A few years ago, a returned missionary in my ward — bright, earnest, studying microbiology at the university — came to me after elders quorum with a question she'd clearly been sitting on for weeks. "I love the gospel," she said. "But sometimes in my classes, I feel like I'm living in two different worlds. Am I supposed to just… not think about it?"
She's not the first person to feel that tension, and she won't be the last. The question of how faith and science relate is old enough to have its own Wikipedia page and fresh enough to keep people up at night. For Latter-day Saints, though, the question carries a particular weight — because our theology doesn't let us off the hook by retreating into pure spiritualism. We believe in a God of matter, of organized intelligence, of real bodies and physical resurrection. We can't wave away the material world. It's too central to everything we believe.
The Theology That Won't Let You Separate Them
Most religious traditions handle the science-and-faith question by drawing a line: science gets the physical world, religion gets the spiritual one. Stay in your lane, and everything's fine. Latter-day Saint theology refuses that bargain.
Consider what's actually in our scriptures. Doctrine and Covenants 93:36 declares that "the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth." Not worship. Not obedience alone. Intelligence. And then, even more strikingly, verse 29 tells us that intelligence — "the light of truth" — "was not created or made, neither indeed can be." Truth, in our framework, isn't just something God decided. It's something even God honors. It has independent existence.
That is a radical theological claim, and most Latter-day Saints have never stopped to think about what it means for how we approach science. If truth is uncreated and eternal, then a scientific discovery doesn't compete with God. It reveals something about the same reality God inhabits and works within. The physicist measuring the speed of light and the prophet receiving revelation are both, in their different ways, encountering what is.
This is why the Lord told early Saints to study "things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass" — and then, in the same breath, to seek learning "even by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:78–79, 118). The "and" in that phrase does enormous work. Study and faith. Not study or faith. Not study until faith. Both, together, as complementary ways of knowing.
The People Who Lived It
Abstractions are nice, but I find more comfort in the people who actually walked this path.
Henry Eyring — the father of President Henry B. Eyring and one of the most decorated chemists of the twentieth century — spent his career at Princeton and the University of Utah, winning nearly every major prize in his field short of the Nobel. He was also a devoted Latter-day Saint who served on the Church's General Sunday School Board. When someone once asked him how the world began, he answered simply: "I believe whichever way it turns out actually to have been."
That line is worth sitting with. It's not evasive. It's deeply faithful — faithful to truth itself, wherever it leads. In a remarkable 1978 Ensign article called "My Father's Formula," Eyring explained his approach: "The essence of the gospel is the doctrine of trying. The Savior told us to try his words to see if the doctrine be true. … And that, of course, is the essence of science, also: the doctrine of trying, testing, and proving. That's the kind of procedure that makes science what it is. That's why one is able to be a Latter-day Saint as well as a scientist."
What anchored Eyring wasn't a detailed reconciliation of every geological timeline with every scriptural verse. It was something his father told him before he left for college: "I'm convinced that the Lord used the Prophet Joseph Smith to restore his church. For me that is a reality. I haven't any doubt about it. Now, there are a lot of other matters which are much less clear to me. But in this Church you don't have to believe anything that isn't true."
You don't have to believe anything that isn't true. That sentence has sustained more Latter-day Saint scientists than any apologetic essay ever written.
Then there's Russell M. Nelson, a heart surgeon who pioneered open-heart surgery techniques before being called as an apostle. At the 2015 dedication of BYU's Life Sciences Building, he said plainly: "There is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion — or both." He described his early research into the human heart, when medical students were taught never to touch a beating heart. "Little by little we began to tread into uncharted waters," he recalled. And what he found was that when the laws governing the heart were understood and obeyed, the results were "predictable and dependable." The same God who revealed doctrine also established the physical laws that make surgery possible.
And John A. Widtsoe, a Harvard-trained chemist who became an apostle, spent decades writing about the harmony between scientific inquiry and the restored gospel. He believed, as the Church's own history records, that "science and religion were both sources of divine, eternal principles and could be reconciled." His books — Evidences and Reconciliations, A Rational Theology — influenced generations of Latter-day Saints who wanted to love both the laboratory and the temple.
