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188 - BYU Biologist Talks Faith & Science | Church History Matters I Science & Religion Series
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- [00:00]
A
If you want to know whether God exists or not, you need to use religion as an epistemology.
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B
Jamie is a biology professor at byu.
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A
It was when I came to BYU that I realized evolution was so difficult for people.
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C
So what types of questions then is science particularly tooled to answer?
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A
If you want to know anything about how the natural world works, what it.
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C
Looks like, and where does it fall short?
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A
If you want to know what decisions you should make to be moral, those are all questions that, that science can't touch.
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B
What are some of the main sticking points where students especially perceive the conflicts between science and religion?
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A
You base your testimony on this has to be God, then you're setting your testimony up for defeat.
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B
I want to know your students and colleagues, what are some of the most common questions?
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A
So probably the most common question I get is.
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B
We'Re back once again and today we have a guest joining us as well, Dr. Jamie Jensen. So say hi, Jamie.
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A
Hi, nice to be here.
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B
Yeah, good to have you with us.
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C
And Dr. Jensen, would you like us to call you Dr. Jensen? Would you like us to call you Jamie? What do you prefer?
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A
You can call me Jamie. Okay.
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B
Jamie's okay. All right. And Dr. Jamie Jensen is here because we're continuing our series on science and religion. We've done a couple episodes where we've gone to the scriptures a little bit and talked about genre and tools for understanding the scriptures and reconciling the science. But Jamie really is the expert on doing this. In fact, I should mention Jamie is a biology professor at byu and one of the unique things at BYU is your biology professor might open her scriptures one day and start sharing from them. Is that correct, Jamie?
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A
That is true.
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B
Do you do that? Like on the first and last day of class, you share your scriptures throughout?
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A
We talk a lot about the gospel.
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B
Very good, very good. Well, let me give you Jamie's bio and then we'll dive into some questions that we prepared to ask her. So Dr. Jamie Jensen specializes in improving biology teaching through the use of evidence based instructional practices and overcoming barriers at the intersection of science and religion through effective science communication strategies. She is also the mother of four handsome boys and loves reading, sewing and dissecting. Which reading, sewing and dissecting, you don't see in a sentence altogether? Very much so, Jamie, you're reading a book and then you sew a quilt and then you go and you dissect a fetal pig or something like that. That's a typical day for Jamie Jensen. And I should also mention too that Jamie has built a Wonderful website, full of resources for faithful seekers who want to reconcile evolution and religion. You can just Google BYU Reconciling Evolution. Jamie is one of the authors of a free PDF that's being offered by the College of Biological Sciences at byu.
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A
College of Life Sciences.
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B
College of Life Sciences. Thank you. I was struggling with the name there, but the PDF is entitled the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution, and it features essays from Jamie, but also a number of scholars, people we really like, like Josh Sears, who's a teacher in the religion department, and Avram Shannon, who's another religion professor. Nick Frederick, who's a professor of ancient scripture, Stephen Peck, Ben Spackman and more. And also a major bonus is this PDF has a number of appendices that include things like the Origin of Man statement made by the First Presidency over a century ago, a statement that we hand out in a lot of classes here at BYU that's called the Mormon View of Evolution. That was actually authored by the First Presidency and then a couple other great things. So, Jamie, anything you want to say about that PDF that people can access for free?
- [03:59]
A
No, just to promote it. If you're looking for ways to bring evolution and the restored gospel together, it's a great book and we've got experts from within BYU and outside of BYU who really are experts in their field.
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C
I should also point out too that we've actually been referencing your work, Jamie. In our previous episodes, you co authored a book with Seth Bybee called let's Talk about About Science and Religion, which is just a short little read. It is so excellent. It's part of a let's Talk about series sponsored by Deseret book. And I just also want to put a plug for that. Maybe we'll talk more about that later as we discuss today. But just so you know, we've been giving that a shout out in previous episodes and we're very grateful for that work as well. Maybe. Let me, let me start with a question, Jamie. I'm just curious about your background for our listeners. Just could you tell us about your background, like as both a scientist and, and as a person of faith? Like, how do those two come together for you?
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A
Yeah, so I actually talk about this a lot when I talk about science communication to sort of give people an idea of who I am. So I grew up in the church, but kind of a little bit non traditional because my mother was a convert in college here. She came to BYU as a non member and my dad, he actually grew up in the church, but maybe a little non traditional.
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C
As well.
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A
And so my upbringing was not quite the same as maybe my, my friends, but I had a grandfather who was a nuclear physicist and he loved science and he cultivated that science love in me. And so I've always loved science. I've always loved biology. I've always loved animals. I've always loved all of that. And so I actually went to college to become a veterinarian and then decided I wanted to be a physician and, and then a physician's assistant and a million other things in between. And then I ended up in graduate school thinking I was going to cure spinal cord injury. And so I did my master's in developmental biology and molecular evolution, specifically around spinal cord development. And then I discovered during graduate school that I really loved teaching, that the sorority was never on my radar until in my PhD where I was studying developmental biology and kind of transitioned over to what we call discipline based education research. So I got really interested in how students learn biology, and that's what I actually ended up finishing my PhD in. So when I got the position at UIU, I'm what we call a deber, a discipline based education researcher. So I'm a disciplinary biologist, but I study education. And it was when I came to BYU that I realized evolution was so difficult for people. I honestly didn't know. I didn't grow up with it being difficult. We talked about it in our home like it was of course, no big deal, but I did have friends who put their hands over their ears while they were in biology class. And I thought, oh, there's something here that I didn't know. And when I got to byu, I could see that this was a struggle for people. And so that's kind of what took my research trajectory in that direction.
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B
Did Deseret book approach you to write the book on science and religion or did you approach them?
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A
The funny story? Actually, we approached them about a very evolution specific book, Seth and I, and they said it was too textbook like, and said, no, thank you. But then they emailed me back right away and said, actually before we got your email, we were just about to email you about this. Let's talk about. So that's how we ended up doing it. And that's how Seth got dragged into. I said, I'm not doing this alone.
