GOSPEL TEACHINGS + FAILED SCIENTIFIC THEORIES = OOOPS!

I am currently reading a book that reconciles Christian and scientific teachings on the creation.  The author does a fairly good job of illustrating the similarities between the gospel and science.  He shows how scientific theories on the history of the earth, pre-Adamic hominids, dinosaurs, and the Big Bang are supported by teachings in the gospel.  (That’s right, supposedly there's a scripture or teaching that supports the idea of a big bang.)  So basically, the author starts with the assumption that the teachings of science are truth, and then shows how the scriptures can be interpreted to support those teachings. 

I think that this sort of scholarship is a worthwhile endeavor, but it is very risky because it relies on a tenuous working assumption, that science has got it right. 

It is fine to argue that there are teachings in the LDS faith that agree with scientific theories, that is until the scientific theories that our faith supposedly support turn out to be false.

Case #1 - Phlogiston.  If you lived during the 1600s and first half of the 1700s you would have believed that combustible objects give off a substance known as phlogiston.  Phlogiston was supposedly evident in the smoke and flames given off when an object burned, and in the reduced weight of the object (ashes) after burning.  The theory of phlogiston remained a tried and tested theory throughout the early 1700s.  It was even dubbed the discovery that “changed the face of chemistry.”  Then in 1770s Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier discovered that oxygen was the substance involved in combustion, not phlogiston.  The once prized theory of phlogiston is no longer accepted as a legitimate theory of science.

Case #2 – Luminiferous Ether.  For thousands of years scholars have been philosophically opposed to the idea that there is space in the universe which is void of matter.  For instance, Aristotle believed that the space between matter was not empty; he called it "quintessence”.  And the Stoics believed that the space between the matter of the earth was not empty; they called it "pneuma”. 

The same goes for science during the the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s.  Leading scientists believed that light and sound waves traveled through something, and they knew that the stiffer the medium, the faster the waves traveled through the medium.  (Remember in The Hunt for Red October the scene where the American submarine crew had to keep quiet?  The sound waves from something as small as a pen hitting the floor could quickly move through the water and steel hulls of two submarines, thus alerting the enemy of their location.)  

Because light waves travel very fast, scholars surmised that it must be moving through a medium in space that has the stiffness of steel.  And so, with very little scientific evidence to go on, they called the substance through which waves and planets pass, ‘ether’.  It was widely believed that ether filled the empty spaces of the universe until 1887 when an experiment by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley failed to find empirical evidence for ether.  The null result was a major disappointment to the scientific community.  Although the theory of ether took a long time to fall out of favor, it is no longer accepted today.  (A prominent LDS scholar once claimed that ether was a manifestation of the Light of Christ.  Click here and read the Joseph Smith as a Scientist book review to find out who it was.)

Today’s most beloved theories may one day be proven false.  It has happened in the past and it will surely happen again in the future.  This simple fact should be on the mind of every LDS scientific apologist. 

We need to be cautious of claiming that gospel teachings support theories like the Big Bang, pre-Adamic hominids, and ancient fossilization.  The beloved and widely accepted theories that we claim the gospel corroborates may one day end up in the trash heap of scientific rejects like phlogiston and ether.  Then what?  That's right - Ooops!
(MormonsandScience 09.08)