Benson asked directly if McConkie believed in organic evolution, to which he replied that he did not. He even called the theory “logically and scripturally absurd,” insisting that Adam was not just the first man but “the first flesh of all flesh.” Dinosaurs, he explained, were likely killed off during Noah’s flood because so many of their bones were found buried in mud. He was clear with his guest about his position: “I don’t attempt to harmonize the theory of organic evolution with revealed truth. I’m not going to talk about the truth or falsity of organic evolution. I’ll leave that up to biologists. I accept revealed religion. If science and religion don’t harmonize, then I reject and discard science.”

Benson asked McConkie about his recent talk and whether the heresies he condemned represented the church’s official position. McConkie replied that “the Church did not have to submit questions concerning doctrine to its membership in order to make them ‘the stand of the Church,’” but he did acknowledged that his talk was “my view on what I interpret to be the stand of the Church.” This is something McConkie reiterated several times throughout their conversation.

As to a view allegedly held by the late church president Joseph F. Smith that God had not revealed exactly how Adam and Eve’s bodies were created, McConkie told Benson that this, in fact, was not the position that the prophet had taken; McConkie said he knew this because Smith’s son and McConkie’s father-in-law Joseph Fielding Smith “told me so.” McConkie emphasized to Benson that “a prophet is not always a prophet,” and admitted that “I can be just as wrong as the next guy.” To McConkie, this meant that, “Prophets can be wrong on organic evolution, of course. And have been wrong.” He even said President David O. McKay was “uninspired” when he told BYU Students that evolution was a “beautiful theory.” McConkie made other statements about the beliefs of church leaders. He dismissed as “underground letters” statements church presidents had sent out affirming that the church had taken no stand on evolution if indeed those letters differed from a statement made by the First Presidency in 1909, which to McConkie was a definitive rejection of the theory.

Surprisingly, McConkie also criticized Joseph Fielding Smith as being “Out of his field” when he used science to try to disprove evolution in his 1954 book, Man: His Origin and Destiny. “He should have stayed in the areas in which he was trained: scriptures and theology.” McConkie said that even prophets get into “trouble” when they go outside of the standard works because people will then start “quoting authority against authority.” For McConkie,” see[k]ing authoritative statements doesn’t solve the problem. People are always seeking authoritative statements. Authorities conflict.” The scriptures were the ultimate sources of the church’s stand on doctrine, and McConkie reiterated his view that “organic evolution does not and cannot account for a paradisiacal earth, the millennium, an exalted earth and man, the resurrection of man and animals and the pre-existence.” If organic evolution claimed that there was death on the earth before the Fall of Adam, McConkie insisted, it simply could not be true.

McConkie explained—again, this likely being his own view—that the reason the church had not taken an official stand against organic evolution was to avoid picking fights with “vulnerable” members. “It’s a matter of temporizing, not of making a statement to prevent the driving out of the weak Saints. It’s a question of wisdom, not of truth.” He used the examples of when he called the Catholic Church the “Church of the Devil” in his first edition of Mormon Doctrine. That designation was true, he said, but people had to be circumspect when teaching it because it would offend Catholics.