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B
I'm. I'm asking. Because that whole series, the let's Talk about, includes entries on plural marriage and race in the priesthood and religion and mental health. And it seems like they're doing research on what the major issues are out there. And they must think that science and religion is a big enough issue that it warrants some kind of, you know, introduction to the field.
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A
Yeah, they had the. The idea already and approached me.
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B
How do you think an incorrect perception of science and religion can lead a person to either reject their faith or, on the opposite side, reject study of science? Like. Like, what are the problems there?
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A
It's a fundamental problem of understanding epistemology. Right. So an epistemology is a way of approaching knowledge, like, how do we know what we know? And there's lots of epistemologies, and we often get confused by what epistemology we use in which situation. And so that's what I often find when I talk to people about this conflict, that they just don't understand the limitations that the boundaries of each epistemology of religion as an epistemology, as of science as an epistemology. And so helping people understand what questions science can answer, what questions it can't answer is important. And if you don't understand that and you're trying to answer questions with the wrong epistemology, it can lead to a lot of confusion.
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B
So maybe we need to define epistemology, which we've done several times on the podcast before, but give us kind of a layman's definition of what you mean by epistemology.
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A
Yeah, so it's almost, you could say it's how we answer questions. How do we get to. How do we. What's the tool we use to answer a specific question? And I can give you an example if that would be helpful.
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B
Yeah, absolutely.
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A
For instance, and this is very much a science issue, but an issue that science actually can't answer. So, for example, off the coast of the eastern United States, they want to build these wind turbines for alternative energy. Right. Great. For the environment, this is going to be a good idea. But it also interrupts a migration path for the right whale. It can actually interrupt breeding and all of the things that the right whales need to do and getting to places where they need to go. Science can tell us what the interruption is going to be, what potential side effects there might be to the right whale population. We can also tell you what the effects will be of having alternative energy sources, how that's going to affect the climate. These are all things we can tell you from a scientific epistemology. But if I ask you, what should you value more, the right whale's migratory pathway or an alternative energy source, like both are important things. And when we decide how do we value one over the other? Well, that's an Entirely different epistemology. Now we've got to consult ethics and morality and maybe religion to decide, you know, is God's creatures, whales, the most important thing here? And we should preserve those above putting wind turbines there. Is the economy the most important thing? That's not something that science can answer. But I've heard plenty of scientists who will step outside the bounds of scientific epistemology and say, therefore you should value wind turbines or you should value the right whale, when that's not a scientific question. They can have their opinion based on their own values, but. But it's not a scientific question. And we see that a lot with evolution, right, where they'll say, science says organisms evolved and humans evolved and we have common ancestry. And then they'll take that extra step and say, and therefore God does not exist. And I think, oh, hold on. That's an entirely different epistemology. If you want to know whether God exists or not, you need to use religion as an epistemology. You need to use different evidence. There's differences in the types of evidence we gather. There's differences in the tools that we use within each epistemology.
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C
So what types of questions then is science particularly tooled to answer? Like what? What epistemology is best served by the scientific method?
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A
Yeah. So if you want to know anything about how the natural world works and what it looks like, so things in the natural world, nothing outside of the natural world, that's where science shines.
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C
And where does it fall short?
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A
If you want to know the purpose of life and its existence, if you want to know what you should value, if you want to know what decisions you make to be moral, those are all questions that science can't touch, and they fall within lots of scientific topics. Right. Anytime you're trying to make decisions about conservation or climate change or any of these, we run into this value statement of whether you should value the polar bears over the poverty in South Africa. These are questions we have to decide that go beyond what the science can provide.
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C
So it sounds like we kind of need to be a little ambidextrous in our epistemologies, being able to fit the right tool for the right question. And if I hear what you're saying, like, the problems really erupt when you use the wrong epistemology for the wrong type of question. Is that a fair summary?
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A
Yeah. And I like to use the word bilingual from President Kimball's second century address. We're supposed to be bilingual and we're supposed to teach our students to be bilingual. But if you walk into a Spanish classroom and you speak English, you're using the wrong language.
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B
Yeah. The right tool to tackle the right problem. You're a biology teacher and you also teach at a faith based institution that's sponsored by a church. You teach at byu. What are some of the main sticking points where colleagues or students especially perceive the conflicts between science and religion? Like what are the flashpoints?
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A
Evolution obviously is one. When we talk about the evolution of species versus the creation story in the Bible, we run into it and we talk about genetics and genetic by environmental influence. Right. So when we talk about agency and how much agency do you have versus determinism by your genetics and the environmental influences, trying to think of the things. I teach a new GE class in biology and we tackle. Those are two. We tackle human health and medical technologies. And what's a miracle? Right? Is this a miracle or is this just a medical technology that humans brought about? We talk about stewardship. What's your role as a steward? When we talk about conservation and climate change and environmental stewardship, I'm stuck back.
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C
On our medical technology. A miracle or is it just something that humans came up with? This kind of gets at something that you talked about in your let's talk about science and religion book. You talk about the God of the gaps. Can we talk about the God of the gaps dilemma for a moment? Because I thought it was really insightful. Like first of all, I guess, could you explain what is the God of the gaps reasoning? And then second, like, why is that approach dangerous to faith? And then finally, like, what's, what's your recommended better approach than the God of the gaps approach?
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A
Yeah. So a God of the gaps is the idea that you're putting, you're placing God into the gaps in our, in our physical understanding of the natural world. So the easiest explanation, I think I use this in the book is like back in ancient times, the Greek gods, they were the explanation for weather patterns, for natural disaster.
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C
Zeus is the God of lightning and Poseidon is the God of earthquakes and stuff.
