And the Gods
said: Let us prepare the waters to bring forth abundantly the moving creatures
that have life; and the fowl, that they may fly above the earth in the open
expanse of heaven.
And the Gods
prepared the waters that they might bring forth great whales, and
every living creature that moveth, which the waters were to bring forth
abundantly after their kind; and every winged fowl after their kind. And the
Gods saw that they would be obeyed, and that their plan was good.(Abraham 4: 20-21)
Many people see a great discrepancy between the theories of evolution and the story of creation. I don't, insofar as by evolution we mean the order in which things were created upon the earth. For the most part, these things seem to align quite well. Where I differ from Darwin is that I believe each creature to have been created to multiply after its own kind. How God did this technically, I don't know and I feel no need to know. He said He created it by the power of His Word, even Christ, and that when He said, "Let there be. . .," He was obeyed. That, once created, creatures can over time be modified within their own species is something I believe. For example, if you were to allow a population of a variety of exotic pigeons to breed freely over several generations, you would eventually return to a basic brown or grey pigeon.
God tells us through both Moses and Abraham that He first prepared the waters to receive life. In 1924, Soviet biologist, Alexander Oparin, proposed the theory that life originated through gradual chemical evolution of particles of carbon. He called the resulting concoction, "Primordial soup." [1] What Oparin, and later other scientists stumbled upon could have been what God called the preparation of the waters to a condition conducive to the production and support of life. Whether He did it through carbon compounds or not, I know that He did it. I believe that God, both the Father and the Son, are the greatest of all biologists and even the best of we humans just infants stumbling in the dark, trying to figure out how They did it.
Amongst all the creeping things next in creation included the amphibians;
reptiles;
insects and other creeping things;
and, ultimately, the birds.
The reference to the whale in both the Abrahamic account and the Mosaic account certainly did not represent modern whales or dolphins, which are mammals and came later on the "creation ladder." The writers could have been referencing very large fish using the only wording they had to represent such things. The Book of Jonah tells us that Jonah was swallowed by a "big fish" which is often retold to mean a whale. However, many scientists who study the Bible have come to believe that Jonah may have been swallowed by a whale shark, a truly big fish indeed. The picture on the left illustrates the size of a modern-day whale shark alongside a modern diver for size comparison.
The "war" between science and religion is one we have created in our own minds due to lack of faith. God told the early saints to "seek learning even by study and also by faith." God wants us to seek out answers, but with prayer, faith, and inspiration. Joseph Smith once said that there is no conflict between true science and true religion. When there appears to be, one of them - either the science or the religion - is not true.
© Gebara Education, 2016
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