“Mormonism” has not been so much disturbed as other Christian churches by the quarrel which has been long waged between science and religion. There have been two reasons for that.
In the first place, “Mormonism” has never labored under the serious handicap of traditional dogma and interpretation that the older churches have had. They asserted, for instance, the older Christian faiths, that the earth is round, that it was made out of nothing in six days of twenty-four hours, and that man was moulded like an adobe from the earth. “Mormonism” never taught these ideas. Joseph Smith, even before Darwin’s Origin of the Species, remained silent on the question of the time it too God to create the earth. He did say, though, that the word “created,” should be “organized,” for the reason that the earth was made out of materials that already existed. And the apostle Parley P. Pratt ridiculed the idea that woman was made literally out of Adam’s rib. Orson Pratt, the philosopher apostle most probably studied opinions respecting it, but, so as we know, he never expressed any view on the question. So the Church had not had to retreat time after time before scientific discoveries, as so many others have had to do, in consequence of which no very great inroads have been made on our membership. (John Henry Evans, The Heart of Mormonism [Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930], 471)
