Well done for believing in evolution. As a geology student it would be hard not too. I don’t know how you can reconcile the myth of Adam and Eve with evolution. But that’s your choice. If you can believe in Adam and Eve you can pretty much believe in anything.

Probably, if pressed, most religious believers would admit that they don’t believe in intelligent design and a lot of religious myths because they are just too impossible to believe. I wonder how many people really truly believe in possessed pigs that talk, flying angels of death, virgin births, levitation and miracles. There is no evidence for such things and such things have not happened in the modern world because of science and the fact that most people are better educated, less trusting of authority and therefore less superstitious. I have no doubt that if the world was plunged back into the Dark Ages for whatever reason, the belief in superstition would rise. We see this, just under the surface, today. A huge amount of people consult tarot card readers, so called mediums, faith healers, holistic practitioners and read their horoscopes. A lot of people don’t have the inclination or time or education to search for the truth so prefer a superstitious answer which sums it up neatly without having to invest a lot of time mentally questionning it. If you are a poor slum dweller in India and your religion/culture tells you that you deserve to be in a low caste because God’s authority made it that way then you aren’t going to argue when that is the norm of society. In Ireland the Catholic Church had its grip on a fearful population for generations. Only recently it has been revealed that the Irish government was complicit in their crimes or ignored it. In America, the religious right are a force to be reckoned with with some states teaching intelligent design as a fact. In Great Britain educational academies with private funding are teaching the values of their financiers, also teaching creationism as a fact or at least as a theory as worthy as evolution which is patently nonsense. The danger is, is a lot of religious movements are oppressive and act as a kind of release, a comfort blanket for those who really need to think for themselves. Again I refer to the low castes of India, the women of Iran who are followed by religious police if they dare venture out unaccompanied and woe forbid they dare talk to a man! The poor of Africa who are fed the Vatican’s propaganda and believe it etc, etc.

Everybody,
Just for the record, I am a graduate student of geology. I believe that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. I believe that organic evolution has been a real process through Earth’s history. I believe that man evolved from a lower life form.

That being said, I also believe in Adam and Eve. I also believe in God. I also believe in the Bible. I have pretty nuanced views of these things, and they are things I’ve had the chance to think a lot about.

Not all LDS share my views on these things. My experience is that probably a majority of LDS don’t believe in evolution, but there is a really large minority that does. Organic evolution is taught at BYU. The Church takes no official stance on these issues, and lets its membership study these topics out and form their own ideas (as they do with most topics).

James

I know you weren’t brought up a Christian but the tradition in England is Christianity so it would have been unlikely you would have found Hinduism or Buddhism unless you mixed in those circles. You might well have turned to Islam if you lived in Pakistan for example.

And certainly many times people feel God speaking to them, whether it is an internal impression or an audible voice, I have never had the second but I know people who have, however the important thing is because I know from the bible that God listens to and answers prayer, even if I dont feel it or get an immediate answer, I can trust He is there.

And also I was not brought up a Christian

I would like to know how people claim to experience it.

It’s the 21st Century. We can see galaxies light years away, we can defeat disease, we can fly across continents, we can send information across the world in an instance but still people persist in believing in crude, simplistic dark age superstitions. I’m not singling out Mormonism because it couldn’t exist in a vacuumn. All religion is simplistic, pre-enlightenment thinking. The opium of the people in darker days and today abused by the powerful to commit terrible crime (be it crazed Islamists in Palestine or far-right Republicans in America bombing innocent people in other countries) and keep people oppressed, stupid and ignorant.