Where the Tension Actually Lives
So if the theology is this open, why does the question still feel hard?
Partly because we're human, and humans like certainty. We want a tidy chart that maps Genesis onto the fossil record, or a definitive Church statement about the age of the earth. The Church's Gospel Topics entry on Religion and Science is honest about this: it acknowledges the question directly but doesn't pretend to resolve every detail. The Church teaches that God is the Creator. It does not dictate a mechanism or a timeline. That deliberate openness is, I think, a feature rather than a bug — though it can feel uncomfortable to people who want every question answered.
Jacob's words in the Book of Mormon capture the real danger, and it's not science. It's arrogance. "When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves" (2 Nephi 9:28). But the very next verse redeems learning entirely: "But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God." The problem was never knowledge. It was the severing of knowledge from humility.
That distinction matters. A Latter-day Saint geologist studying plate tectonics isn't setting aside the counsel of God. She's answering the very invitation God extended: to understand "things both in heaven and in the earth." The person Jacob warns about isn't the scientist — it's anyone, in any field, who decides their understanding is so complete that they no longer need revelation.
Alma made a related point when he told Korihor that "all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator" (Alma 30:44). Notice what Alma appeals to: motion, regularity, form. The very things a scientist studies. For Alma, the order of the cosmos wasn't a rival explanation to God — it was evidence of God.
What the Restored Gospel Uniquely Offers
Here's what I think most people miss about the Latter-day Saint position: our theology doesn't just tolerate science. It needs it.
We believe that God has a body of flesh and bone. That matter is eternal. That the creation was an organization of existing materials, not a conjuring from nothing. That intelligence itself is uncreated. These are deeply materialist claims for a religion to make. They mean that the physical universe isn't a fallen distraction from the "real" spiritual world — it's the very medium through which God works. "This is my work and my glory," God tells Moses, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man" (Moses 1:39). That work happens here, in bodies, on planets, through processes.
So when a biologist traces the development of an embryo, or an astronomer maps the expansion of the universe, or a geneticist sequences a genome, they are — whether they know it or not — studying the handiwork of God. And a Latter-day Saint who understands the scope of the Restoration can hold that truth without anxiety. We don't need science to prove the gospel, and we don't need the gospel to disprove science. We need both because truth is bigger than any single method of finding it.
Brigham Young put it with his characteristic bluntness: "If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine. We believe it; it is ours; we claim it."
Living With Open Questions
I want to be honest about something: there are places where we don't yet have clean answers. The relationship between the scriptural creation accounts and the geological record. The question of how evolution fits with the doctrine of the Fall. The age of the earth. The Church has wisely refrained from making definitive pronouncements on these specifics, and I think that wisdom is itself a kind of revelation. It tells us that God is more interested in our humility before truth than in our having a position paper for every debate.
A recently published volume from BYU's College of Life Sciences, The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution, captures this spirit well. Its editors note that "the Church has constantly maintained the revealed truth that God planned for the eternal life of people and therefore created us on purpose, while also maintaining that 'nothing has been revealed concerning evolution.'" Within that space, faithful members and scholars explore how the two ways of knowing can coexist — not by forcing resolution, but by trusting that more light will come.
That trust is itself an act of faith. And it's the kind of faith I'd recommend to anyone sitting where that returned missionary was sitting — feeling torn between two worlds that are, in the end, the same world.
If you're in that place, here's what I'd suggest this week: read D&C 88:118 slowly, and notice how the Lord doesn't rank study and faith. He yokes them. Then ask yourself where in your life you might be artificially separating them — dismissing your own intellectual questions as somehow unfaithful, or dismissing spiritual experience as somehow unscientific. Both impulses are forms of the same error: shrinking truth down to a size we can manage.
The God of the Restoration doesn't ask us to manage truth. He asks us to pursue it — all of it, in every direction, with every faculty we have — and to trust that it will, in the end, converge on Him.