Religion has no plot. Science has no plot. This means that Joseph Smith is the only entry. He, at least, has given us a story with a plot. But is it convincing?
The stories of the garden of Eden and the Flood have always furnished unbelievers with their best ammunition against believers, because they are the easiest to visualize, popularize, and satirize of any Bible accounts. Everyone has seen a garden and been caught in a pouring rain. It requires no effort of imagination for a six-year-old to convert concise and straightforward Sunday-school recitals into the vivid images that will stay with him for the rest of his life. These stories retain the form of the nursery tales they assume in the imaginations of small children, to be defended by grownups who refuse to distinguish between childlike faith and thinking as a child when it is time to "put away childish things." (1Corinthians 13:11).
Joseph Smith gave the world something that nobody else could. That is why Joseph Smith, with nothing going for him and everything going against him, simply could not lose. He told us what the play is all about. If you can come up with a better story than his, more power to you, but up until now no one else has had any story at all to place before us, and no one can. If only for that reason, Joseph's story deserves a hearing.
The Latter-day Saints have four basic Adam stories, those found in the Bible, the book of Moses, the book of Abraham, and the temple—each seen from the point of view of the individual observers who tell the stories.
The apparently strange and extravagant phenomena described in the scriptures are often correct descriptions of what would have appeared to a person in a particular situation. Noah saw the flood from His point of view. From where he was, "the whole earth" (Genesis 8:9) was covered with water. As far as he could see there was water. After things had quieted down for 150 days and the ark ground to a halt, it was still three months before he could see any mountaintops. But what were conditions in other parts of the world? If Noah knew that, he would not have sent forth messenger birds to explore.
Joseph and Sidney Rigdon had to use metaphors and similes to describe what they saw: "His eyes were as a flame of fire; the hair of his head was white like the pure snow; . . . his voice was as the sound of the rushing of great waters" (D&C 110). There was no fire, no snow, no rushing waters, but that is as near as Joseph Smith and Sidney Ridgon could come to telling us what they experienced when "the veil was taken from [their] minds, and the eyes of [their] understanding were opened" (D&C 110:1)! They were reporting as well as they could what they had seen from a vantage point on which we have never stood.
Before being introduced to his home planet, Abraham is given a view of the cosmos, in the which he is reminded again and again that all distances, directions, and motions are to be measured with respect to his position only. From another position, the picture might well look very different.
Kolob is not described as the center of the universe, but governs only one class of stars: "I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest" (Abraham 3:3). Kolob's influence and time governs "all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest"—the expression is used for the seventh time (Abraham 3:9).
The creation process as described in the Pearl of Great Price is open ended and ongoing, entailing careful planning based on vast experience, long consultations, models, tests, and even trial runs for a complicated system requiring a vast scale of participation by the creatures concerned. The whole operation is dominated by the overriding principle of love.
"Worlds without number" had already come into existence and gone their ways: "And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words" (Moses 1:38).
Consider how it was done: "And the Gods said: We will do everything that we have said, and organize them." (Abraham 4:31). "And the Gods saw that they would be obeyed, and that their plan was good" (Abraham 4:21). "We will end our work, which we have counseled. . . . And thus were their decisions at the time that they counseled among themselves to form the heavens and the earth" (Abraham 5:2-3).
After the talk they got down to work. "The Gods came down and formed these the generations of the heavens and of the earth, . . . according to all that which they had said . . . before" (Abraham 5:4-5). They worked through agents: "The Gods ordered, saying: Let [such-and-such happen] . . . ; and it was so, even as they ordered" (Abraham 4:9, 11).
What they ordered was not the completed product, but the process to bring it about, providing a scheme under which life might expand: "Let us prepare the earth to bring forth grass" (Abraham 4:11), not "Let us create grass."
"We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell" (Abraham 3:24). Why? "And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them" (Abraham 3:25). What he commands is what will best fulfill the measure of their existence, but they are not forced to do it—they are not automata. Adam was advised not to eat the fruit but was told at the same time that he was permitted to do it. It was up to him whether he would obey or not.
Abraham 4:11-12 continues: "Let us prepare the earth to bring forth grass.. . . And the Gods organized the earth to bring forth grass from its own seed, . . . yielding fruit [the fruit is the seed], whose seed could only bring forth the same . . . after his kind; and the Gods saw that they were obeyed." Here are levels of independence down to a complete programming by which the "seed could only bring forth the same."
The most important provision of all is, "We will bless them," and "cause them to be fruitful and multiply" (Abraham 4:28). The blessing of everything makes all the difference. This blessing is the whole difference between a play and no play.
