In a new political ad running in Kentucky, Barack Obama is pictured standing at the pulpit before a pipe organ and a cross, with the words at the top of the ad "Faith. Hope. Change."   

I see Barack Obama has decided to alter the formula of St. Paul in 1st Corinthians Chapter 13 and substitute "Change" for "Charity" in the triplet of "faith, hope and charity."  I would think that anyone who is seriously committed to a faith in Christ and who believes in the message taught by Paul would resent that message being coopted and altered in order to help a politician gain power, rather than for its original objective of bringing about personal commitment to Christ and charity and love toward the rest of humanity. 

The message of the ad appears to be that Obama is a new apostle, a new prophet, even a new messiah.  Since Obama already explained that he doesn't take seriously Paul's teachings against homosexual activity by Christians, preferring a wishy washy view toward homosexuality that he asserts has the authority of the Sermon on the Mount (which is actually pretty uptight about even sexual thoughts outside marriage being a sin), we see Obama here emerging as his own pastor, a minister of his own gospel in his own right (no longer needing to serve as a disciple of Jeremiah Wright). 

Indeed, is the "Faith" and the "Hope" a faith in God and a hope for salvation through Christ, or a faith in the "arm of the flesh" and a hope for government to eliminate the need for reliance on God?  Instead of the reader being challenged to perform acts of charity, Obama promises "change".  But this is not a change in the reader, a transformation into a state of being closer to God, but rather a change in the circumstances of the world, a change to make the world accommodate the desires of the reader.  After all, it is Obama who is going to make the changes.  All the reader is asked to do is vote for him. 

If this is not a false gospel, I don't know what is.   

Intelligent Design is an approach to the origins of observed life that does NOT start from the axiom that Genesis is true and accurate, but rather starts with the actual observed facts, and then in an act of philosophical courage, breaks free of the assumption made by Richard Dawkins and Darwin that ONLY material things that we can observe can exist, and that there is no intelligent agent manipulating living matter other than human breeders who do it intentionally, and human land developers, who do it unintentionally by modifying the environment of living species.

There is in fact no scientific reason to insist that there cannot have been an intelligence antecedent to humanity, nor that the intelligence was unable to manipulate living matter. After all, mankind is now cataloguing the individual genes of mankind and other species, and determining their function, and starting to make modifications in order to cure genetic defects that cause disease. In a few hundred years, as any decent science fiction anthology can tell you, we ought to be able to create living things to order, within certain limitations of the existing genes and proteins in living matter.

Since the earth is about 4.2 billion years old, and the universe about 14 billion years old, there is no way to rule out the possibility that a prior intelligence existed that intervened at one or many points in the events that led to the development of life on earth, most of which happened over the last billion years. Such an intelligence would only have to be about as smart as we are, and just a little older in terms of its scientific knowledge. This is the theme of the book and movie "2001".

It is possible that some day mankind could introduce life to the planets Mars or Venus, or moons such as Titan or Europa. Fred Hoyle and other scientists are quite serious in proposing that the essential complex chemical compounds of life get distributed around the galaxy on meteors that have infinite patience until they crash down on a likely world and seed it with life.

ID simply proposes that there are ways to rationally test to see whether evidence for this outside intelligent intervention can be identified in the forms of living molecules now. They look for configurations of molecules in living things that are much more likely to have been created on purpose than by random mutation. Essentially they are making the same argument that an archeologist does when he asserts that a particular flint shard, that is symmetrical and useful, was made for a purpose by an intelligent agent, rather than being a product of natural processes like erosion and seasonal temperature variations. It is the same argument made by a forensic scientist who asserts that the evidence at the scene of a sudden death indicates that the death was caused by a purposive actor, rather than by a random accident. It is the same argument that is made when, after an aircraft rams a building, which could be a highly unlikely but unintentional accident, another plane soon rams into a second building next door, and then a third plane similarly strikes another building hundreds of miles away within an hour. Because these events are very, very unlikely, and their closeness in time is even more unlikely, the most likely and therefore rational explanation for their cause is an intelligent and purposeful, albeit evil, agent as their common cause. As we learn of the communications from passengers in each plane, this direct evidence of hijacking simply confirms what we already have deduced from the closely spaced events themselves.

