Adam & Eve and Mormon Truth Claims

hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of mormon stories podcast i am your co-host for today john claims and mike we're super super excited to have you back this is a great series yeah thank you this will be uh this will be a fun one today yeah like i was reviewing the slides before we started and who would have thought that adam and eve could be in my view such a smoking gun but for mormonism i think adam is is a smoking gun but but let's let the viewers and listeners decide um but this is i think this is literally almost definitionally foundational yeah you know it's funny um so we've been doing i think this is our 11th episode it might be our 12th it's our 11th or 12th now and this is a topic that i did not intend to do on the overview at all and i was um kind of going through you know i sketched out the topics that i thought were the most important to cover and um one of the things that's funny is when you kind of i know some people hate the word deconstruct when you deconstruct mormon truth claims you don't necessarily usually dive into the biblical ones and it took me a long time to get there and then all of a sudden um i saw something online i mentioned it and anthony miller who you've had on before who's a really smart dude uh messaged me and pointed me to some stuff he had done with you year i think a couple years ago and all of a sudden in about a 10-minute span i went from having like one or two sections of biblical scholarship to like six or seven because these things are so important because of the way they're integrated so tightly not just into the book of mormon but all the scriptures within mormonism and um you need all of these stories in genesis to be literal history or else everything falls apart right away and it is because joseph smith makes them the foundation of the book of mormon and the book of abraham book of moses because he makes them the foundation if they're not historically true it's a massive problem and this is a problem that a lot of mainstream churches are dealing with by being willing to say the bible's not a history book because it's it's it's not um because we could show that in different ways adam and eve is almost um more problematic because of the fact that the story itself is we'll get into it but there are the bible itself tells us that the adam and eve story is a late edition but joseph smith didn't know that and of course i wouldn't have known that myself either but these things are as i talked about in the early episodes these are the pieces of the puzzle where you can all of a sudden you can kind of see where this is going and these are the fingerprints that joseph smith leaves on the book of mormon's text because we can see he's writing this with that 19th century world view that the bible is a history book and as we can see now that is going to cause him some problems that you just cannot get away from yeah yeah because with joseph smith adam is literally engaging in all aspects of the restoration right and and that's a problem and then the doctrine in doctrine and covenants and book of mormon are based on the new testament which is based on the old testament so it's literally it's the it's the foundation of the whole thing yep all right well let's jump in yeah so this one will be a little more i think a little different than what we've done before since now we're kind of going we're going to stick with mormonism but we're also going to go into the bible so everyone i'm sure that's listening is familiar with the story of adam and eve in the bible um and so we don't have to go into like reading the text of it but just to say that there's there's two different creation stories which um there's one in chapter one one in chapter two of genesis that kind of explains the beginning of life on earth in the traditional view adam and eve were created by god in about 4000 bce and are the original ancestors to every man woman and child that's on our earth today and just to point out most scholars and even um i'm saying most biblical scholars in all secular scholars would agree this is an ideological myth an ideological myth just means effectively that it's like an origin story um that is being used to give a community a purpose and um to try to understand where they come where they came from and so um the adam and eve story in genesis is effectively an origin story that's being written almost as a way to start the bible and joseph smith kind of takes this as a literal historical event and because of that writes it into the scriptures of mormonism and that allows us to be able to look at the scriptures of mormonism and say the truth claims don't hold up and also helps us to date when it was written because we can use the versions that joseph smith is using and kind of the world uh that he lives in those beliefs are all 19th century in the book of mormon and this is how we're going to kind of approach adam and eve as a whole okay yeah yeah it's got to be the most familiar story you know yeah i mean we could obviously read it but i'm sure you everyone watching i'm sure is familiar with it at least to the point where we don't need to go into that but just you know we'll get into some of the specifics as we go but you know we're just going to go over just that main story and how it relates to mormonism because it in not only that um you know i mentioned that it also shows in the scriptures but you know as john mentioned earlier because joseph smith is evolving his theology throughout his time as prophet he is going to make mistakes that contradict his earlier teachings and this is adam and eve is a big example of that because even if they're historical he's still going to mix up his teachings on him as he goes through revelation but if they're not historical then it's hugely problematic yeah and i'm just going to tell people at the outset that that david bacavoy on mormon stories has a great episode to dig into the adam and eve from uh from like a scholarly perspective and simon southerton we did one with him yeah and those are great and and david baccavoy's um for anyone who's watching this series who has not watched the i think it's like four episodes with david bock of what you did on it's it covers um old testament new testament book of mormon book of abraham those are must listen to or must watch because he is he can run circles around me i could not even be in the same world as him as far as understanding that the text because he can tell you um what the original hebrew was saying or what the original greek was saying so he can tell you um those things off the top of his head and and so his work is extremely important and if you are a believer i would also recommend to people to check out dan mcclellan's tick tock channel he is the translation supervisor of the church he so he works for the church and he's a um biblical scholar as well he has you know he has all degrees as well and so that you know listening to david bakavoy and dan mcclellan and and to see the fact that they agree on almost everything we're going to say today um at least with regards to like the history of the bible um obviously there's gonna be differences on maybe on some of the interpretations of like the the later stuff but the fact is this is not something that is going to be disputed by anybody except for um i would argue like church leaders uh correlated church material and so it's gonna make people really uncomfortable because adam and eve i think cuts a little bit deeper than the book of mormon does i i totally get that and the one thing i'll say at the outset is as someone who's gone through this and and experience kind of how painful it can be to do this going through it helps you to understand what the original intent of the authors were for these texts and in a lot of ways that sucks from a perspective of someone who went through the church and has understood these truth claims don't hold up or are not what you thought they were but there's a lot of value to be taken in the way that the people took them and so you can find a lot of value in these stories while understanding they're not historical and while that may be problematic for mormonism it does not mean that you cannot take value in it does not mean that you cannot take the good from it and leave the bad behind in these biblical stories and so while it's going to be uncomfortable and painful for some people to listen to these episodes i just want to let you know there is still a lot of value you can take and even though the truth is going to kind of jolt what you grew up learning or what you were born with being taught it doesn't mean that everything's bad and and i hope that we can illustrate that as we go through this series to try to point out that there's still a lot of of good lessons to be learned here and there's still a lot of good it's just that these instances tell us that the truth claims of mormonism are going to have problems because of it yeah all right thank you for that so with that said no you know it's cleaner well you know and again and we'll you know get in this real quick it's just i hope people understand that you know when you watch these episodes they they're very uncomfortable and they're very painful for people who are believers um but i hope people can understand i'm trying really hard to do this with sources that i i'm very confident hold up and not using sources that i think sometimes we see both from a critical and an apologetic standpoint that don't and so with that said um with adam and eve's historicity you can look at all sorts of fields of study to know that the idea that man and woman began on earth 6000 years ago is just not even remotely plausible and we can look at evolution and just the study of evolution of humans for homo sapiens shows that modern day humans likely began to evolve in africa about 315 000 years ago but the problem is they have fossils that date long before that so we had now a fossils of ape-like slash early human species millions of years ago that is confirmed through dna it's confirmed it looking at the changes of fossils over time and that's why you know i know it's again this is difficult for a lot of people to accept but humans share 99 of our dna with chimpanzees and bonabos i think i'm saying that right and it's because not because we're you know um that my uncle is a chimp it's because we both likely evolved from a common ancestor long ago and so they split off we split off and so the reason the dna is so similar is because of that and we don't want i don't get into dna too much simon southern can do that way better than me and i know he has in his earlier episodes and but the thing is you can look at all sorts of of areas where you can show markers that are similar in our dna that tell us that there's just no way that it's a coincidence and so that tells us that adam and eve were not just pulled you know created from dust or out of the rib of a person but a long process of evolution and that is why when you look at genesis it's mythical and it's it's not i'm going to kind of jive with what we know today and as i mentioned fossil records we can go as early as like over three million years ago and i can't probably pronounce this correct but there was one homonym species um ah aferenas and they were walking they have the fossils showing that they were walking on two limbs and what's really cool is if you ever look at we went to a um dinosaur museum and they had a wall where they had the human skulls over time and you can see the differences like you can literally see things like um your overbite changes they think that the overbite evolved so that we could communicate better so we can make more sounds to to communicate with with each other better and so you can see those changes and so to deny that those changes took place is highly problematic and those things don't happen