How the Creation Accounts Differ

One of the first questions in Lesson 3 (The Creation) of the Sunday school Old Testament manual is, "How do the accounts found in Genesis, Moses, and Abraham differ from each other?" I'm glad you asked! Unfortunately, the brief answer provided in the manual is woefully inadequate. There are lots of subtleties that escape even a careful reading. We miss them, in part, because we have been conditioned by familiarity to not see things staring us right in the face. We also lack contextual understanding about their composition. I thought I would lay the differences I have collected over the years. You may find that this side-by-side comparison is helpful for following along.

Who does the creating?
Genesis 1: God (Hebrew = Elohim)
Genesis 2: LORD God = Jehovah God (Hebrew = Yahweh Elohim)
Moses 2: God
Moses 3: Lord God
Abraham 4-5: the Gods (likely reflecting the literal Hebrew meaning of elohim, which is plural)

What is the overall story?
Genesis: God creates the heavens and the earth, and life on it, in six days and rests on the seventh day. Then for some reason we get a second story where the LORD God creates man, vegetation, animals, and then woman [1].

Moses: God creates the heavens and the earth in six days and rests on the seventh day. Then we are told that everything previously mentioned was a spiritual creation, and on the seventh day the Lord God creates man, vegetation, animals, then then woman.

Abraham: The Gods create the inanimate portions of the heavens and the earth (expanse, oceans, dry land, lights in the sky) and prepare the earth to bring forth life, in six days/times. At the beginning of the seventh time, the Gods carry out their plan for creating life by creating man, vegetation, woman, and then animals.

Elements unique to The Book of Moses:
- The account is changed to first person from God's point of view
- God speaks to his Only Begotten
- Sea and water are singular in some cases
- The sun and the moon are specifically named
- 'green herb' becomes 'clean herb'
- Moses 2:4: "I, the Lord God, made the heaven and the earth." The order of heaven and earth is reversed to match the reference earlier in the same verse.
- The mist is called forth by God
- Extended explanation of spiritual creation
- Man is the 'first flesh' or first creation
- Animals have the breath of life
- "This I know now is bone of my bones..."

Elements unique to the Book of Abraham
- Everything is done by 'the Gods'
- Different vocabulary including: organized, empty and desolate, brooding, and expanse. Some of these reflect Sexias's Hebrew grammar, which Joseph had studied.
- In Abraham 4:1 and 5:1, 'heavens' is plural, which reflects the plural Hebrew word
- References to both days and 'time'
- 'breath of life' is replaced with 'spirit'
- The rivers in Eden are not named
- Reference to Kolob and the Lord's time
- Woman is created before the animals
- "This was bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; now she shall be called Woman..."
- "and for Adam, there was found an help meet for him." Since woman was already created, the word 'not' has been removed.

The Harmonization Instinct
I want to go back to what I said about familiarity causing us to miss things. The harmonization instinct is very strong within Mormonism and we sometimes have difficulty allowing passages to speak for themselves because we want them to say what they are supposed to say. For example, the Abraham 4 and 5 chapter headings say that the plans for the six days of creation are set forth and then implemented. However, a careful reading shows that there is actually a mixture of creating and preparation going on. The Gods actually do create light, create the expanse, create dry land, and organize the luminaries. The planning part has to do with the eventual creation of life. The six days describe the preparation of conditions for life to be created, and then life is created in the following chapter, beginning with Adam.