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A
You have a hurricane, Poseidon. If you have a lightning storm, it's Zeus. And so when, when science discovered what causes lightning, what causes hurricanes, it replaced God as an explanation. And so, and that seems like ancient, nobody does that anymore. But we do it all the time where we'll say, oh, you know, you can't explain why humans are moral. And so morality has to be a gift from God. Well, that's a God of the gaps. Right. Because science can explain morality in a lot of ways. There's a lot of evidence that morality is an evolutionary favored trait.
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C
Meaning that. Meaning those who exhibit moral qualities are more likely to propagate and, like, succeed in society.
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A
Niceness and morality tend to be favored in a group setting. And so all of these things, though, if you look at, you know, one of the main arguments for intelligent design is that we are so irreducibly complex, but over and over again, science has shown how that complexity evolved. And so if you base your testimony on this has to be God, it has to be miraculous and in some way we can't explain, then you're setting your testimony up for defeat. If science can explain it and it doesn't need to be, that's not why we believe in God.
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B
Yeah. To cite probably the most obvious example, if we can say that evolution provides an explanation for how human bodies developed, then that destroys our belief in God, because are we children of God? You know, did God create us? That's a God of the gaps dilemma. That's probably the biggest one, I guess you'd say.
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C
Yeah. In your book, if I can quote you. In fact, I don't know if you or Seth wrote this, but I'm gonna say anything. Good. You probably wrote it. And if it's kind of boring, Seth probably wrote it.
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A
I was the main author. But that doesn't mean it wasn't Seth's word.
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C
You put it like this, really starkly. You say it is dangerous to believe in God only when his existence resolves uncertainty, when his existence explains things you do not understand. What happens when science comes up with a reasonable and even a testable explanation for a gap in our understanding? Does your faith disappear because something you attributed to God can now be explained by science? Then you said it won't if your belief is not based in God's filling the gaps. So I think this is so common. We just. We just do this. We just fill in the gaps and we. We kind of wonder and we, we, you know, the beauty of creation, like this beautiful world, like you said, mankind's morality, like, these are things. I think C.S. lewis, I know, has. Has quoted that idea of us being moral creatures is evidence of God. Like. Like this is something that, like, kind of sophisticated people do. So it kind of struck me in the book. I thought, okay, so what. What's she going to say is like, the better way? And so what do you want to say about that? Like, what is the better way then to kind of a guard against this God of the gaps tendency that we have? And, like, what would you replace that with, like, what's. What's the better approach?
- [18:28]
A
Yeah, it goes back to our discussion about epistemologies. Right. So if you're going to make decisions about whether or not God exists, you should not be using science. And as an epistemology, it's the wrong one. And so that, and that goes right down into the tools we use and the evidence we accept as evidence. So if you're going to talk about God, you need to be using the. The tools of religious epistemology. So this is reading the words of God, listening to the words of God coming from the prophets, and then your own personal revelation. And that's just as much an instrument as, like a spectrophotometer is. Right. It's an instrument to be able to discern the spirit is an instrument that you have to learn how to use. We learn. We get better and better over time, and we learn how to discern spiritual evidence. And spiritual evidence is different than scientific evidence. Right. In a lot of ways. We know there's. That we can have spiritual evidence. We see these in the scriptures with Moroni and, you know, here, test me. Right? Test and see if this is real. We run experiments. But those evidences are spiritual evidences. They're feelings that you have that you've used your instrumentation to determine, like using a sewing machine to build a carburetor. Wrong tools. Wrong tools, wrong evidence.
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B
Using a measuring tape to try to hammer in a nail or something like that.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
I'm going to quote a second excerpt from your book where you talk about this. He said we need a shift in our mindset such that our belief in God is for an entirely different reason. Not because he can explain the gaps in our current understanding or because we have physical proof, but because he gives us spiritual understanding and because we have felt his presence in our lives. Spiritual evidence, not scientific evidence. This leads to the very important question on what should we base our testimonies to which we firmly respond on spiritual knowledge. Give us some examples of what you mean when you say spiritual evidence. Like how do we define what spiritual evidence is? Or the religious epistemology that you've been talking about.
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A
Yeah. So I would first start off by saying, and I have this conversation with lots of students, it looks a little different for everyone, right? Like the way that you feel the spirit is different and it's not a one size fits all. And I, and I have a lot of students that come into my office in crisis because they feel. Feel like they haven't felt the spirit the same way. Other people have. They've never cried in testimony meeting or. Or whatever it might be and understanding. And that's, again, going back to your instrumentation. Everybody's instrument is. Is a little different, and we have to learn how to use it. So I'll. I'll be right up front with you. Like, my spiritual instrument is not the mushy, emotional feely sort of. I. I don't feel the spirit that way. Half the time when everyone's crying around me in a sacrament meeting, I'm thinking, what did I miss? What's going on? Right? Because that's not the way that I. That's the way that the Lord speaks to me. The way the Lord speaks to me is through logic. And so I will pray about a question, and often I find an article on pubmed or I find a book that I should have read that gives me insight that is of a spiritual nature, but I found it through my own kind of logic, and that's the way that the Lord speaks to me. And so spiritual evidence is really those feelings. And it's unfortunate that it's not transferable. It is shareable, right? I want to say scientific evidence is both transferable and shareable. But transferable, meaning I can hand you all my bacterial plates or I can hand you all of my numbers. Say you do the analysis and you'll come to the same conclusion. Whereas spiritual evidence is shareable. You can share your testimony, but I can't transfer it to you. Everybody has to do it for themselves. And I think that's probably by divine design, because each of our spirits are unique in the way that we communicate with our heavenly Father.
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C
I'm thinking of Alma 32, which I think is kind of like the coolest testimony experiment, like description in Scripture, where Alma says, experiment on the words of. Of like the prophets. And as you do that, as you plant the words in your heart, like, as though they might actually be true, and like, kind of act as if they are. And live your life as if they are, something will start to happen. And he asked this question later on. He says, is this not real? When you start to feel it expand, when you start to feel it enlightened, when you start to feel it, how does he say it swell? When it starts to become delicious to you? Is this not real? And then you. He says, yeah, but like you're pointing out, but it's happening internally, and you cannot. You cannot take that out, and you cannot hand that to somebody else. And you. You can only describe your process and invite them into that same Process themselves. So that's so interesting. Why do you think that is? I mean, epistemologically, like, why. Why set it up like that, do you think, Jamie? And again, you're. You're. You're not God. But like, any. Any. Any. Yeah. Any thoughts on the value of that?
