During the Sunday School lesson on the law of consecration and tithing, we studied Elder D. Todd Christofferson’s October 2010 conference talk entitled:  “Reflections on a Consecrated Life.”  One passage I read seemed particularly interesting in light of the belief in physical-only chance mutations as the driving force for all biological change.

“A consecrated life respects the incomparable gift of one’s physical body, a divine creation in the very image of God. A central purpose of the mortal experience is that each spirit should receive such a body and learn to exercise moral agency in a tabernacle of flesh.”

“Those who believe that our bodies are nothing more than the result of evolutionary chance will feel no accountability to God or anyone else for what they do with or to their body. We who have a witness of the broader reality of premortal, mortal, and postmortal eternity, however, must acknowledge that we have a duty to God with respect to this crowning achievement of His physical creation. In Paul’s words:

“What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

“For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).”

Notes:

D. Todd Christofferson, “Reflections on a Consecrated life,” Ensign, November, 2010, [https://www.lds.org/ensign/2010/11/reflections-on-a-consecrated-life?lang=eng ]

Piero Scaruffi, “Review of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1987),” [https://www.scaruffi.com/mind/dawkin3.html], 2000.
“Dawkins also clarifies the meaning of “random” in Darwinian biology: mutations are not ‘random’ in the mathematical sense of the word (that anything is possible) 
. They are random in the sense that they have no other purpose than to mutate; they do not necessarily improve the organism or the organism’s chances of survival. ‘Chance’ is probably a better word.”

Jerry Bergman, “Darwinism: Survival without Purpose,” [https://www.ukapologetics.net/08/darwinspurposelessness.htm] Institute for Creation Research, (www.icr.org ).

“Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life…life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA…life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. –Richard Dawkins.”