overnight so you're talking about a couple of you know upwards of over three million years to get from maybe that point where you know the uh you know the most earliest kind of human form started to where we are today and all of that is going to happen basically before adam and eve's story is even created and so between evolution and fossil records we can say with with absolute certainty that life did not begin on earth 6 000 years ago yeah and whether it's africa or asia china even even north central south america it's we have writings we have drawings we have you know all sorts of things uh you know archaeological and ecological evidence that that goes at least back to 18 000 bce the place to see an era yeah it's just yeah there's just no way and and i think some people are starting to find some stuff where they believe that the modern day humans may have come out of europe there's like one or two i mean it's not the consensus but there's a couple of studies that are starting to come out but regardless none of that is going to be within 6 000 years and none of that is going to be in america and both of those are highly problematic and so if we look at dna we talked about this in our book of mormon in the dna episode um we have a lot of evidence beyond fossils and beyond archaeology and beyond migration patterns to show that people have lived for a long time and so dna um if you go on amazon or any you know just go to 23andme for like 100 bucks now you can get a very detailed dna test to tell you about your ancestors and so this um is something i did a couple years ago and it's so cool because um dna can show um obviously in probably more detailed uh tests in 23andme that humans likely left africa at least 200 000 years ago and that's looking at the dna of people and trying to figure out how far back we can date them and where the earliest humans would date to um and what's really cool about that is again we talked about this in the book of mormon in dna episode but the dna is confirming the archaeology and because it's confirming the archaeology that gives us a lot more confidence that those what people would call theories are likely true and while they may be um fine-tuned and maybe there will be some um something that comes up someday that tells us maybe it was even earlier somewhere else so far we're looking at at least two hundred thousand years ago from the earliest kind of humans as we are um leaving africa maybe europe that is again you talking you know 194 000 years earlier than the scriptures of mormonism would tell us people were alive and that's a huge problem and if i had to restate it's one thing if if one branch of of science confirms a certain timeline but if but if genetics and anthropology and archaeology and linguistics uh they're all lining up and geology they're all lining up to to convey a similar timeline that's when you know uh you know something's pretty solid yeah and this is a slide i added in this is more of a personal one but so again if you do the 23andme dna results they can tell you how much of your percentage your dna is neanderthal and gerardo mentioned this on our dna episode to say he had more than i think a higher percentage of people and i think mine was in the middle or something like that i think i'd like 1.6 neanderthal dna but what's really cool about this is the neanderthals um are dated to have disappeared 40 000 years ago which means that again my dna can be traced back to 34 000 years prior to adam and eve um you know supposedly being the first humans but what's really cool about the 23andme test is they give you traits from your neanderthal dna now these are the four traits that they told were the strongest um variants in my dna one of a worse sense of direction the second is difficulty discarding rarely used possessions the third is less likely to have a fear of heights and the fourth is a better sprinter than distance runner and all four of those traits are 100 true for me and the first two which were the first the two strongest have literally been told to me my entire life from my family my friends my sense of direction is absolutely horrible and i've been told by my friends and family throughout my whole life i'm a hoarder i have crap from middle school that i don't want to throw away because i'm like i might want to look at that someday so again i realize it's just four data points but the fact that four data points from my neanderthal dna that 23andme can show are tied to traits that match me perfectly should be an indication that you cannot just throw out dna because you don't like the dating every dating of it or you don't like the the way that the results impact some of our deeply held beliefs these are really important data points at least to me to show me that the neanderthal dna that i have that they can analyze it at least to some degree because these four things for me personally are so so dead on that you know to get all four of those right it seems significant it's almost like astrology but or tarot cards but yeah well yeah i mean and that's the thing like you know we always joke about like um you know how tarot card readers and all that and how stupid it is this is an area where they're looking at our you know our genetic makeup and are able to make conclusions that are are right and so yeah we've got an overview on this when we get way near the end but i did an overview on like if joseph smith got it right who got it wrong and this is a problem because this is where you got to say if if if adam and eve were born six thousand years ago and if the native americans are the descendants of the book of mormon people then that means everything we know about this is wrong which means that this 23andme test which we can show is correct on so many levels can't be right you know what i mean and that's the that's when i say you have to balance apologetics that's the problem like if you want to just miss dna and say well the dating is off by a ton we can't trust science okay but then you also then have to throw out dna and everything else we do and no one's going to do that because we trust dna as long as dna doesn't interfere with our beliefs and as painful as it is we have to be willing to accept that even if we want to remain a believer and just say this doesn't make sense but i still choose to believe and at least that is an intellectually honest approach but anyways getting back to the adam and eve story um this is really important too because adam and eve um is a story that is we'll get into it in a second but it's a late edition of the bible and it's based off of earlier origin myths and so the epic gilgamesh which is going to be more tightly tied to the global flood has this story which i think is really important it's a story and i hope i'm not pronouncing en can do and sham hat so if i pronounce wrong i'm sorry but in both a man is created from the soil by a god and lives in a natural setting amongst the animals he is introduced to a woman who tempts him in both stories a man accepts food from the woman covers a naked covers his nakedness and must leave his former realm unable to return the presence of a snake that steals a plant of immortality from the hero later in the epic is another point of similarity and let me just make sure so so this would have existed prior before the adam and eve story being inserted into some of the old testament so the epic of gilgamesh i believe his data to 1800 bce and as we'll get into adam and eve is likely written in the sixth and fifth century bce so this would have been written long before and this um article that i'm quoting which is on the overview is giving more of an overview so i'm sure from an apologetic standpoint they'd say you're cherry-picking details there's a lot of differences um again these are details that are in there that just happen to match the adam and eve story and as we'll get into in our next episode on the global flood we're going to have the same thing with the epic gilgamesh and um as david bockford points out i don't know if i have this in this these slides or not but when he was on your episode he talked about how a lot of the earlier babylonian myths find their way into the bible and he said without bible there'd be no bible this is an instance of it because we have these myths that are making their way into the bible just as and think about this too the similarity between the book of mormon has as we've talked about in our previous episodes a lot of 19th century ideas make their way into the book of mormon a lot of 19th century myths and beliefs such as the mount builder myth make their way into the book of mormon well this is no different this is just a different time so in the biblical times they are also pulling earlier myths into the bible to try to explain where people came from because just as in the book of mormon where we're trying to explain where the um native americans came from in the bible they're trying to explain where do we come from where do our community come from and so these stories are really important but they're not historical and so they're they're in a lot of ways they're composite of earlier myths and earlier oral retellings by different communities right yeah it makes sense it's kind of the the global world views of the day right yeah i mean and they're trying to account for where they are and so um you know the adam and eve account includes many elements of a fable including a talking snake a man that is created out of dust a woman created by putting the man in a deep sleep to take a rib living to the age of 930 years old and the name adam simply means man in hebrew um so i know that maybe not a huge deal but you know this is a kind of a a mythical fable where the name adam is is kind of a generic name just to basically say this is the first man you know and um so if we look at the early writing and this is really important and this is again um so i was listening this is from an episode on of infants on thrones about the 14 fundamentals of following a prophet so it had nothing to do with this and they had a believing member on and one of the fundamentals was um i believe believing in a literal adam and eve and the believing member was saying how he believed in it and john hamer jumped in who i mentioned in previous podcasts and he's been on here a lot he's awesome and he just he asked he said how many times do you think the early writers of the old testament the early prophets mentioned adam and eve and i forgot what the guy said but you know he said probably not a lot and john hammer's like zero so in the early books of the old testament there's not a single reference to adam and eve but there are 116 mentions of moses and 100 mentions of david which tells us they are aware of these early stories being passed down from generation to generation through oral retellings but they have no knowledge or idea of the adam and eve story in the old testament until you get to the very late books and even then it's barely a mention and that tells us this is a late addition to the bible that's a huge thing i had no idea that adam and eve weren't mentioned by all those old testament prophets yeah and what's funny is when i was doing the overview you know of course i'm trying to make sure i've got it right and because people apologists will say oh you know there's mentions here and there and we covered in the overview in more detail but there is no specific mention of the adam and eve story at all in the early books um and there's i think two mentions in in the old testament later so the fact is it's not known to the early prophets of the old testament and if you want to say that you know it just wasn't something they mentioned this is this is such a big deal and and again when we get to the book of mormon it gets even worse because in the book of mormon it is a huge deal and so you then would have to explain why did the early