Thoughts of life, death, and resurrection bring us to face crucial questions. How were we made? By whom? And why?
Through the ages, some persons without scriptural understanding have tried to explain our existence by pretentious words such as ex nihilo (out of nothing). Others have deduced that, because of certain similarities between different forms of life, there has been a natural selection of the species, or organic evolution from one form to another. Still others have concluded that man came as a consequence of a "big bang," which resulted in the creation of our planet and life upon it.
To me, such theories are unbelievable. Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary? It's unthinkable! One might argue that it is within a remote realm of possibility, but even if that could happen, such a dictionary could certainly not heal its own torn pages, renew its own worn corners, or reproduce its own subsequent editions.
We are children of God, created by him and formed in his image. Recently I studied the scriptures simply to find how many times they testify of the divine creation of man. Looking up references that referred to either create or form (or their derivatives) with man (or such derivatives as men, male, woman, or female) in the same verse, I found that at least fifty-five verses of scripture attest to our divine creation. I have selected one to represent all those verses that convey the same conclusion: "The Gods took counsel among themselves and said: Let us go down and form man in our image, after our likeness. . . . So the Gods went down to organize man in their own image, in the image of the Gods to form they him, male and female to form they them." (Abraham 4:26-27.)
I believe all of those scriptures pertaining to the creation of man. But the decision to believe is a spiritual one, not born solely by an understanding of things physical: "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Corinthians 2:14.)
It is incumbent upon each informed and spiritually attuned person to help overcome such foolishness of those who would deny divine creation or think that mankind simply evolved. By the spirit, we perceive the truer and more believable wisdom of God.
(Russell M. Nelson, The Power within Us [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1988], 9.)