“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19). The generally accepted explanation for the evolution and diversity of life is predicated on a mechanism called Natural Selection. The idea is that random mutations in a population will sometimes confer an advantage that will make it likelier for those with the mutation to survive long enough perpetuate their mutation into future generations. This idea of natural selection can be applied to a lot of other domains besides just biology. We might even say that we live out our lives through a process of natural selection. We are so ignorant about the world and our place in it that every five or ten years science reveals whole new domains about which we know almost nothing. We try to nevertheless navigate this world and carve out some path of values and meaning despite all of our ignorance, and this process of trial and error follows the pattern of natural selection. We might try ten or twenty ways of doing something before we find a way that sort of works, at least for right now. This isn’t always a fun process and it often leads to a lot of pain and suffering for ourselves and for others, but left to our own power and intelligence and wisdom, natural selection is the best that we can do. Thankfully, we do not have to rely solely on our own power. We may be mostly stumbling blindly in the dark and colliding painfully with the sharp edges of reality, but we do have the option of putting off this natural selection process and instead submitting ourselves to the Divine Selection Process. Our Heavenly Father’s work and glory is in part to help us chart the best course through this life. When we rely on our own natural selection process, we put ourselves at odds with His work and glory and set ourselves up as enemies to God. But if we will submit to Him in all things, then instead of relying on the natural selection process of picking the least evil we can find right now, we can put our trust in our Heavenly Father and choose to walk the path that He shows us. It is not always an easy path, but it is always easier than setting off in random directions and hoping we end up in a spot that’s not worse. I know that we are all trying to do the best we can with a bunch of bad options, but I do know that if we will put off our natural selection process and trust in the Divine Selection Process and practice being submissive, meek, humble, patient, and full of love, then we can be assured that we are walking down the right path.