prophets think it's no big deal but then when they get when they leave jerusalem which at that point they would think it's no big deal they think it's a huge deal and that is where you start to get into problems when you look at the book of mormon as a 19th century text versus the bible which you know this story is being written in the sixth and fifth century bce so um to to have a 19th century perspective in the book of mormon tells us a lot about why it's so important then but is not as important during the bible fascinating okay and so um as i mentioned from john hamer he talks about how there's no mention of adam and eve in the bible there's two and two late in the old testament um but none in the early old testament prophets yet in the book of mormon there are 26 mentions or references to adam and 28 in the doctrine of covenants and again if you think that the adam and eve story is not a literal historical event it could be possible to have in the book of mormon but why would the doctrine of covenants speak of him as a literal person and joseph smith is expanding um on the story in the book of mormon um and then he writes it back into his revision of genesis which becomes the book of moses so in all of these instances joseph smith through you know what we're told is kind of like pure revelation could fix this story um and he never does he actually expands and makes it even more literal and stronger and so um the biggest problem here is the book of ether which would have originated around 2200 bce and it speaks of adam and so it says in ether chapter one and as i suppose that the first part of this record which speaks concerning the creation of the world and also of adam in an account from that time even to get to the great tower in whatsoever things transpired among the children of men until that time is had among the jews therefore i do not write those things which transpired from the days of adam until that time but they are had upon the plates and who so find with them the same will have power that he may get the full account and so they're doubling down here on a literal adam and eve and so what i'm trying to say is the fact that it's the late edition of the bible joseph smith doesn't know that and so then with ether he's writing it in a 2200 bce but at this point no old testament prophet is aware of adam there's no there's no awareness of the adam and eve story at this point and so for the book of mormon people to have an awareness of it tells us that the earliest the book of mormon could have been written would have been like the sixth or fifth century bce but really it's written with a 19th century mindset as we've covered over and over in these previous episodes and this is a problem when you look at how the book of mormon is composed and why we're seeing so many things that are inaccurate like this is really anachronistic to the book of mormon in the sense that the story was not known to the early prophets yet the book of mormon prophets are just completely aware not just of the adam and eve story but how it's going to be taken through a christian view you know obviously what like another you know 700 years after it's written into the bible i mean this is a really big deal part of what's maddening about mormonism is they've got this idea of plain and precious truths being taken away from the bible so a mormon who's just not willing to look at evidence and and think rationally and consider logic can just always say well we have always known the bible is corrupt so that's why we need the book of mormon because it gets it gets things right because the bible got screwed up and i think the thing is like you know looking at it from my point of view as a believer um i had that same mindset and it's not because um you want to you know it's partly because you don't want to get into it because the implications are huge right so it's really difficult it's really painful to get into these things and so from a believer mindset i totally get it like i get why we fall back on that because we've been taught our whole life when you come across errors in the bible it is because the bible's translation has been corrupted the problem is like you get that below that surface and then all of a sudden it's like it's not just the bible it's the book of mormon that has issues with translation you know i know yeah and i don't know i'm trying to push back i'm just saying like yeah the thing is i get what you're saying because i was there you know and and i you know as i mentioned before i'm still technically a member but before i joined mormonism as a convert i was a protestant background and so when i started to lose faith in mormonism because of these issues i fell back on that and adam and eve was one of those things i never really like necessarily thought of as like this perfectly historical event i never believed in a global flood that killed all the dogs that that never sat with me um because i was a dog i loved dogs as a kid but um the fact is that it's really easy i think to look back at these stories and just go they're oral retellings and so in the bible they don't quite get it right and and that's actually not a bad approach to take and a lot of churches are starting to take that to say it's not historical it gives us um moral value yeah it gives us values to live by the problem is that mormonism takes what is not a historical thing and just cements it it doesn't even just mention it it cements it and so because of that it creates it creates more of a problem for mormonism than any other church and so when i mention this i'll have people say well why don't you then bash catholic church because they believe in and it's like because even though the catholic church doesn't necessarily say this is not historical they don't have additional scriptures that nail it down as a literal event and that is why mormonism i think joseph smith you know he got ahead of himself on these things and so yeah 26 mentions in the book of mormon yeah and 28 mentions in the doctrine and covenants is just yeah you can't mormonism cannot get away from the adam and eve it can't and it's going to get worse as we get going and that's and that's the problem you know it's just like it's layer upon layer it just gets worse and also that it kind of blows me away to think of adam and eve as an anachronism in in the book of mormon because you think about adam and eve as being the first humans yeah they're going to predate everything but once you understand what what you explained about biblical scholarship and old testament scholars that's mind-blowing that the first humans fable-wise become a necromancer and you know we'll get into it brilliant i love it yeah we'll get into a little bit later because there is like the argument's going to be for sure that from an apologetic standpoint they'll say like maybe it wasn't written down but the story was known before he left you know because it probably it was written down i think a lot of scholars say it was written down after he left but you know you can date it as early i think some people say you can date genesis as early as like 1000 bce but most scholars would say sixth or fifth century so my guess would be from an apologetic standpoint and say lehi's family would have known about it even if it wasn't written down and that's why they keep retelling it the problem is they're telling it in a 19th century way and so it's like even if you want to believe you it wouldn't have been or put another way it would have been written down in the same way and so when he's pulling these same um words and the same ideas directly in it that's where you really get into the the version of the story would be anachronistic and i think the story itself probably is too but from an apologetic standpoint that's for sure where they would go yeah okay and um okay so basically we've kind of covered this already but the five books of moses would be dated to the sixth or even the 5th century bce which means while it was possible they were known when lehigh left it's absolutely an unknown unknown story in the time of ether so even if you want to say that lehi would have known the book of ether would have no knowledge of it because that you know there's no way it would have been written at 2200 bce and there is no way it would have been that well known of an orally told story because of the fact that the old testament prophets don't know about it so that's where that apologetic would fall up would just go you know and crumble because at that point it's not even an issue of being written down it's an issue of we have the early old testament prophets not talking about it and that tells us it was not a story that was if it was known it certainly wasn't considered as important and that obviously doesn't make sense because it is such an important story um so beyond the book of mormon um the book of abraham mentions adam twice in chapter one and then retells the yahwest version of the garden and of eden's story in abraham chapter five which implements joseph smith's change in theology from a single god to a plural plurality of gods um and in the book abraham it treats adam and eve's literal history but the book of abraham would have been written before 1650 bce which is a thousand years before the story of adam and eve was developed and again because he's pulling directly from the yahwes the j source and the bible he's pulling from a source that would not have been written for about a thousand years so even if you want to believe that the story was known again this is where joseph smith is pulling in a source that was written way too late but he doesn't understand that and so he pulls it back into these texts thinking it you can just kind of plug and play it and this this is anachronistic to use a text that wasn't written for about a thousand more years in a book of abraham translation that was purportedly from about 1650 bce so now we've got book of mormon doctrine and covenants yeah abraham and that's and that's just it's that and that's and this is why and not only that but like i mentioned you know book abraham obviously starts to get into the theological changes of the multiple gods and so you start to see those changes but even just focusing on adam and eve he's pulling these stories in because he thinks that it's a literal historical record but he doesn't understand when it was written and this is why you know again we talk about how you can date the book of mormon these are things that nobody that was writing a scriptural book today would do because they would be able to see it but he didn't know and so he assumed it was historical and that obviously is going to lead to big problems yeah which is this next slide is kind of mind-blowing yeah and so this one is just really important so beyond the scriptures joseph smith claims to see adam in a vision at the kirtland temple in dnc 137 joseph smith records a vision where he states i saw father adam and abraham and michael this vision vision is problematic not just for its use of a literal adam but because the church would later declare that adam and michael are one and the same yet he claims to see both and this is a huge problem so um the future prophet joseph f smith also claims to see adam and eve in another visionary says in dnc 138 he says among the great and mighty ones who were assembled in this vast congregation of the righteous were father adam the ancient of days and father of all and that is going to be a huge problem as we get going here and um so i don't know do you have anything to add now yeah yeah so so joseph's claiming to see someone who now we know doesn't exist that puts it in the material world it's one thing to be in the scriptures but now joseph is claiming to hang out with the dude right well and that's the problem and again that's the whole thing like if adam is not if adam is a mythological figure and you know