ID does not attempt to go beyond that to identify characteristics of the intelligent and purposive agent(s) who acted to create certain specific aspects of living things. Those of us who believe in Genesis can start there and accept God's assertion that He is the Creator, which is also confirmed by John 1 and Hebrews 1. We believe the two bodies of knowledge, the Bible and unboxed scientific analysis without the materialistic axiom, logically point to each other, but it is not necessary to accept Genesis before one can accept ID. The vociferous opposition to ID is triggered by its power to persuade people that they don't have to buy into materialism and atheism in order to be, paralleling Dawkins, "a self-respecting scientist."

ID itself does not require the Bible to be true in order to make its assertions and its critique of Darwinism true. The RESULT of ID, as distinguished from its basis and its analysis, is to be open minded about alternatives to the materialist view of creation, which is basically that "stuff happens", without essential cause, in a mystery that is more impenetrable than the mystery of how the Trinity reconciles a unitary, unembodied and passionless God with the Christ who was born, suffered, died, resurrected, and ascended to His father and our Father.

Once a person admits it is possible that all things did not create themselves, then he does not rule out of hand the possibility that the God described in the Old and New Testaments had a hand in the process.

Some Catholic scientists like Kenneth Miller have a very theological view of God as creator, asserting that God put into the first moment of creation, the Big Bang, all of the elements and forces and vectors needed to bring about suns, planets, moons, water, and living plants and animals, and mankind. They also believe that none of the important mutations and selections is truly random, but that God influences the outcome of random events to ensure HIs purposes are fulfilled. Thus they are content to use a narrative that on its surface sounds identical to one written by an atheist, but for them has an extra layer of meaning that affirms God's role as creator.

My personal view is that Genesis, on the one hand, is so short that it seems irrational to assert that this is supposed to be the complete story of creation, either as an observation or an explanation of mechanism or purpose. On the other hand, if one looks at it from the perspective of the specific creation of the earth itself, it matches in major steps the succession of events that the sciences of cosmology, astronomy, geology and finally biology state are the main milestones in the earth's history. It does not correlate so well with the sequence of events that precedes the formation of the solar system and the coalescence of the Milky Way Galaxy. What it seems to offer us is a narrative as if someone is standing off to the side as our own earth and its immediate environs come into being. It is a vision given to Moses by God that Moses then reduces to writing as he writes Genesis.

The insistence by some people that the "day" of Genesis has to be the same as a 24 hour day is not required by the language. The Bible uses the term "day" in all sorts of ways, including referring to entire eras. One variant is to take the verse that says "a day with the Lord is as a thousand years" and then apply that to Genesis and say that the creation took 6,000 years rather than 6 24 hour days, a difference in magnitude of 365,000. When the variation in length of time is that wide, on what basis do we rule out another factor of 1000 or 1,000,000? Somehow God has to work FAST or it's not a miracle? If we note that the galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter, and then see the vastness of the universe beyond that, we understand that the physical dimensions of God's creation are virtually unimaginable for humans. The Bible affirms that God is eternal, and will continue into the infinite future, as will mankind, resurrected to a positive or negative situation for eternity. With infinity in time going forward, and infinite extent in the three spatial dimensions, why do we insist that the time dimension backward in time must be so short and disproportionate to the other dimensions of creation? What is a billion years to God?

Another distinction between a Darwinian universe and one that is purposeful is that the vast expanse of creation would not go to waste if God made it. If His purposes are advanced by making this earth and its people, why wouldn't it also be advanced by having the same kind of creation on the multiplicity of planets in the galaxy and universe? The role of randomness in Darwinism and materialism is so pronounced that it is not mathematically possible for many worlds to have separate creations of life that attain intelligence. If we are able to continue our project of finding and then examining planets around other stars, it may be possible to detect signs of intelligent life on them, and if we find it to be relatively abundant, that fact will be a strong argument against Darwinism and a strong argument for purposeful creation. A highly populated universe would be a testament to a God who has joy in and loves his creations, and multiplies them not only on earth but everywhere he can.