Similarly, Moses describes six days of spiritual creation, followed by physical creation on the seventh day. Although this runs against the grain of mainstream interpretation, several elements of the story fall in to place when the account is read that way, including the fact that Adam is described as the 'first flesh.' And as a matter of fact, that appears to have been the predominant (or at least an acceptable) interpretation around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century (see First Flesh). This interpretation also makes sense of the following passage from the Doctrine and Covenants:

Q. What are we to understand by the sounding of the trumpets, mentioned in the 8th chapter of Revelation?
A. We are to understand that as God made the world in six days, and on the seventh day he finished his work, and sanctified it, and also formed man out of the dust of the earth, even so, in the beginning of the seventh thousand years will the Lord God sanctify the earth...
(D&C 77:12)

If you are thinking, "Well, that's not how it's described in the temple or in Church publications," you are making my point. We tend to force all four creation accounts (Genesis, Moses, Abraham, temple) to tell the same story rather than taking them on their own terms. And that's why we are likely to miss subtle differences. Our challenge, rather than trying to homogenize them, is to tease out why they are different.


Notes:
1. The explanation from scholars of the Hebrew Bible is two separate stories have been merged together. The change in God's name is one prominent clue.

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Conspiracy Theories are Sweatpants of the Mind

There's a classic scene in Seinfeld where Jerry admonishes George for wearing sweatpants.

You're telling the world, "I give up. I can't compete in normal society, I'm miserable, so I might as well be comfortable."

This scene came to mind recently as I thought about people who trade in conspiracy theories. I think they are sending a signal rather similar to that of the sweatpants:

I give up. It's too hard to keep up with the complexities of modern society. I'm miserable and don't know who to believe, so I might as well be comfortable and adopt conspiracy theories.

Of course, this is not a denial that people sometimes conspire together for ill. However, your typical conspiracy theory typically throws prior probability and simpler explanations to the wind, and postulates the cooperation of many different people who would otherwise have little reason to cooperate. Conspiracy theories also tend to be unfalsifiable in that any evidence raised against them is incorporated as part of the conspiracy.

There are several ironies that come from conspiracy theories. First is the enhancement of tragedy for those affected. The awfulness of having your first grader murdered in his/her classroom, for example, is bad enough. But to then have people publicly accuse you of having faked their death, and harass you about it (as has happened with Sandy Hook), is a supremely cruel compounding of horror. Second, is that conspiracy theories are rather unhelpful in addressing the problem at hand. Simply put, when you wildly misdiagnose the problem your solutions will range somewhere between unhelpful and harmful. Finally, to bring us back to the title of this post, conspiracy theories give their adherents the illusion of knowledge and understanding. Moreover, in their attempt to reach the REAL truth, sincere adherents of conspiracy theories are actually manipulated by those who cynically foster the theories for gain.

I was already developing this metaphor and had started composing this post when current events added another to the genre. What kind of sweatpants does your mind have to be wearing in order to take this seriously, and what should we think about those who composed it and spread it? (See here for why it's total garbage.)

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Remember Planet Nibiru? It's (Not) Back!

Some people never learn. The Washington Post reports that a poor NASA scientist is having to field questions about a mystery planet known as Nibiru or Planet X, and predictions that it will cause catastrophe for Earth tomorrow (having failed to do so in September and October). According to the article,

Nibiru theories have by now become so abundant that if you spend long enough on YouTube or PlanetXNews.com you can find an apocalypse scheduled for just about any given day of the week.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because this isn't the first time the fictitious planet has caused concern. In 2011 I highlighted the same hysteria. At the time, the prediction was for destruction in 2012, and it's the same scientist having to reassure people that this is not a thing. I don't pay as much attention to this kind of crap as I used to, but I figured I might as well document it again for blog posterity.

For more, see my previous post: 2012 Cosmophobia

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Why It's Hard for Me to Get On Board with the Pro-Life Movement

Few topics in politics get as heated as abortion, and the Church is pretty clear about its policy on the matter. Why, then, do I find it hard to get on board with the Pro-Life movement?

Before I jump into my list, I should stipulate that I don't follow the issue closely, and I'm not steeped in the various legal nuances. I'm just giving my perspective as a regular guy who happens to also be a Mormon and a scientist. Also, I said that the Church's position on the matter is pretty clear, but let's make it explicit. The Church opposes abortion but recognizes three classes of exceptions, as stated in Handbook 2:

The Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience. Members must not submit to, perform, arrange for, pay for, consent to, or encourage an abortion. The only possible exceptions are when:

1. Pregnancy resulted from forcible rape or incest.
2. A competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy.
3. A competent physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.