the apologetic might be that look god gave him the revelations that adam is real because joseph believed that all the people around and believed and that was the way he could best get his message across you're like okay you you know it's a little goofy for me just because we're supposed to be getting like the plain and precious truth and the most the the fullness of the gospel but even if you want to make that argument to have him claim to see the literal atom if he's not a real figure is hugely problematic and again i'm sure the apologetic would be like well there still was a a first human somewhere but this is where the problem comes because there's no clarification of that and so when you take a story and just keep drilling it down and down and then cementing it in you can't then just redefine what like and this is an area where i get really um annoyed when i hear it because i take this stuff at face value and a lot of pologists will redefine terms i'll redefine what translation means i'll redefine you know what atom might mean they'll redefine what a flood global flood local flood will get into that in our next overview and i'm saying if you take these things at face value you can show where joseph smith whereas where his mind's mindset is with regard to adam and eve and how that is embedded in these scriptures and in this vision and as i just mentioned the fact that he's going to call um adam and michael different people and then later call them the same person again that these are supposed to be revelations from god so how is he seeing two different people when he's going to call them the same person later that that's a that's just that doesn't work unless you can see that there's an error there and it's not just joseph smith it's joseph f smith and yeah many many prophets after joseph smith yeah reference are going to reference adam yeah so it's just a big problem and so um if we go to the next slide this is when we start to get um yeah this is good so the church refers to a spot in missouri as adam anderson which is where joseph claimed adam and eve went after being expelled from the garden of eden so the belief within the mormon church is that the ad that adam and eve lived in missouri in the united states um and this obviously has a lot of problems even if we believe adam and eve were a literal event but if it was not a historical event but an egological myth how could joseph smith receive a revelation that adam and eve happen to live in the very spot that the early saints just happened to be settling into missouri at that time yeah and you know it's one of those things where as a believer you just go wow that it's amazing that god led him to the spot as you know looking at it from a blank slate now i'm like oh isn't it convenient that joseph smith is using these stories to basically create his theology and to get his followers to believe even stronger because not only now are you settling in the church that god is leading in our latter days but you god led us to the spot that adam and eve happen to live in but this is a problem because historically speaking we know that that human life did not begin in america in any way and um and to be able to try to you know mix that in with with the rest of this it just doesn't fit and so it's almost like um you know a book that's out of order kind of because we're starting to see now where these different stories are being added in by joseph smith and then as we look back you know take a step back and look from an overhead view you can start to see they don't fit together and they're very disjointed especially when you look at the way the revelations line up yeah and that that idea that the garden of eden is in missouri just gets that laugh line in the book of mormon musical because it's so well yeah it's just and it's funny you know like again as a convert that was one of the things i didn't hear that until after i joined the church and even then i'm like what like in missouri and and then people would say oh yeah one day we're all going to go back to missouri and i'm thinking to myself like really you know missouri and i you know i like missouri i've been to missouri a number of times it's not that it's just you would think there'd be more foundational history to that story and it just turns out that joseph smith and we'll point this out in in a later overview on revelation but a lot of his revelations are like this where he's just giving revelations that are going to give people more attached to the faith and himself more credibility because if you claim to be the one that sees adam and eve if you claim to be the one or to see adam or see god moses all it gives you more credibility among your followers and but it also leads to problems because he is saying these things um i think with a certain understanding that at the time he probably didn't feel like anyone was gonna be able to fact check them on but now we have so much more biblical knowledge and now all of a sudden you look and you go yeah this is this is just it's bad you know it's there's no plausible way to make this work yeah what comes to my mind is treasure digging remember how it kind of all comes down to treasure digging it does you're digging it was joseph if you boil down treasure digging it's joseph claiming to have special powers to see things yeah it starts out being treasure but then it goes to scripture and then it goes to translating things and now he's seeing adam you know and and adam on diamond in missouri he's got to keep his believers and followers thinking and feeling that he can see stuff that they can't that he can channel knowledge that they can't i don't want to call it a con but that's the whole that's the game is just gotta always be telling people i've got power to see things and and when those things that he sees are problematic over and over and over and over again yeah and you'll hear all the time people say oh he was just really boastful and so he would kind of tell stories it's like but again if you're telling stories that are debunked how then do you discern which stories were him being boastful or him you know actually getting revelation because they both have problems and so at what point you know can you keep saying oh this isn't historical he was just being boastful this one we haven't proven false yet so you know and that's again it's a whole cliche of like speaking as a prophet speaking as a man but you got to take them all together you cannot try to separate the two and say well he said this was from god but you know he was probably just trying to help people to better understand what he's doing it's like no you can't have it both ways and so as we've talked about these overviews we have so many of these instances where you cannot separate the two and then have it be consistent and so also how do you disprove that uh adam and eve in the garden of eden were in missouri unless you have unless you have commercial science there's no one around him that's going to be able to go no it's not it's in israel it's like no no you can't so yeah it was safe to make a pronouncement like that and you know until science comes along basically yeah and one of the things that they talk about with the book of mormon and it's one of those things where it's awkward to america to americans and it's awkward to me like it's even awkward now to talk about this is the book of mormon is incredibly um focused on american exceptionalism and i love living here and i love this country so it's weird for me to be like yeah the book of mormon is a little bit too heavy on america like it's too much it's like a it's like a love letter to america it talks about how this is the chosen land the promised land it was set aside just for us today because america is going to be the lead you know the best place in the world you know the new jerusalem and all that and that is why you start to see things like well adam and eve couldn't have been in the old world because this is the promised land this is the you know new zion new jerusalem and so you get that american exceptionalism all throughout the book of mormon all throughout the the revelations and i hate that because i really love this country but then the same times i'm like it might be a little bit too much and um and those are the fingerprints that come from someone who's in that 19th century mindset of this is the best place in the world you know and um anyways can you go back one uh one slide real quick yeah so i didn't read the bottom yet so um we're talking about adam and eve missouri and complicating that problem is um dnc 116 which labels adam as the ancient of days which is likely where the atom god doctrine originated and dnc is a short one but it says spring hill is named by the lord adam on diamond because said he it is the place where adam shall come to visit people or the ancient days shall sit as spoken of by daniel the prophet so if you go to the next slide this will go into that a little better but the problem is that the ancient of days that's referred to in daniel is god it's not adam and it's pretty clear if you actually read daniel 7 in context so in daniel 7 it says i beheld till the thrones were cast down and the ancient of days did sit whose garment was white as snow in the hair of his head like the pure wool his throne was like the fiery flame in his wheels as burning fire a fiery stream issued and came forth from before him thousands thousands ministered under him and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him the judgment was set and the books were opened um again the point here is if we want to say that the ancient of days was adam it would put adam higher than jesus in the kind of like the structure of the godhead here and so every biblical scholar that's not mormon will tell you that the ancient days in daniel 7 is god sitting on his throne it's not adam and this is a huge mistake that joseph smith makes which we're dealing with still today with the atom gone doctrine um which has remnants in our church it's obviously a really big deal in fundamentalists lds offshoots and just again thinking about it logically if the ancient of days is adam then adam is now higher than jesus and if that's the case then what is that revelation from joseph smith saying wouldn't it i mean like you're called the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints but jesus then would would then report to adam that's that and that's that's why you can't get away from the adam god doctrine it's baked into the scriptures yeah makes sense and um this is one that i think is really interesting and it's one of those ones i didn't really come across until i started doing the overview but what's really interesting is that joseph smith never makes the connection of adam being the ancient of days until sydney rigdon mentions it in the may 1834 evening a morning star when he writes in chapter 24 of isaiah and 23 verse the prophet after having described one of the great greatest desolations ever pronounced on the head of any generation of men says then the moon shall be confounded and the sun is shamed when the lord of hosts shall reign in mount zion and in jerusalem and before his ancients gloriously we have before seen that this rain was to last a thousand years in his ancients before of whom he was to reign in mount zion and in jerusalem gloriously where all the redeemed from among men of every tongue language kindred and people according to daniel he jesus was to come to the ancient of days here he is said to reign before his ancients that is all the saints from our father adam down for who could the ancient of days be but our father adam surely none other he was the first who lived in days and must be the ancient of days and to whom would the savior come but to the father of all the race and then receive his kingdom in which he was to reign before or with his ancients gloriously let it