The atheist claim that belief in religion violates the “Copernican principle of the mediocrity and ordinariness of the earth” has things backward. It is they, with their insistence that life can come about only by chance, who must insist that earth is unique in the galaxy, if not the universe. Darwin does not claim that life is inevitable, but rather that it is random. Stephen Jay Gould asserted that, if you went back in time and restarted the earth's biological development, the outcome would be totally unpredictable due to these random factors, with no guarantee of intelligent mankind being the result. Thus, most other worlds would fail to produce higher order life, let alone intelligence.

On the other hand, those of us who believe in a God who loves to create have every reason to believe that, for most purposes, the earth is absolutely ordinary in relation to the many worlds God has made in the observable universe. If he thought the earth was "good" at creation, there is every reason he would multiply that goodness by creating other worlds and peopling them as well. So earth with its human civilization is quite unexceptional in God's view.

Why do we insist that God cannot work slowly? He seems content with the slow growth we experience as individuals, and the gradual progress that is made in carrying the gospel around the world, which has gone on for 2000 years and is still going on, with millions out of earshot of the good news. Christ's second coming did not happen in 70 AD, or 100 AD, nor in 2000 AD. God has patience, more than we short-lived humans. How do we get off telling Him the schedule for His own work? We should be humble in our interpretation of the Bible and not insist that it must have originally intended a meaning that we apply to it, as much from our own cultural assumptions as anything. To insist on more precision than Moses' original vision had in it is presumptuous of us. It is clearly a summary. The fact that it does not describe the details of planting trees and installing fish in the seas and birds in the air does not mean that there were no details in the original event, and that they all just popped into existence. We are told only a few of the living things that were created. There is not a total catalogue of all the varieties of fish, insects or mammals.

Why then should we insist that the narrative has to be considered complete and definitive in terms of the events that took place? If the bats were created without being specifically mentioned, the way they were created and distributed is also omitted. This indicates that there are omissions from the process as well. Insisting that only those things specifically described as happening could have occurred is not warranted by the nature of the narrative itself.

The Gospel of John says that if all the things Christ said and did were recorded, the whole earth could not contain the books. This is hyperbole, but the gospels clearly contain only a minute fraction of the ministry of Christ, which lasted three years, but the books can obviously be read in a few hours. 99.9% of Christ's actual teaching and other acts are not in the record.

Why then should we insist that Genesis 1 and 2 have to contain all the essential details of the creation? That there is no part of the story that is not there, when the narrative itself does not say that, and we can hardly assert that the Bible gives 100% of details when it plainly says it does not.

I am a native of Japan, where my mother grew up in a Russian Orthodox family. About 1% of Japanese are Christians. Unlike Korea, where the trauma of Japanese conquest and then of the Korean War has led to rapid growth of Christian and quasi-Christian (e.g. Unification Church, AKA "Moonies") churches, Japan has a dedicated secularity that has concentrated more on identity as Japanese rather than as Buddhist or Shintoist (native animism akin to Native American religions).

The Japanese Army conducted incredibly brutal violence on people in Korea, China and the Philippines, without religion ever entering into it. Nationalism and a belief in the superiority of the Japanese race, without any specific belief in the afterlife, motivated massacres and kamikaze attacks. No heaven was necessary. Not even an international utopian vision like Communism was needed. Just Japanese people thinking of themselves as the best of all possible nations. Just overweaning pride, hubris without gods.

Looking back, this motive for conquest seems to have been the one that animated Menelaus at Troy, the Greeks and Macedonians under Alexander, the Romans, the Mongols, and the various Germanic tribes that are ancestors of modern Europe. It motivated the Aztecs and the Maya and the Inca.

