Why Mormons Leave

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Science and the Church

A global flood, a six-thousand-year-old earth, a literal Adam in Missouri, and no death before the Fall were taught as doctrine. Respondents who took science seriously could not hold both.

Charles Darwin by Julia Margaret Cameron, c. 1868 · Julia Margaret Cameron / Adam Cuerden · Public domain

What members were taught

The earth is about six thousand years old and there was no death before the Fall. Evolution is a theory of men and contradicts the scriptures. The Flood covered the whole earth. A prophet, not a scientist, is the final authority on how the world came to be.

What the record shows

A global flood, a six-thousand-year-old earth, a literal Adam in Missouri, and no death before the Fall were taught as doctrine. Respondents who took science seriously could not hold both.

Science was rated a major factor by four in ten respondents, and the trend analysis found it rising. It mattered more to men, and it was almost always paired with something else: the Book of Mormon's anachronisms, the Book of Abraham's astronomy, or the Flood that the Jaredite story requires.

What the written comments describe is not a war between faith and reason in the abstract. It is the experience of learning, usually in a university course, that things one had been taught as revealed fact were simply not so, and then discovering that the prophets who taught them had done so with the same certainty they brought to everything else. Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie wrote that evolution was a heresy and the earth was young. The Church has since retreated to "no official position," but it never said the earlier teaching was wrong, and it never explained how men who spoke for God on the matter could have been mistaken. Respondents drew the obvious conclusion about the rest of what those men taught.

In their words

“They said that there was no death before the Fall... a letter that Elder McConkie wrote that addressed ten points of how you can keep your faith. And one of the things in there was, he specifically mentions that evolution can't be possible.”

Brooke McLay, Brooke McLay, whose husband was a Church Educational System director, on what they had taught. Mormon Stories 2024 at 1:33:20, 2025. Hear it · Episode

Quotes are taken from machine-made transcripts of Mormon Stories interviews and may contain small transcription errors. Each links to the moment in the recording so you can hear it for yourself.

What people actually name

From the crowd-sourced 2014 comprehensive list, lightly edited.

  • Scriptural and prophetic teachings that there was no death before the Fall, roughly six thousand years ago, against a fossil record hundreds of millions of years deep.
  • The Flood taught as a literal, worldwide event and the "baptism of the earth."
  • The Tower of Babel as the origin of languages, which the Book of Mormon depends on for the Jaredites.
  • Apostles who condemned evolution in print for most of the twentieth century, and a Church that never formally corrected them.
  • Book of Mormon claims about the Americas that population genetics, archaeology, and linguistics do not support.

What the Church has said

  • Gospel Topics: Evolution — the Church now says it has no official position on evolution beyond the divine creation of humankind

Hear it first-hand

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