here be remarked that it is said to be in mount zion in jerusalem where the lord is to reign before his ancients gloriously so sidney rigdon is saying that adam is the ancient of days and this is in may of 1834 and this is gonna be really interesting cause we see this with other areas where joseph smith is like a sponge and he's pulling from all of these people around him and if you go to the next slide these two will tie together really nicely and then i'll shut up for a second um but joseph smith is going to revise um dnc 27 when they go from being the book of commandments um to the doctrine and covenants but joseph smith is actually going to add this concept into a revelation when when he's making these changes so in dnc 27 joseph smith is going to make a lot of additions as you can see on the photo that's a photo done by the tanners um to kind of outline all of the words being added into the original revelation from god um this originally was about only drinking wine with sacrament that was made new among you but in these changes joseph smith seeks to create a line of authority from adam down to joseph smith along with the keys of the priesthood within these changes is the following text in the voice of god and also with michael or adam the father of all the prince of all the ancient ancient of days so right you know a year after um sydney reagan writes this in may 1834 joseph smith is adding it into a revelation from god that was previously given he's putting it in the voice of god that adam is the ancient of days yeah so is god revealing stuff to joseph or joseph the sponge picking up things he hears from you know whether swedenborg or um you know ethan smith or sydney rigdon like you know i mean this just provides more evidence for what terrell givens now wants to say that joseph was an inspired syncretist or a spy yes yeah is it god revealing or is it joseph just doing bricolage right yeah i mean that's just i mean you can literally see and and we'll show this when we do the priesthood overview um cindy rigdon brings in the idea of the melchizedek priesthood and all of a sudden and slowly works its way and melchizedek priesthood was not there in the original book of mormon and so you start to see these things and all of a sudden joseph then retrofits it in the voice of god which creates all sorts of issues because then you know joseph smith is writing his revelations to claim in this case that he's getting a later uh i think i think richard bushman said something like about the priesthood but you could apply here that he gets a better understanding of what he experienced later on and that's why he makes the changes but it also just happens to fit his outside teachings it's not like he's getting these these changes to the revelation before he changes his teachings his changes in the teachings come then the retrofitting comes back later to match it and that is a massive problem that we see with a lot of these concepts and it's why we can date these concepts to joseph smith and why we can show through a timeline that not only are they evolving but they're evolving in a really natural way that make perfect sense when you take them at face value and when you have the when you have the documentation exactly see you know what what leads to the changes i'm dying i'm hoping that you have a melchizedek priesthood episode we do yeah we do they'll be coming pretty soon actually uh well once we get once we get through the bible stuff it'll be pretty quick so um and then you know like just we're kind of saying but so this is again where joseph smith is retrofitting ideas and the voice of god and the one point i'll make on the slide again this is a huge problem this revelation calls adam or michael the ancient days so he's calling adam and michael the same person but as we mentioned before he had already claimed in a vision to see um see them separately so now in 1835 he's proclaiming them to be the same person which means these little details are getting mixed up and so how can you claim to see both of them when in a revelation from god you're saying adam or michael meaning of the same person are the ancient of days i mean that's a huge problem to say you're seeing them separately it's like the elias and elijah problem where he claims to see elias and elijah in the temple and they're the same person with a different translation and so once the greek one's a hebrew if you claim to see two people you know that's a massive problem and so from an apologetic standpoint they'll say well it's a title it's not not the name of a person but regardless here we can see he's saying adam or michael the ancient days saying the same person yet seeing them separately that tells you that somewhere along the lines joseph smith is making it up or having an error that god is giving to him through a vision or a revelation neither of which is a good good thing to go by and i'm just i'm thinking of just a meta observation that that all this doctrine and theology leading to adam god theory is building up around a a historical figure that never existed in the first place so not only yeah not only is the doctrine self-contradictory right and silly and now the church has abandoned it and backtracked but this whole mountain is built is built on a foundation of of adam didn't exist yeah it's all silliness right it's all well i mean and that's the thing it's like again what we'll you know we've kind of touched on before but this is why it's not as big a problem for any other church because every other church can say this is not necessarily 100 literal history but there's value to it but mormonism takes it and just hammers it hammers it directly into the ground and says this is the foundation that we're going to build off of but when you build off a foundation that you've created and the mormon is more the scriptures of mormonism create a foundation that's not historical then nothing you put on top that's historical nothing and so yeah that means the book of mormon's not historical book abraham doctrine and covenants but that also means his visions are and so you know from an apologetic standpoint you might say like jim bennett i think we'll get into the global flood he'll say well it doesn't matter if you believe in a local or globalized it's not really the point it's like but it is because once you get away from the teachings of the the foundational teachings of the church to then redefine it as we don't have to believe in it being historical then all of a sudden you've redefined the entire church the entire truth claims of the church in a way that you've undermined the scriptures all of it like authority you've undermined everything yeah and that's just it and so for me it's like okay well if you're going to do that then you're then what are you left with because then you could go to any church because then any church could say it's not historical but it's good well mormonism if that's really the mormonism truth claim is not we're not historical mormonism the truth claim is we've got the only true history we've got the only true scripture we've got the only true living prophet and we're good but if all those first things fall away it's it's really problematic joseph's innovation was he made everything material he made it literal and physical and it started with the plates right and yeah oh no i mean it started well for us it started with god and jesus literally appearing but but we know that came later anyway yeah well no and and to that point you can actually take it one step further because not only did joseph smith make it all material but joseph smith's gift which was a good one is that he had the the charisma and the creativity to not only make a material but to make it personal to you to make it tied to you so you could tie it to america to missouri where they happen to be and so not only is he really good at making these things material but he's really good at then making material in a way that matters to you personally and if you can do that that gets you more involved and that you see that today i mean i mean i know there's that meme out there where it's like every prophet and they're telling the kids you are the chosen generation it's always about you are the chosen generation you are the ones we've been waiting for and it's because of that personal uh attachment that we put between being the in the true church in the latter days and being living in this time in this place in america um you know they try to do that because it's it's a really effective way to build belief um so anyways this is as i mentioned by calling by joseph smith saying that um michael or adam of the ancient days it leads to the adam god doctrine and this is from brigham young and we're going to get into it because even though it's it's not you know the book of mormon but it is adam and eve in mormonism and so this is from brigham young in 1852 and i'm sure some people listening have heard uh versions of this quote but he says now hear it oh inhabitants of the earth jew and gentile saint and sinner when our father adam came into the garden of eden he came into it with a celestial body and brought eve one of his wives with him one of his wives just noting that he helped to make and organize this world he is michael the archangel the ancient of days about whom holy men have written and spoken he is our father and our god and the only god with whom we have to do every man upon the earth professing christians and non-professing must hear it and will know it sooner or later they came here organized the raw material and arranged in their order the herbs of the field the trees the apple the peach the plum the pear and every other fruit that is desirable and good for man the seed was brought from another sphere and planted in this earth the thistle the thorn the briar and the obnoxious weed did not appear until after the earth was cursed when adam and eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit their bodies became mortal from its effects and therefore their offspring were mortal so brigham young is saying without question that adam is our god and was anciently polygamist which is another problem and another reason why um fundamentalists like to cling to this so much but this is coming from joseph smith and that's why when people say adam god is a brigham young thing you could go no it's not it's a joseph smith things we just talked about in the previous one that joseph smith calls adam and also with michael or adam the father of all the prince of all are the ancient of days i mean that's the problem and so william young would not be as forceful or as assertive about the adam god doctrine if you know about him historically he didn't even want to call himself a prophet brigham young didn't even want to call himself a prophet because he respected joseph so much that he just wanted to be known as a president yep as i understand it i think that's fair so brigham would not have been so forceful about adam god if he hadn't gotten that directly from joseph yeah that's that's just it and so you know again when people say adam god was just brigham young it's like no it's not and that that i think is kind of a deflection that we make because we the church works so hard they will throw they will throw a brigham young under the bus all day every day if they need to do it to protect joseph's um infallibility and this is where you see that because joseph smith literally writes that michael is the ancient of days and michael is adam and that leads to brigham young making the correct assumption that that means that adam's our god and again if you want to believe that god speaks to the prophets of this church then you have to say why is god not correcting this because he doesn't and you know we've gotten into some previous episodes i just want to point out again that this is a really important thing and we believe in the mormon church