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A
Mortality is, I think, personally designed. Right. And we talk about this in my biology class, that the body you've been given, even. I mean, there's a lot of. Most things about your body you did not choose. They came genetically. Right. And even your early environment that shapes so much of who we are is not your choice either. So. But I do think it's maybe tailored a little bit to what God knew your spirit needed to experience. Right. We're all down here to learn something new. And I just look at, like, I have a really short fuse. You can ask my husband. He will agree. It's the red hair. Right. I get frustrated. I asked my children one time what emotions mom feels, and the only one they could come up with was frustration. So that's my primary emotion. And I do think that, you know, one of the main things that I have, I probably need to learn that probably my spirit needed to learn was patience. So I am constantly being tried with things that are trying to teach me patience. And my husband always says, if you would just learn it, Jamie, then you wouldn't have these trials anymore. I'm a slow learner, so. But I do think it's tailored towards who are. Who we are as a spirit child of God.
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B
Yeah. And I. I want to point out that in your BYU devotional, you actually shared this experience with one of your professors when you were in graduate school, where you. You. You talk about spiritual evidence not being transferable. It is shareable. But it also seems like when you were talking to him, you were saying it is demonstrable, too. Like, it is a process that a person can go through and they'll get evidence. It's just that the evidence might vary from individual to individual. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
- [25:16]
A
Yeah. And the tools that you're going to use, you're not born an expert. Right. So if I were to say to somebody who's never been in the church, who's never felt the spirit, who's never prayed. Right. To ask them to just do what I did and you'll get the same evidence is probably not likely. Right. And there's a scripture. Alma's talking to Korihor, and Korihor is denying that there is a God. And Alma says Just look around. Everything you see, the planets and their motions, everything around you tells you that there is a God. And I think, well, hold on, Alma, you're right. For you it does. But for someone who hasn't gained that spiritual knowledge first, that physical evidence is not evidence to them. Right. I have lots of colleagues who I love dearly, who are atheists, who, who don't have any belief. And I couldn't say to them, well, gosh, just look at the trees. Duh, right. It would not be evidence to them because they don't have that spiritual foundation. They don't have that spiritual evidence first. So for somebody who's spent the time, refined their spiritual tool, figured out how to use it and interpret the evidence for them. For me, when I look around, you should have seen the sunset this morning. Morning. It was incredible. And to me it testifies of God, but to someone who's not religious, it testifies of, you know, meteorology.
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C
Okay, okay. So can I, can I push you on this? This is an insight in your book as well as, like, a challenge, I think, because you say, quote, science is agnostic, close quote, Meaning science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. And you've already begun to touch on this. But, like, how do you reconcile that then with like. I'm thinking of like, like the study of human biology. You do this. I've heard other scientists who say things like this, like, studying this actually deepens my faith in God. Studying the human body deepens my faith in God. Yeah. Alma 30, verse 44. Alma saying, look around, look at the planets, look at earth, look at everything on the earth. Doesn't it all witness of a supreme creator? It seems like sometimes we do reach for the scientific to confirm our belief in God, but you seem to push back on that. You say that scientific evidence will not reveal God to us. So I just want to kind of hear you interact with that.
- [27:44]
A
Yeah, that's a good question. And I think you can't gain an understanding of God through scientific evidence. I think you can strengthen, like, it's like, you know, you test the hypothesis and you have, you have a valid way that you're going to test this hypothesis. And then you see other evidences that you think, oh, yeah, that would support it. But that alone would not be a rigorous enough test to prove anything. And so I do think that science, scientific evidence, the world around us, it can strengthen your faith. But like I said, not until you have actually used the correct epistemology and the correct test to prove that God Exists to you, then. Yeah, lots of different epistemologies. You know, that warm feeling in your heart, like those kinds of things can strengthen what you believe, but they wouldn't stand alone, in my opinion, as a test of God.
- [28:38]
B
Well, let's shift gears a little bit. You mentioned you're teaching a class specifically on this idea of reconciling science and religion. Let's say we're in your class. What are some of the basic principles that you would want us to know in our quest to sort of bring these two epistemologies together, to find a way to make them work?
- [28:57]
A
So we actually spend the whole first unit talking about, like, how do you use scientific epistemology? How do you use religious epistemology? And one of the main things we really, really emphasize is a comfort with uncertainty. And I know that that seems like, oh, I don't want to be uncertain. Nobody wants to be uncertain. Evolutionarily were actually designed by evolution to not be uncertain. Right. We're very uncomfortable with that because if you saw rustling in the bushes and you're like, well, could be a lion, could be something else. Yeah. You didn't survive long enough to pass those genes on. Right. We are certain. We jump to conclusions, we make assumptions, and we get out of there. Right. And so we are very uncomfortable with uncertainty. And that's something that I think as you become epistemologically sophisticated, as you become learned in a particular epistemology, you learn how to sit with uncertainty a little bit better. I know for me, when I started on my scientific journey, I honestly thought that we knew everything there was to know about biology, and it was all in the textbooks. And I remember being in graduate school when I asked my advisor a question, and he said, well, I don't know. I don't think we know that yet. And I thought, hold the phone. We don't know that. Like, I thought we knew everything there was to know. And as I got deeper and deeper into biology, as I became an expert, I realized how much we don't know and that it's okay. Like, there's ways to know. We just have to do it. Right. And so it's more hopeful than it is discouraging that, hey, oh, there's some. Some really great questions we can ask. And the fact that we don't know is kind of exciting. And. And religion as an epistemology is the same way. But we're taught in our church, I think, especially. And maybe this is sort of a flaw. We're taught to be really certain, right? You see those little seven year olds, they go up to the pulpit and I think I said this in my devotional and they're like, I know the church is true. And I'm like, dude, you're seven, you don't know anything. You believe your parents, and that's great. But like, that knowledge is going to take a while for you to learn. And even if you were to ask, I think if you were to ask the prophet, do you know everything there is to know about the Gospel, he'd probably say, no, that, hey, we're still learning, right? We're still. That's why we believe in a growing and continuing Revelation Church, right? That, that we're, we're getting more knowledge as we go. And so I think we spend a lot of time trying to help our students understand that, hey, as we learn these things, if something comes up that you think, think, oh, that doesn't seem to match what I previously believed. I want you to have some intellectual humility. I want you to say, hmm, it's possible that I don't know enough yet of the science or of the religion or of both. There's a really great quote right from President Nelson when he dedicated our building here in the life sciences. And he said, you know, if there seems to be a conflict, it's because we don't know enough of science or religion or both. And so having that intellectual humility, I think is really important as you approach these topics.
