Themis wrote:A lot of church material is not created to answer this question, but to teach about Noah or some other doctrine. You don't get to write an article in the church's premier magazine whose sole purpose is to take the position of a literal global flood and literal tower of babel without the church leaderships approval. I suspect one or more of the brethren asked for it. It has been the only position of the church, so it stays that way until the church officially makes a new position.
I think we're equivocating over what it means to be church doctrine here. I suspect some brethren have strong positions on the matter and the practical politics of that mean some ensure their views get into some manuals. I don't think that makes it a doctrine of the church. i.e. I don't think the manuals always reflect the official teachings of the church. Indeed quite often they don't. (The D&C Institute manual is horrible in that regard for instance)
There have been times when the church has paid far more attention to what ends up in a book. While I don't think it reflects church doctrine either (except in a very loose way) from people who worked on the Encyclopedia of Mormonism Pres. Hinkley and others were very engaged in it partially to offset the 'authority' of books like
Mormon Doctrine. To the Ensign I've simply known too many people who have worked on it or the manuals to think they always reflect doctrine. There is of course politics involved in it all.
The tower of babel is obvious fiction even for many Christians, but not for LDS because the Book of Mormon Jaredite story says it was real. Christians don't care, and it is obvious people wondered why people spoke multiple languages, although for literalists it explains how people were spread around the globe and had multiple languages after the flood when only 8 people were repopulating the world.
Well again it depends upon how to read these passages. If we read in a kind of fundamentalist way where all texts reflect a god's eye view without any error and as if written by one of our peers in a fashion to our regular communication then that's a problem. I'd just note that Ether is written by Moroni who has his own reading of the brass plates and his own assumptions about what it all means. That means we shouldn't just uncritically accept what Moroni says. Ether 1 doesn't even mention the Tower of Babel. (It just says great tower) That's in the chapter heading written by Bruce R. McConkie who tended to adopt a fundamentalist protestant way of reading these texts. All Mormon writes is that the language of the people was confounded. But what that means isn't clear. There are tons of ways to read Ether 1:33-36. One way common way of reading it is that it relates to textual writings. i.e. some event happened leading to a breakdown of a civilization center and these people were worried about being able to read their texts. The analogy would thus be closer to what happened to the Mulekites than the more extreme fundamentalist way of reading the Tower of Babel narrative.
Maksutov wrote:https://www.LDS.org/ensign/1980/09/the-gospel-and-the-scientific-view-how-earth-came-to-be?lang=eng
Even a BYU professor of the history of science picks a fight with uniformitarianism...while dancing around the question of the global flood, his stance is repeatedly "antisecular" and "antiuniformitarian"...which I read as code for "global flood believer". Apparently he thinks that a parallel LDS universe exists where his delicate distinctions are substitutes for data.
I can't speak for Nielson who I never had classes from. However a required class in science when I was there was ethics and religious issues in science and engineering. It had different teachers every few weeks. There even the very conservative CES guy in charge of the religion department taught in a way pretty open to science for evolution and such things. Paul Cox taught several classes and he's a rather famous evolutionist although he's no longer at BYU. Anyway, no one pushed a global flood including as I said the people from CES you'd most expect to push it. (I sadly took a D&C class from the professor who taught that section and unfortunately his religion class was a more stereotypical CES like class that I hated)
Of course since I graduated around 94 I've no idea what things are like now. My friends there say most things are much better but a few things are worse (they got rid of the honors department which frankly had the best religion classes).
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