that god sent an angel down to joseph to tell him that he will be killed if he doesn't have sexual relations with young polygamous brides yet he lets this one go and i'm not trying to be facetious here i'm literally saying you have to look at what is important enough for god to send angels down within the theology of mormonism and what's not and so we have adam god and we'll get into some of the racist stuff that brigham young really implements all of it is left alone and that is another sign that there is a communication barrier between these prophets and god totally and to make this point even further um you know again the church likes to say well brigham you are speaking as a man and this was just a theory it's a adam god theory is not doctrine this was taught in the temple so this was literally taught in the temple the mormon temple and it was written down by brigham young secretary as part of the script and so every person at the temple was told father adam's oldest son jesus the savior who is the heir of the family is father adam's first begotten in the spirit world and the only begotten according to the flesh as it is written adam in his defended divinity having gone back into the spirit world and come into the spirit to marry as she conceived and she conceived for when adam and eve got through with their work in this earth they did not lay their bodies down in the dust but returned to the spirit world from once they came so if you want again to believe when when the mormon church says that the doctrine of the temple never changes and all that and that you get pure revelation in the temple this was in the temple and this is telling every member and again this was removed pretty quickly because a lot of other leaders of the church did not agree with this but the prophet of the church brigham young put this into the temple and again if you want to believe that god is going to sit by and let someone put something in the temple that is incorrect you've got to then balance that with all of these issues really quick how does what is a writing in a journal of some dude named john nuttle how does that tie to the temple i'm not getting the connection well he was brigham young secretary and so they wrote the scripts down so that they could have people present them in the temple and so this is just writing down the script for brigham young so that the temple workers could read it to them okay so so this is i don't think writing is what yes young is saying yes into the temple yeah so so nuttel is writing down i think they were trying to perfect the the script of the temple for this stuff and so he's writing down all of the scripts for these different parts of the temple ceremony and so i don't have the actual script of the temple ceremony back then i don't know i'm not sure it would be interesting because i that'd be interesting to see i believe they did i think that i think this is this is when they're trying to get a standardized script for the temple ceremony and so that this is at the lecture at the veil and so they wrote it down because brigham is is basically this is kind of like joseph smith having a scribe this is the secretary writing it down to make sure they perfect it okay got it got it and um so like i said that's a huge deal and so you know to kind of clarify we've kind of hinted on this but the church's stance on adam and eve has been that they are literal historical characters who appeared six thousand years ago and bruce r mcconkie in a 1981 speech at byu said the fall of adam adam and the atonement of christ are linked together inseparably everlastingly never to be parted they are as much a part of the same body as our the head and the heart and each plays its part in the eternal scheme of things the fall of adam brought temporal and spiritual death into the world and the atonement of christ ransom men from these two deaths by bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of men this makes the fall uh is essential a part of the plan of salvation as the very atonement itself yeah and if it's the temple's based on it the scriptures are based on it joseph to now all the prophets and revelators it's all adam it's all written in adam that's why i started this episode by saying it's so foundational it is a single one of the mormon scriptures and the bible and all the prophetic utterances and the freaking temple ceremony it's everywhere it is i mean and it's just it's embedded and you can't separate it because of the fact that joseph smith as prophet made it so literal yeah i don't want to i don't want to get too excited about this but maybe in some ways adam is the smoking gun of of mormonism i mean it's so foundational like you could say the book of mormon is the keystone right man the book of mormon is based on the bible which is based on adam and so it's all the scriptures adam's book of mormon the doctrine of covenants it sinks the book of abraham it sinks the temple ceremony and it sinks every prophet from joseph to now i mean yeah oh that means like for me it's tough because like with adam and eve you said it earlier it's like you can't prove it wasn't in missouri and so i think that's why you would have a hard time like arguing it's um a smoking gum but it is because unless you can show all of the evidence that tells us it's not historical unless you can find a good rebuttal for that that actually fits within what we know today then yeah i mean it just shows that joseph smith is trying to as david bokwe would say actualize the adam and eve story to the people in his community to the early members of the church through the book of mormon through all the other scriptures through the revelations and if it's not true then joseph smith is making it up or god is tricking him neither of those are good and and if you want to argue god's tricking him that gets even more problematic because not only is god tricking him but he's confusing him because he's having joseph see see the tube in one vision and then say the same in another and so yeah that that's the problem and that's really weird uh adam sinks the articles of faith too we gotta throw those in yeah i mean it's just all of it is tied and that's why when i started this the series with you i kept saying like you have to take every episode and just put it on top of the next on top of the next on top of the next because they all fit together and this again is the same patterns you see in the book of mormon where he's pulling outside um influences directly into the text well he believes this to be a historical thing because at that time most people believed it to be literal history yeah and now that we know it's not it just falls apart and um so going more present um 2015 elder jeffrey r helen made this statement at general conference it is increa in our increasingly secular society it is as uncommon as it is unfashionable to speak of adam and eve or the garden of eden or of a fortunate fall into moral mortality nevertheless the simple truth is that we cannot fully comprehend the atonement and the resurrection of christ and we will not adequately appreciate the unique purpose of his birth or his death in other words there is no way to truly celebrate christmas or easter without understanding that there was an actual adam and eve who fell from an actual eden with all of the consequences that fall carried with it i do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that but i do know that these two were created under the divine hand of god and and i've talked to i've talked to elder holland i had lunch with them twice uh back in the day and this is this is how holland talks he's like he gave me this analogy once you throw a rock in a pond yeah and the the ripples are strongest the closer to the to where the rock enters the water and and the ripples are weaker the farther the way out and and he he was making an allergy to a literal belief versus a progressive non-literal belief and um and for him adam and eve is absolute are absolutely literal and your commitment to the gospel the way that the impact that the church has on you is going to be a lot it's going to be watered down if you start taking things like adam and eve oh yeah i mean instead of literally and that's just that i mean the problem is when you build you know when you build a house on a foundation and all of a sudden you know 10 years later you say the foundation is all cracked but we can still work with what we got it's like no you can't and that's the problem like yeah that's the whole thing if you make joseph smith making it such a literal um event in a literal doctrine where you see them envisioned i mean you can't separate and so jeffrey holland right the when you take that away you are going further back on the ripples because there isn't there's nothing really to hold on to that differentiates you from any other christian church at that point because now you're saying our scriptures that were um produced by joseph smith are not historical well then what are you left with um you know all of the and again we don't need to go into tangible but yeah all of the uniquely mormon things are are tied to this and so if the temple ceremony is not um from god then why are we wearing you know church required underwear why are we giving them 10 percent to go there you know why are we doing all these things there yeah and so again we can yeah yeah but also i just want to make a i want to just call people's attention to something what we're seeing in 2022 is a slow motion sleight of hand bait and switch because what you what you're what you're seeing now is the church is slowly empowering patrick mason terrell and funeral givens spencer flumen and a bunch of progressive um mormons uh to start introducing the idea well you don't have to take it all literally and they're trying to kind of fork people create space for a forked theology where where orthodox conservative traditional mormons can continue believing literally else their faith falls apart and they leave the church but they also are introducing um the space for a liberal progressive non-literal uh theology because because the prior is not sustainable in the long run especially the younger generations that care about science and facts and evidence right yeah i mean yeah and that's the thing like i could well you you know way more than i do but i you know for the emails i get most of them are from people they're like 25 and under because they're young enough to where they're coming across as naturally young people talk to each other more than adults do about this stuff and they're also in more of a uh not just a space to to be willing to accept new evidence but they're in a a culture where they they do value these things a little more than when we were maybe younger and so um you know the church has to create that space the problem is you know can you create the space in a way that's being honest to the evidence as opposed to just saying we disagree with you that it's not historical but there's still still a space for you you know and and that does also create that conflict that we're seeing now between like the progressives and the more hardline members where there is that battle you see it a lot online and you know this is where i think to me you can't take the hard-line approach anymore unless you're willing to redefine the evidence and and throw away what you don't like and that's just not again to me i can't do this it's not intellectually honest the hard-line position puts you in la la land where you're it's putting you up there with like santa and the easter bunny if you're a fundamentalist orthodox literal believing mormon your theology is indistinguishable from the easter bunny in santa claus it is and our tolkien and harry potter you know it's all the same fantasyland stuff well i mean you know again i know that that's like going to be very offensive to believing members i would