Even these exceptions do not justify abortion automatically. Abortion is a most serious matter and should be considered only after the persons responsible have consulted with their bishops and received divine confirmation through prayer.

I support the Church's position, while recognizing that in a diverse society there will be disagreement about where the line of acceptability should be drawn. Nevertheless, I believe that any public policy regarding abortion must at least accommodate these exceptions. With that as background, here is my list:

1. Insufficient confidence that the exceptions above will be respected: In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, several of the candidates expressed opposition to one or more of these exceptions, and this hard-line stance seems to represent that of an increasingly militant pro-life movement. It's fine and dandy to debate these exceptions as abstract concepts, but it becomes serious business when they apply to you or a loved one. The moment a proposed law or legal interpretation significantly impinges on the exceptions above, I'm out.

2. Giving embryos personhood status: Many pro-life activists would like to grant embryos legal protection as persons, and have attempted to do so through ballot measures. This seems to be as much a legal strategy as an expression of belief. If you can get the law to recognize a fertilized egg as a person with rights, then the very concept of abortion becomes much more difficult because now that 'person' has just as much legal protection as anybody else. It has a certain attractive simplicity to it. Every person was once an embryo, therefore every embryo is a person. However, I don't believe this is defensible on scientific or practical grounds [1], and it would lead to all manner of absurdities. Also, see number 1 above: How do the exceptions work if an embryo is legally recognized as a person?

3. Animus toward birth control: Obsession with the well-being of embryos leads easily to attacking contraception. Some people believe that if a birth control method prevents implantation or in any way disturbs a pre-implanted embryo, that it is tantamount to abortion. In this view, pretty much any hormonal or pharmaceutical form of birth control might cause abortion because, hey, can you be 100% sure an embryo was NOT disturbed, disrupted, or inhibited? (If you don't believe me, just Google "contraception abortion". The first result I got claims that hormonal contraception is abortifacient because the uterine wall becomes less receptive to implantation.) Such people are welcome to their belief, but in my mind this takes us back to absurdities because many embryos never implant and are naturally eliminated from the body, nevermind the medical conditions that are treated with hormonal contraception. Further, it is strange to me that people who abhor abortion wouldn't want the next easiest solution to be broadly available. Of course, if you re-define abortion to include the mechanisms of contraception, then I guess there's no difference. But I don't think most people equate the two, and such reasoning doesn't apply to other methods anyway. I recognize that some people have a religious objection to birth control (not the LDS Church, by the way), and I respect their right to refrain from using it. But the moment anti-abortion slips into anti-contraception, I'm out.

4. Animus toward research using fetal tissue: Organ donations save lives, and some people donate their bodies to science (e.g. anatomy labs). These things are generally viewed favorably [citation needed]. But for some reason, when tissue or cell lines are derived from a fetus, many people think an unholy line has been crossed. It would be wrong for women to get pregnant and/or abort just for the sake of science, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that we have laws against, say, paying people to donate their fetuses to science. But given that abortions and miscarriages do and will occur under the best of circumstances, why should it be taboo to use fetal tissue and cell lines for research purposes? It is a historical fact that some embryonic/fetal cell lines have played an important role in medical science, including production of vaccines. In fact, as irony would have it, the vaccine for rubella--a virus that damages fetuses--is grown in a cell line originally derived from an aborted fetus. I don't think that we should view fetal tissue research any differently than organ donation, which is to say that it is legitimate but governed by ethical constraints. As a side note, I'll mention here that the Church has twice stated that it has no position on embryonic stem cell research.