- [31:59]
B
You know, I had a similar experience, not with biology, but with religion, where, you know, we were in a class and we were talking about a story in the book of Genesis. It was the story specifically where Sarah kicks Hagar out because she's worried that something's going to happen to her son. And I just raised my hand and said, you know, why did Sarah act that way? And the professor said, I don't know, but I know the Lord believes Sarah was a good person, so there must be things that were missing about the story. And he just all of a sudden introduced uncertainty where I could look at the Scriptures and say, I don't have to have everything figured out. Exactly. In fact, that can be very liberating to say, there's more to the story, there's more to know. Like you said, it's this kind of humility to basically say, I know the essential things, but there's a lot of things that are worth exploring that maybe I don't know.
- [32:53]
A
And I think that it's so important that as scientists and as religion professors that we scaffold Students on how to handle this uncertainty. Because most of the time when some student walks into my office because I actually get more than I would have ever expected, who come into my office who are having a crisis of faith and it's often based in this area where they thought they had a solid testimony and then they learned something from church history or they learned learn something in science and it shakes their world and they feel like their entire foundation has crumbled. And I think, oh, hold on, your foundation is still there. What do you do when you come up with, when you come up against something that doesn't quite make sense? How do you navigate that? You don't abandon everything you previously believed. You just need to acknowledge your assumptions, right? Think about what things did you assume you knew that you actually don't? What things do you need to study out a little more? What things do you need to just push pause on and say, you know what, I don't know and I may not know for a while, so I'm just going to push pause on that and stick it on a shelf and I'm going to wait, knowing what I know. Like I have a testimony, I know that God is real. These details, not sure. And that's okay. As scientists, we put things on the shelf all the time because we don't have the technology yet or we don't have the evidence. The evidence hasn't been found, we don't have the money to test it. You know, those kinds of things.
- [34:15]
B
I remember a few years ago, Dallin H. Oaks gave a talk on the afterlife where he started out by saying, what we don't know about the afterlife far outstrips what we do know. And that was good because we do start with a lot of certainty. In fact, that's one reason why we turn to religion, is to have faith in what's going to happen to life after death or why life is complicated and difficult, but it's also okay. And it's a sign of maturing faith to basically come to be comfortable with the idea that we don't know everything. And we're probably not supposed to right now.
- [34:48]
C
Could we play a little game, Jamie, maybe just to illustrate how you kind of think through challenging questions. For instance, you open up the Bible. Luckily you don't encounter any sort of like science, religion conflicts until Genesis chapter one, you know, but so you open up to Genesis one, the biblical account of creation. And I mean, right away there's some modern scientific assumptions that are being violated about the way that the creation story is told in terms of how this earth came about. So what do you do mentally? Like, how do you walk through a moment of seeming contradiction in scripture between what scripture is claiming and what science tells us? Like, can you just kind of model that out loud?
- [35:41]
A
Yeah. In fact, I had to, right? Because I was. I was pro science from the beginning, and. But I'd read Genesis, and I never had thought about it. Somebody brought it up, and I thought, oh, gosh. Huh. How do I reconcile this? And so that's when I started talking to experts in religion, because that's not my expertise. I actually remember sitting in one of the first conferences we held. So I had some funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and we held these workshops where we brought in teams of theologians, so academic religious people, biologists, and then local pastors, people. Boots on the ground, right? And I remember sitting. And I can remember. Remember it so clearly. We were sitting up in the life sciences conference room, and somebody said, well, we've got to consider hermeneutics. And I went, what was that word? I didn't know what hermeneutics was. I didn't know any of that. And I remember sitting and just like, I mean, jaw on the floor. I didn't realize we even interpreted scripture. I just thought it was plain reading. And that's it. I didn't know there was even a discipline, a scientific discipline of hermeneutics and in scriptural interpretation. And. And then I started reading things about, like, what is the Bible? Where did it even come from? And that's one thing. So I sit on a committee with a bunch of religious people at the Smithsonian. So there's the hall of Human Origins that displays human evolution for the whole world, right. In the Smithsonian's National History Museum. And so there's a team that they put together of religious individuals that. That we get together every year, actually, I'll be there in February, and we talk about how do we help this be more comfortable for the public. But these come. They come from all different religious backgrounds. I'm the Latter Day Saint on the team. And in those. It's been in those conversations that I've learned the most about my own religion. Like, I've had my Jewish colleagues go, well, you know, you believe this? And I think, oh, okay. Or it came from here. Like, they know more about sometimes about my religion than I do. And I've noticed, as I've worked with my Nazarene colleagues and as I've worked with my Catholic colleagues, that the training that Latter Day Saints get on biblical hermeneutics for instance, is like if you asked most typical seminary students, where did the Bible come from? Who wrote it? I'm not sure they could answer that. I'm not sure I could answer that for all of the books. But the training that we get compared to my Catholic colleagues, my Jewish colleagues, and my Nazarene colleagues is really kind of sad that we need more training in scriptural interpretation. And so, again, as you. These conflicts, I knew right away, ooh, I am lacking in knowledge that I need to have to bring these together. And so I went seeking it. I went and talked to people. I remember the first time somebody said to me, well, what about the problem of evil? And I said, the problem of life. What? I didn't know what that was. I had to go research. Why do we have a problem with evil? I thought that was part of the plan of salvation. Seemed pretty straightforward to me, but it's not. And so, again, hit the books. Go talk to religious scholars. Go read the book. The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and evolution. Because there's some really great scholars that talk about biblical interpretation, especially Genesis, that I learned a lot just from reading their essays as I was editing that volume.
