Louis Midgley wrote:That an unnamed "scientist" told you about a conversation with Elder Kimball in which he requested to snoop on BYU faculty seems to me to be gossip. I had at least five sometimes rather long conversations with Elder Kimball over the years, and nothing like his concern about teaching evolution ever once came up.
The one who made a huge fuss about evolution was Elder Benson. That is rather well documented. This happened when Dallin Oaks was President of BYU. And Elder Oaks was later called as an Apostle.
And Joseph Fielding McConkie, who I knew rather well, may have had strong opinions about this matter, but his opinions, I can assure you, did not reflect those who actually knew anything about geology, biology and related sciences. And the Brethren were aware of what they taught. And they were also aware that those faculty who knew some actual science thought that they were busy struggling to find out more about the actual way God has organized life on earth.
There is concern, of course, if someone sees in the Darwin legacy proof that there is no God. But gemli types obviously do not, would not, and should not prosper at BYU, nor in the Church of Jesus Christ. Or anywhere else.
The proper place to see how this has been fully resolved is in the entry in the the E of M, that was published in 4 massive volumes many years ago, where the item on evolution that is signed by Bill Evanson, was actually written by Elder Hinckley. This was an action by the Brethren to quash the anti-evolution opinions of some who were then teaching religion, who knew exactly nothing about science. But who had an itch that had to scratch.
Quite a lot there, no? President Benson is depicted here as someone who "made a huge fuss," and also somebody whose views, apparently, "did not reflect those who actually knew anything about geology, biology, and related sciences." Meanwhile, President Hinckley is alleged to be a ghost writer who used somebody else--Bill Evanson--to "quash the anti-evolution opinions" of the BYU religion faculty! Wow! A prophet of the LDS Church was engaged in manipulation of this kind?
And then there's DCP, who in a recent post, actually put in a significant amount of time (the post contains a highly uncharacteristic percentage of original prose) defending the notion that the Brethren are, basically, non-expert simpletons, whose only real job is to serve as "witnesses":
As it happens, I know many General Authorities. But that only strengthens what I’m about to say. It doesn’t weaken it: I hold them in the greatest respect, and I value them for attributes quite unrelated to whether or not they’ve been certified by the academic guild. Their qualifications don’t derive from their scholarly attainments, whatever those may or may not be.
Graduate degrees, deep historical studies, and academic sophistication weren’t required anciently, and they’re not required today...
[SNIP!]
[Saint Peter] didn’t learn [his faith in Jesus] from the faculty of Yale Divinity School or Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union or Princeton Theological Seminary. He didn’t arrive at it via graduate seminars in the history of religion.
The leaders of the Church are called to be administrators of a very big and complex international non-profit organization. But, more importantly and essentially, they’re called to be witnesses, to bear testimony. Not to be scholars, not to function as academic historians, but to be witnesses. That’s their strength, as it was Peter’s.
And they’re called from within our ranks.
They are us.
This is among the more bizarre posts I've seen Peterson write. On one level, this could be interpreted as "butt-kissing"--as sucking up to the Brethren: "Look! I'm trying to show how we're all alike!" If this is true, it would dovetail quite neatly with some of the things Dean Robbers has been prognosticating about in a separate thread. The other--perhaps more charitable--reading of this, is that it's a genuine call for understanding among all Latter-day Saints: "They are us." But let's examine this a bit more closely. Who is "us"? It can't possibly be DCP and the Mopologists, because these are people who, generally speaking, are credentialed academics: a fact that they never hesitate to remind you of. Earlier in the post, DCP also says this:
The top leadership are, in a fundamental sense, just like the rest of us — or just like the rest of us Mormon men, anyway.
Wow! So, no: actually "they are" *NOT* "us," since pretty much half the Church's membership is excluded! Is this guy tone deaf, or what? Who, exactly, does he think this kind of baloney emotional appeal is going to convince? (Your answer to that question will tell you so very, very much about Mopologetics.)
But to go back to what I said about Dr. Robbers's thread: I think that the best way to read DCP's admittedly very strange blog entry, is to read it as him trying to navigate the dangerous political waters of contemporary Mopologetics. He clearly wants to assert the Mopologists' academic superiority to the Brethren: "Their qualifications don’t derive from their scholarly attainments." Maybe so, but the Mopologists' "qualification" almost entirely do. Peterson's post is simultaneously undermining the Brethren's authority at the same time that it is sneakily re-asserting the Mopologists' own (at least in certain instances), as are Midgley's comments. You can't really trust the Brethren to weigh in on the matter of academic concepts, because they are not real academics--their role is to serve as "witnesses" (leave the scholarship to the "real" pros, I guess); plus, as Midgley suggests, the Brethren rely on Mormon academics to do that kind of work.
Except that we know that's not entirely true. Remember Mike Quinn, and his comments on Elder Packer? Or any number of BYU academics who were sent packing? (How about David Wright?) Plus, Midgley is depicting the situation as being highly partisan: the Brethren "like" some academics, and disapprove others. (Midgley has been carrying on yet again about how he thinks Holland's comments re: the "new" MI were "a spanking.")
So I think DCP's post is best understood as an incredibly revealing look behind the curtain of what is going on in Church/Mopologetic politics. I mean, think about it: Why would they side with Thomas Wayment? Yes: he's a credentialed academic, but he also supports views that are diametrically opposed to orthodox Mopologetic thinking. So you have Midgley slamming the "new" MI in public, and meanwhile, other forces within Mopologetics are openly siding with a respected LDS academic who doesn't care about Book of Mormon authorship, and who is openly supportive of LGBTQ+ folks.
As I've said elsewhere, this is a very, very interesting time to be observing Mopologetics.