5. Late-term abortion scaremongering: Late-term abortions are not common and are almost universally for reasons covered in the exceptions above (see, for example, articles in Forbes and USA Today). As you might guess, this very assertion is a matter of contention. Nevertheless, 43 states have laws governing late-term abortions. I'm fine with limitations on late-term abortions as long as the exemptions are respected, but the issue seems to be more of a political and cultural rallying point than one of substantive public need [2].

6. Abortion as the axis of politics: Public polling shows that most Americans think that abortion laws should not be absolute (for or against). And yet, the issue has polarized political parties to the point that candidates must increasingly pass purity tests to be acceptable, and many people feel that their vote for a candidate of a particular party translates directly to a vote for or against abortion rights and defines which side of a culture war they are on. This is not healthy for our society. Pro-life nitwits are not preferable to competent pro-choice candidates or vice versa.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I can't fully align with the pro-life movement, in spite of being a Mormon [3]. Does that make me pro-choice instead? I don't think I easily fit in either category, probably like most of America. Maybe we need to make another category.


Notes:
1. What do you mean it's not scientifically defensible? Fertilization brings together a complete genome. Therefore a unique individual--or person--now exists. Sure, but there is still an opportunity for twining, or formation of chimeras. Or it might fail to develop further. So a fertilized egg can represent the beginning of somewhere between zero and multiple persons (in the normal sense of the word).

2. Surely, the number of women who carry a fetus past 20 weeks and then decide to get an abortion of convenience must be dwarfed by those who have made it to 20 weeks only to face serious and heartrending problems.

3. I'm being a little ironic here. Many people (including some Mormons) think that the Church's positions line right up with the pro-life movement. But aside from its opposition to abortions of convenience, there's not as much overlap as one might think, as I've hinted at along the way.

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President Erying, His Father, and the Letter

In two different General Conference addresses, President Henry B. Eyring has briefly recounted his role in a letter that his father wrote to an Apostle about science and religion.

October 2014:

My father was once asked by a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to write a short paper on science and religion. My father was a famous scientist and a faithful priesthood holder. But I can still remember the moment he handed me the paper he had written and said, “Here, before I send this to the Twelve, I want you to read it. You will know if it is right.” He was 32 years older than me and immeasurably more wise and intelligent.

October 2016:

Once [my father] was asked by an Apostle to write a short note about the scientific evidence for the age of the earth. He wrote it carefully, knowing that some who might read it had strong feelings that the earth was much younger than the scientific evidence suggested.

I still remember my father handing me what he had written and saying to me, “Hal, you have the spiritual wisdom to know if I should send this to the apostles and prophets.” I can’t remember much of what the paper said, but I will carry with me forever the gratitude I felt for a great Melchizedek Priesthood holder who saw in me spiritual wisdom that I could not see.

BYU-Idaho has a video documentary titled, Mormon Scientist, about the life of Henry Eyring (based on the book of the same name) that includes an interview with President Eyring (at about the 5 minute mark) [1]. President Eyring recounts the story above, but with some interesting added details, including a subsequent phone call from David O. McKay. He clearly connects the story to Joseph Fielding Smith's book, Man, His Origin and Destiny.

So far as I am aware, these are the only public statements by President Eyring that exist about the disagreement between his father and Joseph Fielding Smith. The story of that letter--twice mentioned in General Conference--including the full text and response by Joseph Fielding Smith, can be found in Agreeing to Disagree: Henry Eyring and Joseph Fielding Smith.


Notes:
1. A substantially similar, if not identical, video was previously available as early as 2010 at BYUtv as episode 13 of a series called "Inspiring Lives". However, it disappeared sometime before October 2014. Fortunately, the interview segment with President Eyring lives on in the BYU-I video.

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Donald Trump is Nothing If Not Meticulous About Facts

At yesterday's press conference, when asked why he didn't condemn the hate groups gathered in Charlottesville earlier, President Donald Trump said:

I didn't wait long. I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement.