Neither Christianity, Islam nor Judaism is needed to created conquest and brutality. To the contrary, until those religions began to make inroads on how people behaved, no one thought that the world could or should be different. Are in fact the people who are most obedient to religious belief actually a threat, or is it people who might use a veneer of religion to sanctify their own ambition and tribalism, as the Ku Klux Klan did? Their use of a burning cross was both a mockery of Christianity and an adoption of the same use of the cross as was made by the Romans: to threaten and intimidate. What passage in the Sermon on the Mount tells men to wear masks and murder people of other races? What verse in Paul's epistles invites Christians to give vent to their lusts for power, wealth and sexual conquest?

It is in fact the opposite. It asks Christians to reject the ordinary behavior of the world around them, and become holy, set apart, a slave of God rather than of their lusts and ambition. The short letter to Philemon asks him to lay aside the legal status of his slave, Onesimus, and instead accept him as a brother in the worship of Christ. It exhorts Philemon to love and tolerance, instead of the violence which Roman law said was his right as a master. Jesus spoke about the hypocrisy of those who claim to be more righteous than others, but who disobey God's laws enjoining justice and love, highlighted by the parable of the Good Samaritan. The source of intolerance and violence is in men, without any help. It is their natural state. If we are lucky, they allow religious belief to change their nature.

Having spent 20 years in a real male-dominated power hierarchy (the military), I can affirm that the priesthood in the Church is not such a creature. When a Church leader is operating the way he has been taught to by the scriptures and by the prophets, he is a humble servant who places those he “leads” above his own self-realization and self-aggrandizement.

We should not confuse what it means to be a “priest” in a traditional Christian church with what it means in the LDS Church. A traditional Christian “priest” or pastor has a career, in which his (or her) income (including effective income with the perks that come with an office) depends on popularity with the congregants who donate in response to how pleased they are with the priest or pastor. As a career path and means of supporting one’s self and family, the arguments for equal employment opportunity argue for equality between men and women. But when priesthood is divorced from career, when it is predominantly sacrifice, the career model does not apply. Anyone who wants to serve and make sacrifices on behalf of others can do so with or without priesthood.

The scriptures denigrate “the natural man” as “an enemy to God.” The priesthood and the commitment and covenant to service and self-sacrifice it entails is a structure that helps to provide the discipline so that a “natural man” (AKA beer-drinking couch-potato man) can be transformed into a person with a broken heart and childlike in submitting to God. I am sure many men could achieve that behavior and attitude without the priesthood, but for many men it is an essential structure for making that transition from seeing themselves the way the world sees them, and seeing themselves the way the Lord sees them.

Anyone, man or woman, who wants a leadership position in the Church because it gives the leader power over others is not someone I want in that position. Theories about feminist power versus patriarchy seem to me to have the dominant goal of using power to get more wealth and other gratifications, and to satisfy the ego by dominating others. I don’t see any of those goals as being compatible with the Gospel.

What exactly does a priesthood leader get for himself? A chance to hear himself praised occasionally in public? Beyond basic affirmation that one is being effective, it is pride, which we must not let dominate our attitudes and motives. A chance to sit in the seat on the stand in front of everyone? A position that confers the burden of being a visual example (no nose-pickin’ on the sly). A chance to speak more often to the congregation? If done in turn, and with reliance on the Spirit, and in a spirit of service rather than pride, it is simply an opportunity accepted with gratitude.

In the meantime, there are endless hours of service out of the limelight, bearing the burdens of ward members intensely and with a constant consciousness of one’s own inadequacy.

So my hypothesis is that the conferral of the priesthood is the creation of exactly the situation that Moroni addresses in Ether Chapter 12: Having the priesthood, and callings in the priesthood, are times when we are called to “come unto the Lord” and see our weakness in light of the challenges that come with our callings, and realize the need for us to be humble so that we can be strengthened by God, and “magnify” that calling, making ourselves better in the process. In my own life experience, the process of introspection and self-assessment is more of a natural component of female temperament, but it needs to be enhanced in men through structures like priesthood callings. It is something men need here in a Telestial, fallen world. The example and implication of the Temples is that priesthood is a different creature, with a different character and structure in the Celestial worlds.

