The Bible underneath it
Evolution vs. Literal Genesis
It contradicts the Adam and Eve you were taught and the argument from design. It does not rule out every possible god.
The point in one sentence
Evolution contradicts two things Latter-day Saints were taught: that nothing died before Adam, and that Adam and Eve were the first humans and the only source of everyone alive. It also takes away the argument from design. It does not rule out every possible god, and this page does not claim it does.
The Adam and Eve you learned about
If you grew up in the Church, you know this story by heart. Adam and Eve lived in a garden. Nothing died there. They ate the fruit, and death came into the world. Because of that, we needed a Savior. It is simple enough for a Primary class, and it holds up a great deal of what comes after it: the Fall, the Atonement, and why Christ had to die.
That story needs two things to be literally true. First, no death before the Fall, anywhere. Second, Adam and Eve as the first humans and the parents of every person who has ever lived. The scriptures you carry say both, in plain words, and so did the First Presidency. This page checks those two claims against the ground and the genome. It does not argue about anything else.
What the Church and its scriptures said
Here are the sources, word for word. Read them as you would in Sunday School, and ask what each sentence needs to be true.
The Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:22
And if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.
Not “all people.” All things. In this verse, if there had been no Fall, all created things would have stayed in the state they were created in.
2 Nephi 2 on churchofjesuschrist.orgPearl of Great Price, Moses 6:48
Because that Adam fell, we are; and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe.
Death arrives by the Fall. The same idea runs through the Bible you also read: Romans 5:12, “as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men,” and 1 Corinthians 15:22, “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
Moses 6 on churchofjesuschrist.orgPearl of Great Price, Moses 1:34
And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many.
The scripture calls Adam the first man, not one of the first, and not the first of the chosen line. The verse ends “which is many,” and believers read that phrase in different ways.
Moses 1 on churchofjesuschrist.orgThe First Presidency (Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, Anthon H. Lund), “The Origin of Man,” Improvement Era, November 1909, pp. 75 to 81; reprinted in the Ensign, February 2002
“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.”
The statement names the idea this page examines and calls it “the theories of men.” It then says: “There is nothing in this, however, to indicate that the original man, the first of our race, began life as anything less than a man.”
Read the full statement on churchofjesuschrist.orgBruce R. McConkie, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “Christ and the Creation,” Ensign, June 1982
“Mortality and procreation and death all had their beginnings with the Fall.”
An apostle, in the Church’s own magazine. This is the teaching the fossil record meets.
Read it on churchofjesuschrist.orgD&C 77:6, on the “book which John saw”
We are to understand that it contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence.
Many members have read this verse as the age of the earth. The Church’s own “Religion and Science” page now gives about 4.5 billion years. So this is a reading the Church has already let go, and it shows how a reading can change without the scripture changing. It is not used as an argument against the Church here, only as an example.
D&C 77 on churchofjesuschrist.orgThe Church taught that nothing died before Adam and that every person descends from one first pair. Fossils show animals dying for hundreds of millions of years first, and DNA shows our ancestors were always a population, never one couple.
Those are checkable. The rest of this page checks them.
From the claim to the check
Where the Church’s teaching and the science met.
Sources: Church scriptures and publications listed in the exhibits; Encyclopedia of Mormonism, “Evolution”; IJdo et al. 1991; Huff et al. 2010; Hu et al. 2023
The exhibits
The Church’s own pages come first. Then the scientific record. Every quote is word for word and every source is linked.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, New Era, “What does the Church believe about evolution?”
October 2016
What it establishes: Two things at once. The Church leaves evolution to science, and it says what happened before Adam and Eve has not been revealed. It also says its teaching that all people descend from Adam and Eve is clear. This page checks that second part against the genome.
Read it on churchofjesuschrist.orgSame article, on Adam and Eve
October 2016
What it establishes: Two things stay fixed even in the Church’s neutral statement: every person descends from Adam and Eve, and in the Garden there was no human death. Look at the word “human.” Second Nephi 2:22 says “all things.” The Church’s 2016 statement speaks only of human death.