- [39:03]
C
Well, I love that. I love your. Your immediate response is not, oh, shoot, one of these has to go. One of these isn't true. Your response is, I don't know enough about, in this case, religion, scriptural hermeneutics, the origins of the Bible, and therefore I must learn more. Beautiful, Jamie, beautiful. I love that. Yeah. Casey and I have introduced a little sentence we're trying. We're trying to capture. We're trying to teach biblical hermeneutics in, like, one sentence which is not. Is not. You know, it's not.
- [39:40]
B
Not advisable.
- [39:41]
C
Yeah, maybe not. But. But here. Here's our sentence. Jamie, tell me. Tell me what you think about our sentence. Scripture texts are the result of a human divine collaboration written by ancient authors, embedded in their own cultures, and crafted by those authors primarily for the purpose of doing theology, not science.
- [40:03]
A
Wow. That's perfect. Wish somebody would say that. I love it. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah.
- [40:10]
C
Casey, she just gave us a perfect. That's a 10 out of 10.
- [40:13]
B
Good. We. We got it. We got it endorsed, but we're glad to see that.
- [40:19]
C
Well, but. But at the heart of it, that's. That's. We're trying to get to. Because if we approach scripture with the wrong assumptions about what scripture is, we believe that's where most of these problems begin, is right there.
- [40:31]
A
I agree. I agree. And trying to read it from a plain reading from our own context is just flawed. Right. We can't assume the social and political and religious context of the people writing it.
- [40:45]
B
So let me give you another story problem. We've talked a little bit about the creation of the Earth. What about things like the Fourth Fall? It feels like when people come into conflict with evolution and religion, this is one of the main places is that there's this feeling that there was no death before the fall of Adam and Eve. And that has consequences for other things we believe in, like the atonement of Jesus Christ. How do you reconcile things like that? How would you approach a doctrine like the Fall?
- [41:16]
A
Yeah, well, first I'm just going to put a plug in there. Go read the no death before the fall essay in the book that we edited because he as much job than I'm going to do right now. But yeah, when I think about the no death before the fall, first of all, not doctrine. Right. Like that there's a scripture that says no death before the fall, but that doesn't necessarily mean no death of any mortal creature before the fall. And so I tend to take that more figuratively. No death of God's children, no spiritual death before the fall. Absolutely. I mean, I believe in the fall and in the need for the atonement. This is a very real thing. But how that works biologically with the dawn of the human race, there's no revelation on that. But whether things lived and died for millions of years before Adam and Eve is pretty much scientifically proven. Right. That there's lots of death on Earth. I mean, Earth life on Earth has been around for roughly 3.5 billion years. So things have been living and dying for a very long time. We don't believe that Adam and Eve were 3.5 billion years ago. Right. Where Adam and Eve were, we don't know. And, and even from a scientific perspective, there's a lot of places you could put them in time. We've got a really great video on that, actually. If you go to our website under our hover tool, there's a video on scientifically, genetically, where could you put Adam and Eve that would make sense. And there's actually quite a few places you could put them. But there was definitely death of organisms before the Adam and Eve event. Yeah. So I tend to say, you know, what I don't understand must have spiritual meaning. That's a little bit beyond me. Or it's the authors who were writing it didn't have any conception of how old Earth was. And so it made sense for them to state it that way. Not that that was the intention of God to state it that way. It was just stated that way by the authors, like in 2nd Nephi where.
- [43:21]
B
They say that that's part of the humility. Right. Is to say the story is significant to us and it carries meaning. But at the same time too, we don't know which of the parts of the story are literal and which are symbolic. And the Lord hasn't really drawn the line for us yet. We have a number of different accounts of the fall, including one that's shared in the temple. And there's some suggestions in each one of them that a part of the story is symbolic. Maybe all the story is symbolic. At the same time too, the scriptures seem to present Adam and Eve as real people that did exist and had lives and everything like that. So I don't want to go too far either direction. And when it comes to the figurative versus literal way of seeing things, Let.
- [44:06]
C
Me ask you a little more sensitive question here. So as a scientist and a believing latter day Saint, like how do you approach teachings of past or even current church leaders that might contradict scientific findings? You know, some people wrestle with that. They find a quote from Joseph Fielding Smith or Bruce R. McConkey or something where they're pretty hard against something that scientifically is now pretty well established. What do you do with that as a person of faith and science?
- [44:37]
A
Yeah. So first of all, we approach it with a tremendous amount of respect for these individuals and their callings from God to be apostles and prophets. But also recognize that church leaders are human, we're all human. And they were working with the best understanding that they had at end the time. And you got to keep in mind a lot of these statements, they, they took place in time long before sort of the modern synthesis of biology and evolution. And so there wasn't as much known about these scientific topics. And so they were making decisions based on what information they had. I don't fault them at all like that. That may have seemed completely reasonable at the time, given what they knew, given their background, how much science they knew. And so not everything that comes out of a church leader's mouth is doctrine. Right. A lot of times it's just well informed opinion based on their own backgrounds and biases. And it doesn't mean they're not inspired, it doesn't mean that they're not prophets. It just means that they're working with what they've got. They're doing the best they can. So I Think understanding also just how church doctrine is actually established is really important. There's great resources on the church's website for that.