Then writer Joseph Stanford, commenting on Robert Louis Wilken’s discussion of Christological interpretation of the Old Testament, noted that the Book of Mormon is replete with the affirmation that the Old Testament prophets actually foresaw Christ.

Finally, RJN takes note that the long-held Orthodox doctrine of theosis or deification—paraphrasing Irenaeus, “God became man so that man . . . might become God”, is “getting serious attention from evangelical Protestant theologians” as evidenced by the new book Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions.  “And yes” he says, “Mormons also have what appears to be a version of the idea.”  

All three of these ideas—the ultimate possession of the transformed earth by the physically resurrected saints, the explicit prophecies about Christ by pre-Christian prophets, and the deification of man as the ultimate goal of salvation through Christ—are ideas for which Mormons are still roundly criticized as “not Christian” because they are distinct from the teachings of most Protestant denominations.  Yet, as is evident from the pages of First Things, these very “Mormon” ideas are ones with a long Christian pedigree, dating back to the original saints of the New Testament period, a fact which is noted by scholars like Wright, Wilken, and the contributors to the book edited by Christensen and Wittung.  

RJN and others writing in the pages of First Things have taken up the question “Are Mormons Christian?” a question which was renewed with the past candidacy of Mitt Romney for the presidency.  Since these three ideas are now identified as within the spectrum of legitimate Christian belief, a Mormon can hope that the next time the question is raised in these pages, these three beliefs held by the Latter-day Saints will be moved from the minus side to the plus side of the answer.  

Honoring mothers with a story about 2,000 young men

By Raymond Takashi Swenson

For MormonTimes.com
Published: Saturday, May. 10, 2008

Despite their love of pointing out all the "weird" things about Latter-day Saints, our Christian neighbors never mention one legitimately weird thing: On Mother's Day every year, we talk about men.

And not just any men, but 2,000 warriors.

We all know the story, and Arnold Friberg's painting of a mass of young Native American Schwarzeneggers is iconic of our admiration for these 2,000 "stripling warriors" who came to the rescue of the Nephite nation when it was under threat of conquest by their Lamanite cousins. I actually prefer the newer, more realistic paintings that show more typical skinny teenagers, who are not going to get through a war without the help of God.

These young men were acting in lieu of their fathers and older brothers, who could not fight. After their conversion to Christianity through the efforts of Ammon and his brothers, those men had renounced their culture of casual killing by burying their weapons deep in the earth and taking an oath never to take up arms even in defense of themselves or their families, lest they fall victim again to the blood lust that addicted them.

How bad was that addiction? So bad that they played brutal games of stealing the king's sheep, knowing that the shepherds faced the awful choice of either being killed trying to stop it or being killed by the king for not stopping it. So bad that despite repeated experiences of being defeated by smaller but more technologically adept Nephite forces, their anger would still push them into stupid wars.

The unconverted Lamanites, egged on by murderous Nephite dissenters, mounted a rebellion against their newly Christian king. But rather than have his people fight to defend his power, the king said: "And now, my brethren, if our brethren seek to destroy us, behold, we will hide away our swords, yea, even we will bury them deep in the earth, that they may be kept bright, as a testimony that we have never used them, at the last day; and if our brethren destroy us, behold, we shall go to our God and shall be saved" (Alma 24:16).

On a day when the unconverted Lamanites were marching forward to kill them and their families, these fathers and older brothers went out to meet them, armed with nothing but prayers. And after the attackers killed 1,000 of them, the killers were overcome by remorse, stopped their attack, and more than 1,000 repented and took the same oath of renunciation.

Ammon saved his converts by leading them deep into Nephite territory, where the Nephites promised to shield them from further attacks. But with the passing years, the Lamanite armies, manipulated by Nephite rebels, had the badly outnumbered Nephites fighting a two-front defensive war. And so the young men who had been too young to be warriors, who had never killed in anger, never taken the oath of renunciation, stepped forward to take a different oath to defend the freedom of their families and the Nephite nation. Like the oath of their fathers, it was "unto the laying down of their lives" (Alma 53:17).