After the earth is set up we are shown everything from Adam's point of view. In Genesis 2:5, we are definitely referred to a pre-temporal creation, then (2:8) we see a garden planted, and (2:15) a man put into the garden, where he is wonderfully at home. He can eat of every tree in the garden (2:16). He lives on terms of greatest intimacy with other creatures, naming and classifying them as he takes his place among them (Genesis 2:19-20).
When Adam eats the fruit his eyes are opened—he is a piqqeah, one who sees things as they were not seen before, who sees things which he in another condition could not see. He is in a new ambience. Cast out of the garden, he finds himself in a dry climate and changes his diet from fruit to grains, which he must work hard to cultivate.
The book of Abraham is more specific. After the great cycles of creation come the smaller cycles, starting with a very dry planet followed by a very wet phase (Abraham 5:5-6). Man is formed of the elements of the earth like any other creature, and he lives in a very lush period, a garden, which is, however, reduced to an oasis in an encroaching desert (Abraham 5:7-10). To this limited terrain he is perfectly adapted. It is a paradise. How long does he live there? No one knows, for this was still "after the Lord's time," not ours (Abraham 5:13). It was only when he was forced out of this timeless, changeless paradise that he began to count the hours and days, moving into a hard semi-arid world of thorns, thistles, and briars, where he had to toil and sweat in the heat just to stay alive and lost his old intimacy with the animals (Genesis 3:17-19).
Until Adam underwent that fatal change of habitat, body chemistry, diet, and psyche that went with the Fall, nothing is to be measured in our years, "for . . . the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning." (Abraham 5:13.) Until then, time is measured from their point of view, not ours.
He plays a surprising number of roles, each with a different persona, a different name, a different environment, a different office and calling: (1) he was Michael, one of the three most intelligent beings present when the earth project was being discussed; (2) he was one of those who monitored the processes, and who came down from time to time to check up on the operation; (3) then he changed his name and nature to live upon the earth, but it was a very different earth from any we know. It had to be a garden place specially prepared for him. (4) When he left that paradise, his nature was changed again, and for the first time he began to reckon the passing of time by our measurements, becoming a short-lived creature subject to death. (5) In this condition, he began to receive instructions from heavenly mentors on how to go about changing his condition and status, entering into a covenant that completely changed his mentality and way of life. "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit," when "that which is natural" became spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:45-46). The man Adam passes from one state of being to another, and so do we: "as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly" (1 Corinthians 15:49). (6) In time he died and became a spirit being, the head of all his spirit children in the waiting-place, according to common Christian tradition as well as our own. (7) Then he became, after Christ, the first fruits of the resurrection and returned triumphantly to his first and second estates, (8) to go on to glory and eternal lives.
Christianity views man's life on earth as a one-act drama: Adam fell, Christ redeemed us, and that is the story. Before Adam, there was nothing. Science tells us that the drama is pointless, because there is really nothing before or after it. We, on the other hand, see an ongoing epic of many episodes, each one a play in itself—a dispensation.
It is Adam as our own parent who should concern us. When he walks onto the stage, then and only then the play begins. He opens a book and starts calling out names. They are the sons of Adam, who also qualify as sons of God, Adam himself being a son of God. This is the book of remembrance from which many have been blotted out.
Adam becomes Adam, a hominid becomes a man, when he starts keeping a record. What kind of record? A record of his ancestors—the family line that sets him off from all other creatures.
Which takes us back to the issue with which the Adam question began and which has always been the central issue of human paleontology: a matter of definitions. They may seem trivial, secondary, naive—but the experts have never been able to get away from it. Evolution and natural selection were never defined to Darwin's satisfaction.
Those who study the origin of man begin with the final answers. The ultimate questions that can only be answered after all the returns are in, are the very questions with which Lyell and Hutton and Darwin began their explorations. Our thrilling detective drama begins by telling us who did it and then expects us to wait around with bated breath while the detective brings in the evidence. Today all the specialists are trying to agree on a clear definition for man: when is a hominid a hominid, and how much?
Do not begrudge existence to creatures that looked like men long, long ago, nor deny them a place in God's affection or even a right to exaltation—for our scriptures allow them such. We should not be overly concerned as to just when they might have lived, for their world is not our world. They have all gone away long before our people ever appeared. God assigned them their proper times and functions, as he has given us ours—a full-time job that admonishes us to remember His words to the overly eager Moses: "For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me" (Moses 1:31).
And one of the biggest stumbling blocks of science and religion is not knowing how Adam relates to all other beings, earthly and heavenly. But Joseph knew, and His story is God's story, told over and over again on earths just like this one.
To learn more see Hugh Nibley's Before Adam, Old Testament and Related Studies, Chapter 7.
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