Same articleThe Church, “Religion and Science,” Gospel Topics
Current
What it establishes: The Church now states the earth’s age in billions of years, not thousands. That leaves billions of years for death and extinction to happen before any human existed.
Read it on churchofjesuschrist.orgAyala, F. J., “The myth of Eve: molecular biology and human origins,” Science
1995
What it establishes: One method, looking at immune-system genes, in 1995. Later genome-wide studies give smaller numbers (next exhibits). The page leans on the range, not on any one figure. No published estimate gives two.
The abstract on PubMedHuff, Xing, Rogers, Witherspoon and Jorde, “Mobile elements reveal small population size in the ancient ancestors of Homo sapiens,” PNAS
2010
What it establishes: “Effective population size” is a measure of how much genetic variety a population carries, not a head count. It is usually smaller than the real number of people. Either way it is thousands, not two.
The abstract on PubMedHu, Hao, Du, Di Vincenzo, Manzi, Cui, Fu, Pan and Li, “Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition,” Science 381
2023
What it establishes: This is the smallest recent estimate in the studies this page uses, and a critic would raise it first. It is still about 640 times the size of a single couple.
The abstract on PubMedIJdo, Baldini, Ward, Reeders and Wells, “Origin of human chromosome 2: an ancestral telomere-telomere fusion,” PNAS
1991
What it establishes: Great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes and people have 23. A telomere is the protective cap at the end of a chromosome, made of a repeating DNA tag. In the middle of our chromosome 2, that tag appears back to back, where it has no job to do.
The abstract on PubMedDaeschler, Shubin and Jenkins, “A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan,” Nature (a tetrapod is a four-limbed animal; a sarcopterygian is a lobe-finned fish)
2006
What it establishes: One animal out of a long record of animals that died long before there was a Fall.
The abstract on PubMedThe visual breakdown: death before humans, on a true scale
Fossils are death. Every one is an animal that died. So the question is simple: how long was there death before a single person?
Time before today, in millions of years
Every bar is on the same scale. The top bar is the age of the earth. The last two bars are too small to see. That is the point.
Sources: Church “Religion and Science”; Hublin et al., Nature 2017 (Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, 315,000 ± 34,000 years; per Wikipedia); Wikipedia on the Burgess Shale and Tiktaalik; Berkeley UCMP on the Permian. The last two bars are slivers because that is their true size.
Squeeze the earth’s whole history into one calendar year. Animals with hard shells and bones start showing up in mid-November. Tiktaalik, the fish with a wrist, shows up at the start of December. The great Permian die-off comes around December 11. The oldest known human fossils arrive at about 11:25 on the night of December 31. Seven thousand years is the last forty-nine seconds before midnight.
| What you were taught | What the record shows | |
|---|---|---|
| Death | Mortality and death began with the Fall (McConkie, Ensign, 1982); all things would have stayed in the same state (2 Nephi 2:22). | Animals were dying for hundreds of millions of years first. The Church’s own Gospel Topics page cites about 4.5 billion years for the earth. |
| The first humans | Adam was “the first man of all men” (Moses 1:34; First Presidency, 1909). | Genetic estimates of our ancestors’ population size are in the thousands or more at every period studied, with the lowest recent estimate about 1,280 breeding individuals around 900,000 years ago (Hu 2023). None is two. |
| Ancestry | “We are all descendants of Adam and Eve, our first parents” (New Era, 2016). | Our DNA fits a population of thousands, never a single pair (Huff 2010; Hu 2023). |
| How long | Many members read D&C 77:6 (“seven thousand years of its continuance”) as the age of the earth. | About 4.5 billion years for the earth (the Church’s own “Religion and Science” page). The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils are about 300,000 years old. |
Check it yourself: your own chromosomes
This is the one you can look up on your own, because it is not about old bones or old dating methods. It is about the DNA you are carrying right now.
- Two separate chromosomes. Great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes in all.