- [45:50]
C
Your impulse is compassion and respect and yet disagreement. Because the way that doctrine is done is not by a statement of one particular church leader on a, on an issue which may just represent a well informed opinion. That's good. I think that's mature.
- [46:14]
B
And Jamie, do you believe that? See, one of the things we worried about when we started this series was what if a person doesn't believe in evolution? Can a person that does not believe evolution is real worship next to someone who does believe evolution is real and all be part of the same church? And that's okay?
- [46:32]
A
Yeah, I love that question. Actually, early in my career I would have fought against you. I would have said no, we all need to be scientifically literate. It's super important. Important. But as I've gotten a little more mature in my thinking about the science, I've realized, you know, some things for some people are not important. And I've got close family members who just cannot, they just cannot accept evolutionists real. And that's okay. I mean, it's not affecting our eternal salvation. This is not a question we need to answer right now. And so I think my love for them as a member of the church and as a child of God is more important than whether or not they accept that taking antibiotics too excessively is going to lead to disastrous results for us because of evolution. Right. Those things are important and they're important from a scientific standpoint. But it's not the be all end all of importance for me. So if you can't accept that evolution is real, I'm okay with that. Well, we'll take what we can get.
- [47:36]
B
Now at the same time too, I know that you've given some presentations on how you feel evolution actually has given you a stronger belief in God. Can you briefly share a little bit about how your study has helped you gain a stronger testimony of the gospel?
- [47:53]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think of it like. So for instance, my son is a musician and he's just a brilliant and gifted musician. And every time he plays something, I just, I'm in awe. It's beautiful. But then when I go and look at the music that he wrote down and actually the way he composed that and watch his fingers go, it's just more impressive to me. Right. Like beyond impressive because it's something I can't do. And so it's kind of the same thing where I look at it. And I think you Know, the creation is amazing. Creatures are amazing. All of the animals and the biodiversity on Earth, it's just, it's just awe inspiring. But getting to study the actual mechanisms by which God did it, which I think is evolution, it just makes it even more inspiring. I mean, how brilliant it is and how perfect it is in creating this mortal experience that we all needed to have. I mean, if you think about our bodies, right, if we wanted to. If I wanted to create a body for my, my child, that's going to challenge them to be charitable. Evolution is a fantastic way to create a body that's selfish and uncharitable, right? That has a lot of these tendencies. Now we have tendency towards cooperation and morality also because of evolution, which gives us a little lifeline to be able to overcome this natural man. But I think, wow, wasn't that brilliant? It was just a brilliant way to create what God needed to create for us to live out the plan.
- [49:20]
B
It's a little messy, but. But the mess is, Is beautiful when you pull back far enough, I guess is one way we could say it.
- [49:27]
C
I remember, I remember Stephen Peck once said on an interview, he said, creating a video game, like, is something beyond what I comprehend. Like, I'm in awe of people who can create video games. But even more awe inspiring would be creating a video game that can create. Create other video games that can continue to diversify and like, create other video games, like, to create something that can go on diversifying and creating is infinitely more inspiring. I'm butchering the quote, but I remember just kind of that clicking for me like that that is a beautiful way to admire our Creator.
- [50:02]
A
Well, and I think too, if you create a process instead of the actual individual organisms, because I like to just think about this because I think, I think it's fun to think of my heavenly Father creating the process. And then all of a sudden, a monarch butterfly pops out of it and he's like, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Like, do you think he was ever surprised, pleasantly surprised, by some of the beauty that came out of it? It's fun to think about that maybe it was the process he created. And then all of the diversity that came out was even inspiring to him. And we see it in Genesis where God's like, saw it and saw that it was good. And I think really that word good should be. It was spectacular. And he was maybe even a little surprised. It's kind of fun to think about.
- [50:43]
B
Jamie, we've talked about some major questions, but I want to know your students and colleagues what are some of the most common questions that you get asked about that you'd want to talk about here?
- [50:55]
A
Yeah, so probably the most common question I get is what about Adam and Eve? Where do they fit into all of this? Because it is kind of, it could be a scientific question, could Adam and Eve be possible? And I always answer, and I'm careful not to answer in class generally, like, I don't need the gospel according to Jamie. Right. But I will tell them like, there's lots of ways that Adam and Eve could fit in, even from a scientific perspective. And I've asked actually a lot of people inside and outside the church, scientists and non scientists, you know, about this. And I spent some time in South Africa following, following around some paleoanthropologists. And one of them is deeply sensitive to religion. And I asked him, where would you put Adam and Eve? And he actually created this really great video for us that I've got on our website under the hover. Hover tool, the H O V R tool. And he talks about where, where can we put Adam and Eve? And, and one of the things to recognize is, is that if you're trying to genetically trace humanity back to Adam and Eve, it's virtually impossible genealogically. We can trace it back. Right. And probably all of you men have the tracing from Adam down to you of the priesthood. So we have these genealogical tracings, but genetically, if you look at the way that human genetics work works, you lose any genetic signature from certain ancestors within maybe 10 generations. So I can have an ancestor, a direct ancestor 10 generations ago with whom I share zero DNA. And that's how quickly it happens. And so within 10 generations, we can't even trace it back anymore. And so could Adam and Eve have been there somewhere? Absolutely. Like there's no way to trace it back. There's no way to disprove that Adam and Eve weren't real. And so, but, but going back, you know, did we ever have a bottleneck in our species? Yeah, there's a lot of places where you could put them. And I think John hawks goes through, Dr. John Hawks on the video goes like 5,000 years ago, you could put them back 50,000 years ago, you could Put them back 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens, our species, and we show up on the scene somewhere between 250 and 300,000 years ago, where we have anatomically similar to us Homo sapiens living on Earth in fairly decent sized populations. And so you could put them all the way back there, or you could put them when, you know, maybe God needed us to evolve a little more, to be more accountable and ready to live the