.
But is it logical to begin at the top, as our Adam does? The
Adam tradition has it that Adam was the best and greatest, the most perfect of
all men. Isn't that getting the normal process of things backwards? Not at all,
in some things. If you want to found a university, do you begin by gathering a
colony of very stupid and ignorant people and wait for it to evolve into an
increasingly glorious institution? Does a university evolve? It accumulates
books and buildings and staff; and if size is what makes a university, then we
do indeed progress. But as often as not the big problem is to keep it from
deteriorating!
So it is with Adam. Must modern man be an improvement on
him? Such is that absurd doctrine of cultural evolution with which the schools
have been saddled for a century. I well remember my old music teacher, Mr. Seyler, shaking his head with wonder at how Mozart could
possibly have written such wonderful music two hundred years ago!
If unused organs atrophy, we are losing rather than gaining
brain-power. A. R. Wallace sorely offended
That is another thing the most recent studies are bringing
to light more clearly all the time: uniformitarianism
is assumed in all calculations, but now it begins to look to the naturalists as
well as the physicists that things were far, far different back there than we
can ever imagine them, recalling H. R. Haldane's
famous remark that the universe is not only stranger than we think it is but
stranger than we ever can think it to be.
Which takes us back to the issue with
which the Adam question began and which has always been the central issue of
human paleontology: a matter of definitions. They may seem trivial,
secondary, naive--but the experts have never been able
to get away from it. Evolution and natural selection were never defined to
82 - p.83
Do not begrudge existence to creatures that looked like men
long, long ago, nor deny them a place in God's affection or even a right to
exaltation--for our scriptures allow them such. Nor am I overly concerned as to
just when they might have lived, for their world is not our world. They have
all gone away long before our people ever appeared. God assigned them their
proper times and functions, as he has given me mine--a full-time job that
admonishes me to remember his words to the overly eager Moses: "For mine
own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth
in me." (Moses 1:31.) It is Adam as my own parent who concerns me. When he
walks onto the stage, then and only then the play begins. He opens a book and
starts calling out names. They are the sons of Adam, who also qualify as sons
of God, Adam himself being a son of God. This is the book of remembrance from
which many have been blotted out. They have fallen away, refused to choose God
as their father, and by so doing were registered in Satan's camp. "Satan
shall be their father, and misery shall be their doom." (Moses 7:37.) Can
we call them sons of Adam, bene-Adam, human beings
proper? The representative Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans, to name
only the classic civilizations of old, each fancied themselves to be beings of
a higher nature, nearer to gods than others who inhabited the land with them
(and before them), or who dwelt in other lands. And yet they did not deny
humanity to them.
Adam becomes Adam, a hominid becomes
a man, when he starts keeping a record. What kind of record? A
record of his ancestors--the family line that sets him off from all other
creatures. Such records begin very early, to judge by the fabulous
genealogic knowledge of the Australian aborigines (A. P. Elkin) or the most
"primitive" Africans (L. Frobenius). Even
written records go back to ages lost in the mists of time--the Azilian pebbles, the marking of arrows, and the identity of
individuals in their relationships with each other. Whether former speculation
about life on other worlds is now to be upgraded to life from other worlds
remains to be seen, but Adam is wonderful enough without that. That gap between
the record keeper and all the other creatures we know anything about is so
unimaginably enormous and yet so neat and abrupt that we can only be dealing
with another sort of being, a quantum leap from one world to another. Here is
something not derivative from anything that has gone before on the local scene,
even though they all share the same atoms.
April 1980, pp. 566-67.
2. Life on Other Worlds, Symposium (CBS),
sponsored by Jos. E. Seagram & Sons,
3. Smith, Joseph, History of The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols., 2nd ed. rev., edited by B. H.
Roberts (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
1932-51), 5:362; Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-day Saints'
Book Depot, 1854-86), 10:147.
(New York: Dover, 1946), p. 524.
28.
6. Dubos, René,
So Human an Animal (New York: Scribners, 1968), pp.
14,15.
7. Dubos, p.
195.
8. Dubos, p.209.
9. Singh, R. S., Absurd Drama 1945-1956
(Delhi: Hariyana Press, 1973), p. 5.
1 (1972): 27.
4(1975): 46.
12. Jerison, p. 46.
13. Jerison, p.46.
8(1979): 339f.
15. Pilbeam, p.
339f.
16. Jelinek, p.20.
17.
18. Pilbeam, p.
350.
19. Howells, William W., "Homo
Erectus," in B. M. Fagan, ed., Avenues to Antiquity, Readings from the
Scientific American (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976), p. 30.
20. Pilbeam, p.350.
21. Washburn, Sherwood L., "Tools and
Human Evolution," in Fagan, p.27.
22. Simpson, G. G., quoted by John C.
Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (Philadelphia: Baker Book,
1961), p. 443.
(New York: Dover, 1958), p. 62.
24. Dobzhansky,
Theodosius, "Evolution at Work," Science 127 (
25. Dobzhansky, p.
1092.
26. Howells, p. 35.
27. B. Rensberger,
in New York Times,
28. Rensberger.
29. Pilbeam, p.343.
30. Pilbeam, p.341.
31.
32. Washburn, p.5.
33. Jelinek, pp.
16, 19.
34. Washburn, p. 15.
35. Washburn, p.6.
36. Washburn, p.15.
37. Lumley, Henry
de, "A Paleolithic Camp at Nice," in Fagan, p.39f.
38. Klein, Richard G., "Ice-Age Hunters
of the Ukraine," in Fagan, pp. 66,71.
39. Klein, p. 73.
40. Klein, p. 75.
41. Dobzhansky, p.
1097.
42. Barrow, John D., and Joseph Silk,
"The Structure of the Early Universe," Scientific American 424 (April
1980): 127.
43. Barrow, p. 128.
44. Lussier,
Ernest, "Adam in Genesis 1, 1- 4, 24," Catholic Biblical Quarterly
18 (1956): 137-38.
45. Santillana,
Giorgio de, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: David R. Godine,
1969), pp. 68-71.
46. Cited in Dubos,
p. 174.
47. Discussed in Rosenfeld, Albert, "Did
Someone Out There Put Us Here?" Saturday Review, Nov. 20,1973,
p. 59.
48. Nibley, Hugh, "The Arrow, the
Hunter, and the State," Western Political Quarterly 2(1949): 328-44.
49
"Before
Adam" is the edited text of an address given to the BYU community on