- Each one has its own protective cap (a telomere) at both ends.
- Each one has its own attachment point (a centromere).
- One chromosome that lines up with 2A and 2B joined end to end. We have 23 pairs.
- Cap-like telomere sequences sit in the middle, at band 2q13, back to back, far from either end (IJdo 1991; Wikipedia, “Chromosome 2 (human)”).
- Remnants of a second centromere sit at q21.3 to q22.1, where the old attachment point of the other ape chromosome would have been (Wikipedia, “Chromosome 2 (human)”).
Humans and chimpanzees also carry the same inherited DNA inserts in the same spots. An insert landing in exactly the same place in two species is most simply explained by a shared ancestor that carried it first. One older summary counts at least seven such shared inserts, and the same summary expected the number to grow as more genomes were sequenced. And the gene humans would need to make vitamin C is still in our DNA, but full of mutations and no longer working (Nishikimi et al., 1994). Monkeys and guinea pigs do not express that gene either (Sato and Udenfriend, 1978).
What is true on the other side
Here are the believing answers, at full strength, and what each one leaves standing.
“The Church has never said evolution is wrong.” The Church says so itself. Its “Religion and Science” page says: “Over the years, Church leaders have expressed differing views about evolution. However, the Church takes no position on the topic.” In 1931 the First Presidency told members to “leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research” (Encyclopedia of Mormonism, “Evolution”). A member can accept the science with the Church’s blessing. What this leaves standing: a God who used evolution. What it gives up: the 1909 statement as written, McConkie’s 1982 article, and the plain meaning of 2 Nephi 2:22. The same Church pages say the Creation accounts “are not scientific descriptions and that some aspects of them may be figurative.” That is a real answer, and this page does not argue against it. It argues against the specific teachings above.
“There were people before Adam, and God chose Adam and Eve from them.” Believers call these “pre-Adamites.” It saves a literal Adam as the first of the covenant line. What it gives up: Moses 1:34 (“the first man of all men”), and the Church’s own line that “we are all descendants of Adam and Eve,” because on this view most people alive are descended from the others too. It also runs into a line in the same 2016 article: “There were no spirit children of Heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created.” And death comes back into the world long before the Fall.
“Adam is a symbol of every person.” This is how many Christians read Genesis, and it is honest. What it leaves standing: the lessons of the story. What it gives up: the Fall as an event. The doctrine that Christ undid something Adam did needs an Adam who did it (Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:22).
“Adam and Eve could still be the ancestors of everyone, in a genealogical sense.” This is the strongest believing reply. It comes from the computational biologist S. Joshua Swamidass, in The Genealogical Adam and Eve (InterVarsity Press, 2019). Genealogical means you are on someone’s family tree. Genetic means you carry some of their DNA. After enough generations, you can be on someone’s family tree without carrying any of their DNA. As Wikipedia summarizes his proposal, Adam and Eve were specially created less than ten thousand years ago, among people who already lived outside the Garden, and their descendants blended with those outside it until Adam and Eve became genealogical ancestors of everyone alive. That is not ruled out by the gene numbers above. What it leaves standing: a literal Adam and Eve, and ancestors of all of us. What it gives up is exactly what the 1909 statement and Moses 1:34 said: Adam was not the first man, he was not the only man, and there were people and death all around him. It also asks “all descendants” to mean something looser than the Church’s wording. Notice what kind of claim it is. It shows that such a couple cannot be ruled out. It does not show that there was one.
Why the argument from design does not hold up
Many people believe in God because life looks designed. Evolution explains how living things can look designed without a designer. And some of what we find is not what a designer starting fresh would choose:
- The recurrent laryngeal nerve. It runs from the brain down into the chest, loops around a major blood vessel, and comes back up to the voice box. In larger giraffes the nerve will approach 5 meters in length, to reach a spot only a short way from where it started.
- The inside-out retina. In the vertebrate eye, “Light must, therefore, travel through the thickness of the retina before striking and activating the rods and cones.” The wiring is in front of the light sensors.