At one point these 2,000 "little sons" of Helaman found themselves in a desperate battle. They were exhausted from being chased by a much larger Lamanite force for a couple of days, and hot on the heels of the Lamanites was a Nephite division under Antipus. But on the third day the Lamanites had stopped the pursuit. Helaman didn't know if the enemy was occupied fighting Antipus or was simply drawing his small force into a trap. So he asked his battalion what they should do.

"Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their own lives; yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it" (Alma 56:47-48).

When did their mothers teach them this lesson? Was it at a family home evening, as they passed the popcorn? I think, rather, it was on that terrible day when their fathers walked out, unarmed, against the Lamanite armies, and every one of their mothers, as they embraced their younger sons and their daughters, volunteered to become a widow because of their testimony that their families would be reunited in a glorious resurrection.

So we tell this story every Mother's Day to honor righteous mothers. But we should remember that this story -- of young warriors miraculously saved by the faith their mothers taught them -- sets a high and terrifying bar for us.

Are we ready to put our lives on the line for our testimonies, so that our sons and daughters can say "We do not doubt our mothers -- and fathers -- knew it?"

(Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Raymond Takashi Swenson is an environmental attorney and Sunday School teacher in Idaho Falls, Idaho.)

MormonTimes.com is produced by the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah.
It is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Copyright © 2008 Deseret News Publishing Company

A recent post on timesandseasons.org concerns the compatibility between the "myth of evolution" and the "myth of Christianity".  Perhaps a better word would be "mythos" rather than myth.    The following is a comment I posted:

 Part of the difficulty in discussing a "myth of evolution" is the ambiguity in the word "evolution" itself. The broadest definition is simply "change in the population of various species over time", which is clearly observed in the fossil record.  A narrower definition adds the assertion that certain species were ancestral to certain other species, a more difficult proposition to prove, since we lack DNA evidence connecting fossils, and there are no family history records that can be used to determine ancestral connections.  So the claim that one species is ancestral to another is an assertion that can never be proved with certainty.  Every time a new primate species is found in the fossil record, a controversy erupts over whether the species was an ancestor of homo sapiens or one of the dead ends with no modern descendants, like Neanderthal man. 

A further assertion is part of an even narrower definition of evolution, that the asserted (though always tentative) ancestral connections took place through random variations in the genomes of the ancestral species that produced differential survival and reproduction that passed along the previously rare variation so that it became dominant in the descendants, and that an accumulation of such variations resulted in the clearly distinct descendant species.  This is the modern synthesis of Darwinian natural selection with the genetic mechanism that was first suggested by Mendel. 

One of the points that is almost universally glossed over in textbook introductions to this last version of "evolution" is that this mechanism of evolution cannot, by definition, operate to make inanimate matter turn into living matter.  There is absolutely no proven theory to explain how the transition took place from inanimate "primordial soup" (even with amino acids) into a living cell that can reproduce itself, and thus has a mechanism capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. 

Thus, the "myth of evolution" in any of its forms actually does not reach the crucial issue of the creation of life per se. It only is capable of addressing variations in life after it has somehow come into existence. 

A living cell is a factory that can create new factories like itself, with the ability to acquire materials and energy, and all the instructions for making and operating the components of the factory, plus a mechanism for those instructions and all of the machinery to duplicate itself in a coordinated way.  The membrance of a cell, that keeps its machinery together so that necessary chemical reactions can take place and the DNA can create the needed proteins, is not a simple balloon.  It is itself a highly complex barrier that keeps the contents of the cell inside, while allowing only certain materials pass into its interior, with very chemical-specific locks.  The DNA in the simplest cell could not come into existence through a totally random process, since the chance of getting a DNA string of even 100 nucleotides that works is on the order of one chance in 4 to the 100th power--about the number of atoms in the known universe.  Without a living cell as a vessel for the experiment, there is not a lot of time for whatever random process is generating and trying out the variations to get one that works.  And it is a chicken and egg problem from the very start, compounded by the fact that there is no known random mechanism that makes either chickens (the cell) or eggs (the DNA) independently. 