The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement but you don't make statements that direct unless you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don't know the facts. It is a very, very important process to me. It is a very important statement. So I don't want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement. I want to know the facts.

If you go back to my statement, I brought it. I brought it. As I said, remember, Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America. I went on from there....

When I make a statement, I like to be correct. I want the facts. This event just happened. A lot of the event didn't happen yet as we were speaking. This event just happened. Before I make a statement, I need the facts. I don't want to rush into a statement. So making the statement when I made it was excellent.

President Trump makes a good point here. There are too many politicians and pundits who cast blame before the facts are in. It would have been a shame if, in the heat of the moment, Trump had mistakenly condemned the neo-Nazi and KKK marchers, or other fine non-racists who happened to choose to march with them, without the benefit of the facts. That wouldn't be fair to them, and it would risk damaging his reputation for accuracy.

However, Trump should take care that his cool head and sense of nuance doesn't lead people to view him, like his predecessor whose birth he so cautiously investigated, as arrogant and professorial. Americans don't like know-it-all elitists.

Disclaimer: Satire

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On Paris and Tribal Politics

I don't have much to say about President Trump's announcement today that the U.S. will pull out of the Paris climate agreement. It's certainly not surprising. It was a campaign pledge, and one that he could easily keep. Plus, it's another easy way for him to feel superior to Obama. Thus, the urging of many leading businesses to stick with it was not enough to change his mind. Trump is going to be Trump, and this decision is frankly not at the top of my list of political worries these days.

On the broader issue of climate change, I think Jonathan Chait is basically right.

The dominant spirit of conservative thought — or, more precisely, verbal gestures that seek to resemble thought — is not even skepticism but a trolling impulse. The aim is not so much to reason toward a policy conservatives would favor as to pierce the liberal claim to the moral high ground....

[The predominant conservative argument on climate change] contains a defiant refusal to take the policy questions seriously, combined with a gleeful reproach of the urgency with which liberals view the issue. A crude tribalistic impulse overrides any reckoning with the problem. The proximate issue in conservative minds is not climate change itself but the fact that liberals are concerned about all these things. Disintegrating ice shelves, extinctions, or droughts are abstractions.

Let me provide one modest supporting example: Back in 2009 on this very blog, I highlighted the following quote from Rush Limbaugh about climate change.

The whole thing's made up. And the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it. When they're pushing something, folks, it's always bogus.

If that's not the driving sentiment behind current conservative politics, I don't know what is. This mindset, it seems to me, has spread far beyond climate change, and is manifested by the increasing dismissal of experts, outside of conservative-approved sources, on a variety of topics (not to mention the propensity of conservatives to turn against their own policies when adopted by Democrats).

As a young Limbaugh-listening lad in the 1990s, I believed that Republicans were the party of smart policies. Whatever the truth of that proposition back then, for my money the party has increasingly become regressive, selfish, angry, and afraid of the future. (There are exceptions, of course.) I'm not sure what the driving reason for this is, though I am certainly not the first to suspect that the consumption for hours a day of conservative media that constantly tells people that they are being victimized is a big factor.

Donald Trump will not be the president forever, and many commentators see the trend of greening the economy (and the death of coal) as inevitable. The larger questions in my mind are how long conservative politics will be driven by tribalism combined with a sense of grievance, and how long will it be a winning combination?

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FIRM: The Misleading of Latter-day Saints by Latter-day Saints

Last week, while on vacation, my attention was called to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune: BYU and UVU scientists question research offered at a conference on the Book of Mormon. The article described the reaction of BYU and UVU scientists, as published in the BYU student newspaper, The Daily Universe, to a then-upcoming conference called the Firm Foundation Expo. In a word, they were horrified.