just say that like this stuff is really painful to have to dive into because once you get every layer it's like you know i know the phrase like peeling an onion right but every layer just tells you that there's it's less and less and less likely that this is even possible and with adam and eve to believe in a six thousand year old earth at this point is basically denying everything we know and about reality about about yeah about about our world about about how people have evolved and how we've we've been able to to grow communities and all that and so it just and we're as we do these overviews it'll be more apparent that six thousand year world view is just it's just impossible and so yeah and and to what you said about patrick mason this is kind of leaning into as well which is good um so fair mormon um concedes that the church consistently insists that there is a historical adam which is obviously true but then they offer space for members to take a metaphorical approach as well and so this is from fair mormon uh beyond the experience or sorry beyond the existence of a historical adam the rest of it can be understood literally or metaphorically or more commonly as a mixture of these extreme positions um the problem here is that where fair sites this is me speaking um from our overview project uh the problem here is that where ferris sites metaphorical use of adam and eve um the story they're speaking about the story of the rib being used to create the woman so um they cite spencer kimball saying modern prophets have taught that the creation of woman from the rib of the man is to be taken figuratively so they're not talking about they're kind of carefully choosing the words here to say that you can believe in some of it metaphorically but they're really citing um the church saying that the rib um creating the woman is is not like a real thing and brigham young i think also said that too um and so fair takes this quote to say you could take both views and then they say as we find the approach that resonates with our own understanding and our own spiritual witness i think that as long as we try to answer the question of what the scriptures are trying to teach us we will reasonably do well we will do reasonably well it is only when we tried to assert something through the text that was never intended that we run into trouble and um yeah that last part's where i just you where i really zoned in when i was reading it yeah yeah and it's just so really it's so super weird to see that fair is and this is why i get grouchy with apologists i think if i'm grouchy i think sometimes i'm more this is wrongly placed anger but sometimes i get more grouchy with apologists than i do the brethren themselves because they're enab they're kind of the point of contact of enabling the bait and switch right um they're they're and and again it's like the puppet the puppet master and i don't even think the brethren are doing this intentionally but clearly the brethren support fair mormon or fair latter-day saints clearly clearly the brethren support the maxwell institute and patrick mason and the gibbs's um but but because they're on the front lines telling people this stuff yeah oh you know literal if you want to but metaphorical if you want to but that's in isolation because what they're not also adding in isolating this point specifically is is that it it unrave it causes it causes everything else to unravel and we're going to now we're beating a dead horse but no it's fine and that's why like i said i i really zoned in when i was when i first read this quote and i saw that last where it says where are we running uh trying to assert something through the text that was never intended is where we run into trouble and that will lead to our next slide that's gaslighting man it is and so the next slide will kind of explain why that's a problem because this is where joseph smith is going to run into trouble because he is absolutely asserting that the adam and eve story is a little historical event into his own scriptures when it was likely never meant to be received that way one of the things you'll you'll hear if you listen to like david bacavoy um there's another scholar who's been doing so he actually has some great work on adam and eve and mormonism named colby townsend and i've listened to interviews with them and they talk about this all the time these stories were not meant to be like perfect history when they were written at that time and so the fact is joseph smith is taking a story that's probably never meant to be believed by those communities at that time as literal history and he's writing it into new scriptures as history and as fair mormon says this is where he's running into trouble and so um because he's doing this fair is then going to maintain that the issue of the first man is a flexible concept in that part of the lds view of adam comes from this historical figure as a historical figure but part of the lds view comes from the ways in which adam is just like ourselves and often this comparison intended by the text is presented as a metaphor and it's like yes that's the whole thing but the problem is fair mormon will say this to you but look at the scriptures look at the revelations and tell me where joseph smith in any of the revelations or scriptures is giving any space to have this be believed as a metaphorical story it just doesn't exist no no when you're saying hey adam and eve hung out here yeah in missouri this is out of my diamond yeah it's just that's not a four town you've completely yeah metaphorically that's the thing he was never there and so now and this is you know to your point earlier and i'll be quick but what really bothers me about apologetics is that you're redefining what was intended what you're you're now saying this is what i think joseph smith might have meant to say but we we know what joseph's been meant to say we have revelations that are from god so you can't say that joseph smith meant to say something else because these are revelations that he's claiming are from god so if those are wrong you can't just say well maybe he meant it more metaphorically you got to say he got it wrong because he didn't have the information we have today that's what gets me mad about apologetics because they're trying to in this in the section i'm reading from fair it's almost like you go to a car dealership and the sales realizes you're about to leave and they will tell you anything they need to tell you to keep you in that showroom and so fair mormon now is willing to make concessions to keep you in the showroom but they know full well that what their those concessions are making just do not actually work and just like you know a car dealer a sales person might tell you things about the car to keep you there then his head he knows really aren't uh true or you know maybe the most accurate but you're doing whatever you can you're throwing hail mary's up just stay in the room stay in the boat as the church would say and and that's what bothers me because these things do not hold up from the fact that like i said there's no space anywhere for this to be a metaphor it's just it doesn't exist yeah yeah and um so we'll keep going with the fair mormon response and so as we just said it's not presented as a metaphor anywhere within the mormon scriptures um and if we're going to say that the rib is a metaphor then surely we're talking about the serpent as well and then if you could see those two elements are metaphorical then of course then how can you then say adam lived to 930 years old and just happened to be the first man on earth with a name that means man in hebrew all of those things are mythical elements all those things are you know again if you're gonna say one thing is a metaphor you gotta say they all are because they all have suffer from similar problems um and then fair gives this list of what they think is more essential than others and what is non-negotiable when working out the you know evolution and adam and eve and all that and so i'm summarizing a bit here you can see it in the overview project um in more detail but they say that what's non-negotiable um is that adam and eve being literal historical people being the first in a line of priesthood holding patriarchs um the fall being what started around six hundred thousand or sorry six thousand years of the earth's temporal existence um adam and eve being the first uh spirit children of god and that's the perfection of the gods that made us and so um what they're basically saying is like look you could say that the snake the serpents mythical you could say the creation story itself is mythical but as long as you believe that adam and eve really did live at some point in time about 6 000 years ago and that they were spirit children were okay and so they're basically saying you can basically just carve out all of these truth claims as long as you just focus on those things that will keep you tied to the core beliefs of mormonism but to me this is like saying okay you don't have to believe in the entire lord of the rings trilogy but you have to believe in frodo and you smeagol and you know the balrog you have to believe in those and mordor but you don't have to believe in the shire or in you know the ends it's just well yeah it's in and again i know like you know i know that's like such an offensive thing when when when we make those comparisons to someone who might be watching a believer but no i'm not saying i'm just saying like metaphors i know that kind of tease out the implications of what they're doing here because it's it's intellectually dishonest yeah intellectually disingenuous what they're doing and i'm not trying to be offensive i'm trying to illustrate the intellectual dishonesty and the deception of what they're doing yeah and i think to your point it's like they're trying to create this space in this world by saying just ignore all these problems surrounding this core but if you just take everything else and take these few little cherry pick data points and even those have problems because they're still saying that adam and eve began the temporal fall six thousand years ago so what they're saying is what they're saying without saying it is that people live long before adam and eve but they are pre-adamites which is one of the the ways the church has tried to get around the scientific problems is to say that there were people that lived here longer than six thousand years ago but basically they were soulless creatures that just wandered the earth and not until adam and eve did people have a soul and that's highly offensive um just at the thought that we have these millions of people who have lived before 6000 years and we're just saying basically like they're these soulless savages walking around the earth it's really weird when you um think about the implications of trying to say that only people after a literal adam and eve were able to kind of connect or communicate you know well they're all god's creation right right so whoever adam and eve's parents were i i mean adam and eve had language according to the bible right and that's the other problem they could think they could feel they could pro you know they could make children yeah they had a civilization and yet god's like no you're all just like when you die you don't have any soul yeah somehow the chemistry of their body you can introduce the spirit to the children of these parents when they've been involved for a million years it's just and it's just a problem you know because again this is the john larson episode we just did on the plan of salvation and how it makes it makes doesn't make a lot of sense and that's the problem because you try to they're trying now to create this scenario that can fit with the science we have about the the length of the age of the earth the the way we could tell people were here long before six thousand