science and my faith

I have been asked before how I reconcile conflicts between science and my faith (especially as someone with a graduate degree in a science/engineering field). My response is usually something to the effect that all truth comes from God, and so there is no conflict between a truth revealed through a prophet or one discovered through the scientific method. Apparent conflicts can and do arise when either the religious teaching is incomplete or misunderstood, or the scientific teaching is incomplete or misunderstood, or both.

Apparent conflicts that I am aware of are the age of the earth and the origin of man. The Hebrew word used to describe the creative periods can mean literally a day or it can mean an indeterminate length of time (see The Creation). Abraham taught that the Gods merely called the creation periods days (Abraham 4:5,8). So each era or day of creation could have lasted for millions or billions of years. No revelation has been given detailing the age of the earth so what science tells us (4.5 billion years) is all we know.

As to the origin of man we know from archeology/paleontology that there were men (about 200,000 BCE) well before our best guess of when Adam, who the scriptures teach was the first man (Moses 1:34), left the garden of Eden (about 4000 BCE). So my best guess is either Adam was not a descendent of those men, or our guess of when Adam left the garden of Eden is quite wrong.

The scriptures teach and modern prophets confirm that man was created in the image of God (Abraham 4:27) and did not evolve per neo-Darwinism (The Origin of Man). Evidence I have seen is not convincing that the naturalistic mechanisms we are aware of could produce macroevolution (speciation). Usually the arguments for macroevolution are centered around microevolution (variation within species) which is something quite different. Also, the fossil record indicates sudden appearance and stasis rather than decent with modification. If neo-Darwinism were true, there would be an innumerable amount of transitional or intermediate species along the lines of decent. The fossil record is obviously incomplete but it is unlikely selectively incomplete with regard to intermediate species. We rarely find a fossil that might be an intermediate species whereas they should be what we mostly find if neo-Darwinism were true (see Why Darwinism is False).