I've mentioned FIRM before. Although the organization, led by Rod Meldrum, is primarily interested in Book of Mormon geography, it pursues the subject through a young-earth creationist lens (which is required in order to make their ideas work). This kind of science-bending thinking often leads to the proliferation of nonsense, which is what the BYU and UVU scientists were reacting to. Specifically, they responded to Dean Sesson's "Universal Model" that posits that Earth is filled with water. I grumbled a little to myself and thought it might make for an interesting blog post, and then mostly forgot about it.

I'm late to the party, but last night I saw that Ardis Parshall covered the Firm Expo at her blog, Keepapitchinin. She went so that we wouldn't have to, although she ultimately gave up because she couldn't stomach any more.

Her comments are here: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Don't be intimidated; most of the posts are pretty short. However, if you don't read anything else, read the last part and her comments below it! But since I know you probably won't, I'll reproduce a few salient quotes after I share a few thoughts.

I try not to get too worked up over this stuff. After all, there is seemingly no end to the the kinds of nonsense people will push (and it sure seems like nonsense is the order of the day!), and my impression is that while many people may entertain wrong or crazy ideas, most of them don't take them too seriously [1]. Based on the program, it is clear that the FIRM Expo is fine example of crank magnetism -- which is the tendency of people with crank ideas to accumulate more crank ideas. Alternative science, alternative medicine, doomsday predictions, alternative economics, government nuttery, conspiracy theories...they're all represented. Hopefully the collective craziness is enough to warn most people that the Firm Expo is not a good source of information.

I'm sure that seeing that many crank-adherents concentrated in one place is depressing, but I think they are generally diluted to low-harm in the general population. That this kind of stuff takes place under the banner of more-faithful-than-you Mormonism is also depressing, but my general attitude toward people who think their purity of religion is better than mine (especially based on science) is to ignore them. Nevertheless, I salute Ardis for her effort and highlight some of her writing below.

My few hours at the FIRM Foundation Expo were a distressing mix of intellectual dismay at the continuous denial of the scientific method, and profound depression at the misuse of scripture – the misleading of Latter-day Saints by Latter-day Saints – that I could not bear any more of it.

To claim that you will always side with revelation against science when the two are in conflict implies that your understanding of both science and revelation is adequate – that you sufficiently understand the claims of science, and that you truly understand what revelation teaches. What I heard at this conference did not meet those criteria.

The conspiracist mindset somehow grasps the “truth” first, and then searches for data points to support the conclusion (whereas a scientist, who may well have a hunch to guide his initial research, reserves his conclusions until his observations are made and analyzed, and contraindications are addressed). That conspiracist mindset was on full display in the session about the origin of the Earth and its life: We were told first that the Earth is a sack of water, then were treated to a torrent of “data” supporting that conclusion – no coherence, no attempts to test the notion, but merely a flood of mishmash of sources: scripture taken out of context, somebody’s lawsuit about something, pictures and bits of text from sources that might have been reliable and might have been reported accurately but sometimes sounded as if they came from the Weekly World News for all the credibility they carried, rhetorical questions presented as evidence (“What if I told you that …” and “Have you ever thought about …”), and always – always – the scoffing at mainstream scientists for being wrong about this and that and not even looking for proof of this other thing.

Then there’s the bone-deep skepticism of “the world” as a place and a philosophy of deception and wickedness, and a confidence — exaggerated, in my view — that as the people of God we have all the answers to all of the great questions, and those answers do and must stand in opposition to the vain philosophies of men. That is, we simply know better … even, apparently about matters which God has not revealed. I think that generally unexamined belief runs very deep through Mormonism, although it is a byproduct, a misapplication, of Mormonism rather than anything intrinsic to it.

To declare that you will “stand with the Church” in a supposed science/revelation dispute, especially while failing to recognize that the Church has taken no stand, or that you will “stand by revelation” when you rely solely on a knee-jerk fundamentalism that doesn’t bear scrutiny, is no credit to the Church or to revelation.

Notes:
1. Lest someone accuse me, a Mormon, of writing that sentence without any sense of irony, I do see the irony. But that's a discussion for another day.

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