A planner starting fresh would have little reason to build either one this way. Both fit the inherited leftovers of a long history. The larger argument from design, and what is left of the case for God once it is gone, is covered on The Classic Proofs of God and The Case Against the God You Were Taught. The flood, the other half of the story, is on The Flood and the Exodus.
- No death before the Fall, anywhere. Dying was happening for hundreds of millions of years before any human.
- Adam and Eve as the first two humans and the sole parents of all people, as the scriptures and the First Presidency in 1909 taught it.
- A young earth of thousands of years, as some members read D&C 77.
- Genesis 1 read as a literal order of events, as many Christians read it: fruit trees (day 3) before the sun and moon (day 4), flying creatures (day 5) before land animals (day 6), where the fossils run the other way. The Church’s own “Religion and Science” page says the creation accounts “may be figurative.”
- The argument from design: the inference from the look of design in living things to a designer.
- Every possible god. Evolution describes how life changed. It does not say whether anything stands behind the universe.
- A god who set the process going and let it run. This is the god many Catholics and Protestants believe in, and the Church’s neutrality allows it.
- That life has meaning to the people living it.
- Where life started. That question is separate, and open.
- The argument that the universe itself is fine-tuned. That is a different argument, covered on The Classic Proofs of God.
The common rebuttals
“It’s only a theory.”
In everyday talk, “theory” means a guess. In science it means an explanation that has held up under repeated testing. Gravity is a theory. So is the idea that germs cause disease. But you do not need the word to settle this page. The fossils, the chromosome and the population numbers are observations, and they stand whatever label sits on the explanation.
“If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
Nobody says we came from the monkeys alive today. We and the monkeys of today share an ancestor from tens of millions of years back, and then each line went its own way. You and your cousin share a grandmother. Your cousin being alive does not mean your grandmother never existed. Humans and today’s monkeys are cousins in the same way. The chromosome 2 comparison above is the way to check it: the same DNA sits on two chromosomes in the apes and on one in us.
“Intelligent design: some things are too complex to evolve.”
A federal court heard this argument at trial and ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), in a case about public school science classes: “The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” The eye and the nerve above are worth more than any slogan, because they are things you can look up yourself.
“Evolution can’t explain how life started.”
That is right, and this page does not claim otherwise. It is a different question. Not answering it does not make the fossils, or the chromosome, go away.
“Even if it’s true, it doesn’t touch my faith. The Atonement is still real.”
That may be so for many believers, and no one has to leave anything because of a fossil. But the choice is real. If there was no Adam who brought death, the explanation for why Christ had to die is gone, and what is left is a new reading, with a new reason. That is a real choice. It means reading Adam and the Fall differently from the way the scriptures and the First Presidency did.
The Church taught that nothing died before Adam and that every person descends from one first pair. Fossils and DNA say otherwise.
This does not prove there is no God. It shows the account the Church taught of how we got here does not match the evidence.
What this means
You were taught that nothing died until Adam fell, and that Adam was the first man. The Church’s scriptures say it. The First Presidency said it in 1909, and called the alternative “the theories of men.” An apostle wrote in the Ensign that “mortality and procreation and death all had their beginnings with the Fall.” The fossil record shows death on a vast scale hundreds of millions of years before any human existed, and the Church itself dates the earth at 4.5 billion years. Human DNA fits a population of thousands and never a single pair, and it still carries the scar of two ape chromosomes joined into one.
In 1909 the First Presidency called evolution “the theories of men.” Today the Church says it takes no position, and that its leaders have “expressed differing views.”
The Church no longer teaches what its First Presidency wrote in 1909, and says it takes no position. None of this proves there is no God, and the page does not claim it does. A believing person can still say that God worked through evolution, or that Adam is a symbol, or that a genealogical Adam stood somewhere in a much older human story. But every one of those answers is a new story, and none of them is the one that was taught. So the question is not whether evolution leaves room for faith. It does. The question is what a church that taught one thing for decades, and now says it takes no position, can tell you about questions you cannot check.