plan of salvation. Wherever that moment was, that's where you could put Adam. So then the question becomes, and I could go through several possibilities, none of these have doctrinal. There is no doctrine on this, right? So you could say that Adam and Eve, you know, by the time humans were in God's image and able to be accountable, right? We had the intellect that was strong enough to be accountable for our actions and actually understand the plan of salvation. Then maybe Adam and Eve were plucked from two Homo sapiens populations and put in the garden. We know in the garden they're in the presence of God. We know from Joseph Smith that weird things happen to your body when you're in the presence of God. And so maybe they're living in this paradisiacal state in the Garden of Eden, these two Homo sapiens that were brought in. That's a possibility. Another possibility is once we were ready, God created, just as he said in the Bible, from the dust of the earth and Adam and an Eve patterned after these species that were living out there, right? And they live in the garden. And when they leave the garden, there's lots of people out there. We hear mentioned in the Bible of the children of men and the children of Adam. So who are those children of men? Maybe those were the ones that were not part of the plan, you know, or are Adam and Eve symbolic? And when humans were ready to live the plan of salvation, when God was ready to send his spirit children to Earth, everybody at that point was an Adam or an Eve. And that's when the plan officially kicked off. Right? Like there's a lot of ways that you can look at it. You know, maybe spirit children weren't coming down and inhabiting the bodies that the spirits in those pre Adam hominids were like a spirit and a dog or a cat. I mean, they were animals, right? And once spirit children started coming to Earth, that's when Adam and Eve were. Or Adam and Eve are entirely symbolic. I kind of like to think that they were real, but, but, but yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of ways you can look at it. But we do know that Homo sapiens, our species, have been running around on this planet for upwards of 300,000 years looking anatomically the same as us. We started putting on clothing and being, you know, clothes 70 to 90,000 years ago. We were living in cities and societies and domesticating animals well beyond 12 to 15,000 years ago. So we know that all these things were happening long before maybe the 6,000 year mark that people sometimes want to put Adam and Eve, just because we have an abundance of historical evidence, natural evidence, that these things were happening long before that. But it doesn't mean Adam and Eve couldn't have been real people. And we cannot genetically trace ourselves back. So there's no way to disprove an Adam and an Eve.
- [56:20]
C
So tell us again where people can go if they want to dig deeper into these multiple options.
- [56:24]
A
You go to the website. If you go to my website and you go to, there's a tool marked hover for Human Origins video repository. And in there is a video that what about Adam and Eve? And Dr. John Hawkes, who's a famous paleoanthropologist, walks through genealogically versus genetically where you could put Adam and Eve, which is just fascinating to think about where they could possibly be.
- [56:50]
C
I love that. So as we wrap up, first of all, thank you, Jamie. This has been so fun to be with you and appreciate your honesty, your intellect, your life experience that you're sharing. It's just, I think, tremendously helpful for those who will listen to this, just as we conclude. I'm curious about your. What you feel like strengthens your faith the most in the restoration. We like to invite our guests to kind of share where they're at in their, in their faith journey. And you're. You, particularly as a scientist, are someone who cares a lot about evidence. And I'd just be curious how you'd answer the question of like, what you feel is the most compelling evidence for the truthfulness of the restored gospel, Something that really strengthens your testimony.
- [57:37]
A
Yeah. And it's going to be funny that I will say science is actually because I've just talked a lot about how you don't use science for your testimony. But I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out if the church was true when I was in high school. And I feel like I got a grasp of it from a spiritual standpoint. But as I've been designing this course, for example, this last couple of semesters, I've been designing a course and trying to find the connections between what we learn in biology and the gospel. And for me, it's every piece of science that I learned that, oh my gosh, that's perfect. That perfectly fits when we talk about agency. It's perfect that our genetics are not our choice. That's perfect because then we get to decide what do we do with what we've been given and how do we. How do we overcome what we've been given? And so for me, it's all of these little scientific discoveries that just add further strength, that God's a masterful scientist, a masterful creator. And that's where I find the greatest joy. I mean, I love reading the scriptures, I love conference talks, but it's those little science connections, because that's my love language, if you will, is to talk about science. And those are the things that strengthen my testimony. Finding how. Finding out how our mortal bodies and this mortal process has been designed perfectly to live the plan of salvation. It's incredible. Yeah. So that's where I find my strength, actually.
- [59:08]
B
And I like that idea. Maybe we should take that a little bit further about spiritual love languages all and that I'm kind of one of those people too, that when I read about something in science that makes connections, that shows the complexity and the grandeur and the design of the universe, that strengthens my testimony. But I can also, you know, have my testimony strengthened by the still small voice, by spiritual promptings, by moments of inspiration that are a little bit harder to quantify. And I think we need to keep ourselves open to all those languages when it comes to building our epistemology to understand not only how the universe was created, but why it's here to begin with. Well, fascinating stuff. And we're just tiptoeing down, you know, there's so many other questions I want to ask, but we're trying to teach the principles here and not go down every rabbit hole that's out there, though. It's a fascinating thing to do to get all this to fit together and like you said, at a certain point to also say some things we just can't answer right now with the information that we have. That's a necessary thing to learn to do if you're a scientist and if you're a believer.
- [60:23]
C
We're just going to have to have Jamie back because this was really fun. We'll have to figure out another way to have her back on the show. I really appreciate it. This was so fun. Jamie, thank you for your insights. Thank you for your life of seeking and your reason research. So helpful.
- [60:40]
B
Well, thank you so much for all the good work you're doing, too. And we just want to mention again Jamie's book, let's Talk About Science and Religion, and then a free PDF you can download right now called the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution, which has a number of really great perspectives. A lot of stuff that we've referred back to here today, and it's free, so go get a copy and take a look at it.
- [61:04]
C
Awesome. Thanks, Jamie.
- [61:06]
A
Hey. Yeah.
- [61:07]
B
All right. Thanks, Jamie.