In addition, individual leaders of the church have expressed a variety of personal opinions on evolution, many of which have affected the beliefs and perceptions of Latter-day Saints.
A private memo written in 1931 by the First Presidency to church general authorities confirmed a neutral stance on the existence of pre-Adamites and "death before the fall."
Many of these scientists subscribe to the idea that evolution is the natural process God used to create the Earth and its inhabitants and that there are commonalities between Mormon doctrine and foundations of evolutionary biology.
The LDS Church has no official position on the theory of evolution or the details of "what happened on earth before Adam and Eve, including how their bodies were created.
These statements generally adopt the position, as a church-approved encyclopedia entry[a] states, "[t]he scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how, though the Lord has promised that he will tell that when he comes again.
[9]: 31 George Q. Cannon of the Quorum of the Twelve discussed his beliefs on Darwin in 1861, stating that revelation is superior to science, but considered the possibility of evolution among animals and plants.
[9]: 39–40 Due to the many differing opinions that emerged, in the early 1900s the LDS Church began to officially respond to the theories that had already been discussed for nearly fifty years.
Church president Joseph F. Smith appointed a committee headed by Orson F. Whitney, a member of Quorum of the Twelve, to prepare an official statement,[4]: 13, 30 "basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, proclaim[ing] man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity.
[16][17] In 1925, in the midst of the Scopes Trial in Tennessee, a new First Presidency issued an official statement which reaffirmed the doctrine that Adam was the first man upon the earth and that he was created in the image of God.
[5] It states that men and women are created in the image of the "universal Father and Mother", and Adam, like Christ was a pre-existing spirit who took a body to become a "living soul".
In the October 1984 conference, apostle Boyd K. Packer stated that "no one with reverence for God could believe that His children evolved from slime or from reptiles" as well as affirming that "those who accept the theory of evolution don't show much enthusiasm for genealogical research.
"[25] In the April 2012 conference, apostle Russell M. Nelson discussed the human body stating "some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere".
[33][34] In 1982, the Ensign, an official periodical of the church, published an article entitled "Christ and the Creation" by Bruce R. McConkie, which stated that "[m]ortality and procreation and death all had their beginnings with the Fall.
"[35] In an earlier edition of the Ensign published in 1980, McConkie stated that "the greatest heresy in the sectarian world ... is that God is a spirit nothingness which fills the immensity of space, and that creation came through evolutionary processes.
The article continues by stating that the theory of organic evolution should be left for scientific study and that no details about the what happened before Adam and Eve and how their bodies were created have not been revealed, but the origin of man is clear from the teaching of the church.
[39] A previous article in the New Era also showed youth viewing evolution as an antagonistic idea to their faith and becoming upset when it was taught[40] and another featured a church seventy using scientific arguments in an attempt to disprove evolutionary natural selection and adaptation.
[45] In Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, the prophet Enoch states: "Because that Adam fell, we are; and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe.
He wrote that for this purpose, he created Brigham Young Academy, so that God's revelation could be taught in schools with books written by members of the LDS Church.
[57] Soon after the First Presidency's 1909 statement, Joseph F. Smith professed in an editorial that "the Church itself has no philosophy about the modus operandi employed by the Lord in His creation of the world.
[4]: 44 Included in the listed possibilities were the ideas that Adam and Eve: (1) "evolved in natural processes to present perfection"; (2) were "transplanted [to earth] from another sphere"; or (3) were "born here ... as other mortals have been.
"[52]: 221 [60] In the April 1968 general conference, McKay's son, David, read a message on his father's behalf that was an edited version of the 1952 speech, including the omission of the word "beautiful" when describing the theory of evolution.
"[64][65] Prior to becoming president of the LDS Church, Ezra Taft Benson gave an April 1981 general conference address in which he stated that "the theory of man’s development from lower forms of life" is a "false idea".
Our families may be corrupted by worldly trends and teachings unless we know how to use the book to expose and combat the falsehoods in socialism, organic evolution, rationalism, humanism, etc.
He stated his view in 1982 at BYU that there was no death in the world for Adam or for any form of life before the fall, and that trying to reconcile religion and organic evolution was a false and devilish heresy among church members.
[c] McConkie characterized the intellect of those Latter-day Saints who believe in evolution while simultaneously having knowledge of church doctrines on life and creation as "scrubby and grovelling".
"[87]: 37 Prior to becoming president of the LDS Church, Russell M. Nelson stated in a 2007 interview with the Pew Research Center that "to think that man evolved from one species to another is, to me, incomprehensible.
[89] The earliest instance in which science and evolution were used to support LDS doctrine occurred in a series of six published articles in 1895, "Theosophy and Mormonism" by Nels L. Nelson.
Allen also stated that besides core doctrine of the LDS Church relating to the existence of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden, all hypotheses are fair game for "responsible scientists" to consider and investigate.
According to scholar Michael R. Ash, a great number of church members read the Ensign, which generally publishes articles with unfavorable views on evolution.
The researchers attributed this attitude change to several factors including primary-school exposure to evolution and a reduction in the number of anti-evolution statements from the First Presidency.