So the first problem in trying to compare the "myth of evolution" with the "myth of Christianity" is defining what the "myth of evolution" actually is. 

The idea that evolution is guided to some degree by God is quite widespread among scientists who are also religious.  One of the most well known evolutionary biologists and textbook authors is Kenneth Miller, a devout Catholic, who in his book Finding Darwin's God offers his perspective that
God's ex nihilo creation infused matter with the capacity to produce life and an efflorescence of species culminating in humanity (or something like it) that could, in its intelligence, be considered to be a being "in the image of God".  The particular meaning of Catholic views on evolution are discussed in an article by Stehen Barr, PhD, in the October 2005 First Things at http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=238 .  It is also something along this line that is believed by Francis Collins, MD, PhD, leader of the Human Genome Project and author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. 

A variation in this belief held by some scientists who are also religious is that God directed specific mutations that were so complex they could not have arisen from random genetic variation, and they argue that random genetic variation is incapable of creating significant complex changes that must exist before natural selection by differential survival can actually operate.  Some in this group have tried to articulate their reasoning in what they call Intelligent Design theory, in which they offer purely scientific arguments that do not rely on the authority of scripture or other religious doctrine, to support the hypothesis that the most rational explanation for certain features of "life, the universe, and everything", which are highly improbable as products of random genetic variation, is that an intelligent entity, at least as intelligent as humans, had input into their creation through modification of previous species.  In the new movie "Expelled", militant atheist and Darwinian Richard Dawkins admits that what we know scientifically allows for the existence of a highly intelligent alien species playing a role in manipulating the DNA of earth's living things.  Whether that intelligent intervenor is consistent with anyone's definition of God or not is an exercise which Intelligent Design leaves for the reader.  They do NOT argue that we can deduce from the likelihood of intelligent intervention in evolution (in the broad sense) all the characteristics of the intelligence, in sufficient detail to conclude it is the God of the Trinity or any other deity. 

So unless we are absolutely clear on which "evolution" we are talkling about, and thus which "myth", we can get all sorts of different takes on how it is consistent or inconsistent with various versions of the Christian "myths" of Creation, the Fall and Redemption. 

There is no question that James Talmage and John Widtsoe thought that "evolution" in the broadest sense was a particular manifestation of a broader principle of "eternal progression", in which everything in and on the Earth is moving teleologically toward producing a world with inhabitants that will eventually in its entirety become a celestial kingdom with celestial inhabitants and a transformed geology and chemistry, such that the earth has the characteristics of a giant information appliance (a urim and thummim). 

One aspect of the Creation and Fall myths in Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular is the idea that the Fall caused the entire Earth and its plant and animal inhabitants to be transformed from an at least Terrestrial state to a Telestial one.  As I discussed in my post on Noah's Flood, I think we need to be cautious about importing more universality into the statements of Genesis than is actually there in the text.  Some Jewish believers suggest that Adam and Eve were distinct from previous hominids in having souls that originated with God.   I think it is almost as difficult to pin down what the Christian and even Mormon "myth" of Creation and the Fall really consists of . 

Thus, comparing a myth of evolution with a myth of Christianity is a complex task since there are variations and gradations in both the entities being compared.  We all walk into the discussion with our own personal views of what each myth is, but we may be talking past each other because the variation in the meaning of each myth is tremendous, and there is no necessary correlation between which myth of evolution we prefer and which myth of Christianity we like.  They are two sets which, at least for some people, have an intersection that is real and not a null set. 

So my view is that the two myths are so indefinite in specific meaning that making a comparison between them as some kind of general statement cannot be logically done.  You can only compare specific versions of the myth of evolution with specific versions of the myth of Christianity, and both sets of variations lie in a contiguous n-dimensional space with an essentially infinite number of points.