years and to to make it work they're just basically trying to wrap it around the truth claims but the problem is the truth claims are not true and so when the truth claims aren't true if you wrap stuff around it it's not going to make it any more true it's just basically going to make it even messier and so now we have all of these teachings where they'll kind of redefine things to try to make it work but every time you redefine something you're creating a problem elsewhere and we've covered this in every every overview because it happens with every topic that their apologists are redefining and they're re-shifting and they're they're moving the target but every time you do that you're creating problems elsewhere and they don't want to acknowledge that because they're trying to keep the person reading that fair mormon article laser focused on their data point so that they'll say you know what people smarter than me and thought about it i'm going to walk away and that's my problem is i'm trying in these overviews as hard as i can to give the apologetic response the church responds what i found at least you have all three points they're with they just they reframe it in a way that just doesn't work and so anyways um so remember that they're saying fair says you have to believe in a six thousand year old temporal existence and this is from dnc 77 question this is joseph smith giving answers to some questions about doctrine what are we to understand by the book which john saw which was sealed on the back with seven seals and joseph says we are to understand that it contains the revealed will mysteries and the works of god the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance or its temporal existence and so um they say what are we to understand by the seven seals which with which it was sealed he says we are to understand that the first seal contains the things of the first thousand years and the second and also the second thousand years and so on till the seventh and so joseph smith is saying that the earth is seven thousand years you know six thousand years old at the time the book of mormon's written and that basically you know the last thousand years of the final thousand years um and i don't know i just don't know how to get around this you know there's no mention of the earth having these populations before adam and eve and again if you want to believe that joseph smith is the foundational prophet of the church of the latter days these are the things that would tell us that he's a prophet if he came out and said god actually revealed to me that people lived here long before adam and eve but they were pre-atomized that would have been revolutionary at the time and it would have been proven with science but instead he goes backwards and he goes backwards which creates problems it's like in football and you hand the ball to the running back and instead of running backwards he's trying to find these openings so he keeps running backwards in these big loops and also gets tackled for a 12-yard loss that's what joseph smith is doing here because he's not giving us anything that is going to be proven true he's giving a lot that's proven false and there's just no way around that and it's encoded in scripture yeah in the voice of god yeah in the voice of god yeah that's just it yeah um and then fair addresses the problem i mentioned earlier about the ancient of days um which leads to the adam god theory and all that i've got doctrine and um the response is more geared uh towards the um adam god doctrine but i want to read some of this because they believe they begin their response by saying the real question should be how does one justify their interpretation of ancient of days in daniel as only god um and then the author of the response cites one non-lds scholar who contends at the phrase ancient of days in reference to god is unprecedented in the hebrew text um and again just to point out if this were the case why did joseph smith not make any note or change when revising daniel in the joseph smith translation this would be another area where he could make that clarification in the translation and neglect to do it and if you read daniel 7 in context as we already have i put above earlier in the the slides it's referring to god in every way and um the phrase ancient of days only appears in the book of daniel so the use of that phrase is unprecedented anywhere not just in hebrew text it's it's only mentioned the one time and so joseph smith is creating a theology around that one phrase because of course it was a phrase that led to some mystery but to cite one scholar that's like when you you know um when they used to do the um the uh trials about smoking and you could find a scientist who'd go on the stand and say smoking wasn't you know gonna intentionally kill people or you know back 30 40 years ago you could have you know and so you can always find one scholar who is going to agree with you on these things what i'm saying is the overwhelming i'm talking like every single scholar except for probably this one they could find is clear and we read the text earlier it's talking about god not adam and so to keep telling us that what we're seeing with our own eyes and what we're reading with our you know with our brains is not true it's just frustrating and um so just to put a bow on this um we'll cover this as we go in other subjects but this is an area where apologists are defending an idea that simply goes against all the evidence and the consensus and one thing i'll ask you to do if you don't believe me is just to do a quick google search about the ancient of days and they will all refer to god because if you read daniel 7 it is quite obviously god sitting upon his throne the white robes all of that stuff and so just to say the only way adam is the ancient of days is if adam is god which is why that is the doctrine that was created by by joseph smith really and then really picked up on by brigham young because joseph is saying adam and michael are the ancient days which is god in the bible so brigham young picks on it and expands it and that's him like i said earlier you can't brush that away as brigham speaking as a man because not only did joseph smith bring it in through revelation but god allowed it to be inserted into their temple ceremony and we know that he got it from sidney rigdon anyway yes and it all and that's the thing and so you have this evolution of this idea and again at no point did god come and say you know joseph my servant um i am here to command you to fix something or whatever there's nothing there's no evidence that god in any way did anything except strength in this argument and so you can't make it go away by saying brigham spoke as a man because it started with joseph possibly signed a rig sydney rigdon as you mentioned yeah all right well that brings us to the conclusion yeah we made it we did and so yes isn't bad and so um the scriptures and revelations of mormonism require a literal historical adam and eve and the evidence tells us that it's an ideological myth and again this is inside and outside the bible and so outside the bible as we talked about dna and archaeology um and then inside just looking at the fact that none of the old testament prophets knew about it early until the the very late books and there's only two mentions even then um and we talked about the evolving theology which starts with potentially sidney ridden's um article in 1834 which leads joseph smith to claim to see both michael and adam in 1835 vision um but then he claims with the same person when he re re-does the 1836 revelation so again you just have this inconsistency and this evolution that tells us that this is a changing idea and you know just to tie it up the mormon church demands a literal adam and eve story even as apologists now on the outside are trying to give us flexibility and we cover this with the titan loose translation episode about the book of mormon but the point is you cannot go between those two positions and stay in only intellectually honest when you're actually addressing the scriptures of mormonism you could do it with the bible because i think with the bible you can say that these people didn't understand this is history but because joseph smith hammers this into the foundation as history you can't have it both ways you can't tell people you know believe that it's mythical if you want but at the same time have all the scriptures telling us that it absolutely happened yeah and then not to just pile on but but you know if you just think about the episodes we've already done whether it's the last 116 pages the golden plates the treasure digging um you know dna like you just and we're going to do 40 more yeah you just you just see problem after problem after after problem and then the probability as we've mentioned before you have to multiply the fractions of the probability to then come come to a conclusion as to whether or not it all adds up and it's just that's just that everything is swiss cheese everything that's just i mean at some point you know like i said that's why when i started i kept saying take these in totality i know we're doing them every week we're doing a new topic but as we do them you got to keep them in mind because they all tie together the adam eve story is going to tie together in the way the book of mormon was composed into the way the surrounding influences went into the book of mormon and all of those things go together in a way that actually makes a lot of sense when you look at them together as opposed to trying to piece them all out individually which is what you know if you read the c s letter replies from jim bennett from fair and to be fair i mean they're trying to reply point to point but it's a lot easier when you're doing point-to-point to jump between apologetics than it is when you're trying to take them all on at once and that's why i'm trying to refer back to earlier episodes to point out that when you take an approach in one way it's going to cause problems elsewhere so that people that are watching this or listening to this can understand that these are not isolated issues these are issues that really flow throughout and each one of these problems actually creates more problems later on and it's just you can't just use apologetics to make them all go away in any kind of consistent or intellectually consistent way i love it well mike today's been brilliant thank you so much what do we got what are what are a couple things we have next well so now we've kind of transitioned into a little bit of biblical scholarship so we're going to do obviously today's adam and eve we've got the um global flood is going to be next uh tower babel um we've got deutero isaiah long ending a mark sermon on the mount and those are all really important and they're all going to show us the same kinds of things that we went over today and with the book of mormon where you can see how joseph smith is using material that wasn't available to him using ideas that aren't backed up by history and really hammering them in as historical literal perfectly done things and and those are problems when you look at the way the truth claims go with the way joseph smith reveals this stuff beautiful all right mike you've been brilliant thank you so much see you guys next week and listeners and viewers thanks for joining us today on mormon stories we hope you're enjoying this uh this series we've got dozens and dozens more to go um but uh we we want to thank all of you who donate financially to make this series possible we couldn't do this without you but also we lose donors every month uh people move on people fall on financial hard times we probably lose 10 to 20 monthly donors a month if we don't replace them then we have to start cutting services so um we've got an amazing group of 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